Demna has been quiet since February. Now ten silk scarves arrive from the Gucci archive, including the Flora that Vittorio Accornero drew for Grace Kelly in 1966.
This is Demna's second year at the house. He took the job in March 2025. His runway debut came in February, loud and heavy with product. The Art of Silk feels different. Ten silk carrés, restyled for a campaign he directed himself, some tied as headbands, some knotted into halters, some worn as belts around trousers.
The selection moves through the house vocabulary. Equestrian motifs. Nautical knots. Two versions of the Flora. Other carrés carry the names Double Trouble, Your Majesty, Il Gattino. The original Flora, drawn for Kelly in 1966, held forty-three flowers and thirty-seven colours on a single square of twill. Demna has kept it largely intact.
Florence
He traces the whole project to an afternoon at the Uffizi. He stood in front of Botticelli's Birth of Venus and stayed there for a long time. He has been Georgian, and Parisian, and a designer of sharp conceptual menswear at Balenciaga. He has not always been a Renaissance person. That afternoon seems to have changed something.
He took the archive down from the shelf, looked at it, and put ten pieces back into the world.
Isabelle RoweThe house has always carried its Florentine origins on its sleeve. Guccio Gucci opened his first saddlery in via della Vigna Nuova in 1921, and the equestrian hardware stayed embedded in the brand ever since. Demna has come to the codes as a reader rather than an editor. He is not rewriting them. He is setting them down again, in silk, with a light touch on the pen.
Calabria
The Flora scarves are made with Nido di Seta, a small agricultural collective in the Calabrian village of San Floro. The village lost its silk industry more than a century ago. A handful of people there have been replanting mulberry trees, raising silkworms, and spinning the thread by hand, on wooden reels that belong to another time.
Ongetta, in Lombardy, finished the yarn. LACMA took the two Flora scarves, exclusive to the museum store and the Gucci Beverly Hills flagship. The David Geffen Galleries open this spring, designed by Peter Zumthor. A silk revival in San Floro. A new stone building in Los Angeles. The Flora sits quietly between them.
The scarf
A silk scarf works on a smaller scale than a runway show. Ninety centimetres of sewn-edge twill that a woman ties to a bag or a head or a waist. The Art of Silk campaign stages the scarves in that register. A knot at the throat. A belt around trousers. A headband holding hair back from a face. Styling that feels like a woman in her kitchen, not a runway.
Gucci Art of Silk. Courtesy Gucci via Wallpaper*
Prices run to £525 across the line. The general collection sells through gucci.com. The two Flora scarves stay at the LACMA Store and Gucci Beverly Hills. Limited, quietly priced, tied to real places.
The debut runway in February was louder. This is the more honest first move. Demna has reached into a drawer of prints older than he is, chosen ten, and sent them out with his name on the campaign credits. The scarf is the quietest item a luxury house makes. It is also the item that gets worn.