Catherine Opie set her camera square to the face, the way she once framed the subcultures of California. The people looking back wore Gucci. Demna had given each of them a name, a type, a place in a family that does not quite exist.
The campaign is called La Famiglia. It stands as Demna's opening statement at Gucci, the first sustained look at how he intends to cast the house he took over from Kering in the spring of 2025. He arrived from Balenciaga, where he spent a decade building collections around recognisable human types and the clothes they use to perform them. At Gucci he has kept the method and warmed the tone.
The cast
Opie's portraits read as a lineup rather than a lookbook. Demna named the players. La Bomba. L'Influencer. La VIP. Each one arrives with a posture and a wardrobe that tells you who they are before any caption does. Mariacarla Boscono sits in a red coat and a printed headscarf, a signora who has run this block for decades. Alex Consani wears a coat of tiger print and holds the frame like a woman used to being watched.
The idea of the household runs under all of it. Lila Moss takes her place in the group. A later chapter brought in Elsa Hosk. The casting mixes house regulars with faces Demna has worked with for years, and the effect lands like a family photographed mid-gathering, everyone dressed in their own idea of their best.
The archetype
At Balenciaga, Demna's habit was to find the archetype and dress it. The tech founder. The influencer. The oligarch's wife. He treated fashion as a mirror held up to the ways people stage themselves in public. La Famiglia carries that habit into Gucci's own history, a house built on Italian family business and on the friction between old money and new noise.
The clothes say it plainly. Fur and its convincing fakes. Sharp tailoring worn slightly wrong. Logo pieces that lean into the label instead of away from it. Handbags held like props in a play about status. Demna has said he wants products a range of people can live in, and the campaign frames luxury as costume for a role each person has chosen.
A house that made its name on family business now sits for its own portrait, and every face in it is playing a part.
The Splendid EditBefore the runway
The campaign set the terms before the runway did. Demna's first Gucci show followed in Milan, staged in a hall lined with marble statuary, and Kate Moss closed it in a slim black gown. Collection and campaign argued the same case, that Gucci can be read as a cast of people rather than a mood board.
Gucci Autumn/Winter 2026, Demna's debut collection in Milan. Courtesy of Gucci
Milan Fashion Week for spring/summer 2027 opens on 22 September, with Gucci showing on the 25th. The second collection will decide whether the family portrait reads as a strong opening or as the whole idea. For now the house has a face, several of them, each one named and dressed for the part.