Want to Know What’s Up With Gucci? Look Down at the Loafers
Ever since Demna took the Gucci reins in March 2025, the question was rumbled throughout fashion. Would he import his jestful sense of design from Balenciaga? Would he genetically edit the Gucci DNA? Or would he play things safer than he ever has before, cautiously sticking to the fashion house’s established line?
His La Famiglia collection, presented last September, gave us a clue through a range of distinctive Gucci “archetypes,” telling a familiar story with new characters like “La Bomba” and “La VIP.” But all eyes were on his hard launch runway show debut at Milan Fashion Week, which would presumably clarify the vision. A handful of AI-generated teasers, including an image of a sciura in a quintessentially Italian restaurant, proved to be a false alarm. This divisive stab at futurism was in stark contrast to the collection’s overt classicism.
Demna’s Fall 2026 Gucci show, titled “Primavera,” was full-on (Tom) Fordism, taking inspiration from the Gucci of the nineties in, fittingly, a museum-inspired venue. It was a sexed-up throwback to a more unabashedly opulent era, down to the widely-reposted monogrammed thong flashed by Kate Moss. Amidst a slew of fleshy, skintight silhouettes, the collection also debuted a handful of new Gucci loafers. It was these shoes, beyond anything else, that painted the full picture of Demna’s take on Gucci.
The Gucci loafer is a genuine work of art — so much so, it’s part of the permanent collection of The Met. First crafted in 1953 by Guccio Gucci, it iconically switched out the loafer’s conventional diamond-shaped cutout upper for a metallic horsebit, taking inspiration from the company’s equestrian aesthetics. It’s since become a staple of the house, reimagined by its revolving door of creative directors. Tom Ford gave it a glossy, patent sheen and splashed it with a debossed Gucci monogram; Frida Giannini bumped up the sole; Alessandro Michele romanticized it with exotic leathers and even made it backless with kangaroo fur; even Sabato De Sarno prioritized a signature loafer — a short-lived platform iteration — before sharply exiting in February 2025 after just two years at the helm.
The Gucci loafer is not just a symbol of decadence flaunted by white-socked socialites and red-carpet denizens; it’s also an emblem of Gucci itself. Like judging a bartender by their negroni, a good Gucci creative director needs a good Gucci loafer. “The first thing I notice about a man are his shoes,” former CD Frida Giannini once said. Replace “man” with “Gucci director” and you get the gist.
And Demna already has two Gucci loafers to his name, available as part of Gucci Primavera’s “See Now, Buy Now” offering. There’s the Cupertino loafer, named after the Silicon Valley city that houses Apple's HQ though perhaps more a nod to the structure’s chic design. Sculpted from soft leather and stretched into an elongated silhouette, it can enter sports mode when its back is folded down. Then, there's the Giovanni loafer, with a pointed toe that squares off at the last minute and wears an interlocking “G” logo on the right-hand side.
These shoes’ slender shape reflects Demna’s overall angling towards an erogenous sleekness. Notably, too, he hasn’t fully committed to the horsebit: neither of the two new designs feature Gucci’s signature embellishment (several runway styles retain it, however, including a slipper that recalls Michele’s fur-trimmed Princetown loafer). Instead, it swaps the equestrian, Ivy League vibe for something more daringly Epicurean (reflected in the Primavera T-shirts that were draped like togas).
This craving for newness was also reflected in Demna’s zeitgeisty casting, with IYKYK rappers Fakemink and Nettspend shuffling down the catwalk and masked driller EsDeeKid clutching an EsDeeKid-sized handbag in the front row (and performing at the afterparty) where he sat not a stone’s throw from Donatella Versace. As ever, it shows that Demna’s tattooed fingers are firmly on the pulse of the now.
But Demna’s overarching desire for Fall 2026 was to elevate the meaning of Gucci beyond time or space. “Above the product, Gucci is culture, it is a way of thinking and a way of being. Gucci needs to become a feeling. Gucci must become an adjective,” he wrote in his show notes. In some ways, it’s a strange thing to say; Gucci is already, obviously, an adjective.
What Demna really means is for “Gucci” to be a stand-in for what it signifies (sexiness) in contexts outside of itself. The cut of an evening dress or the decadence of a boat party or the extravagance of a shag carpet could be “Gucci” — even if, literally, it is not. But Demna proved, with his faithful rendition and calculated risqué, that only a Gucci loafer can truly be a “Gucci” loafer — and that’s saying something.
