Can Gucci Make Luxury Out of Artificial Intelligence?

Demna, the designer who spent a decade at Balenciaga redefining what luxury means, presented his first runway show for Gucci this week during Milan Fashion Week. It was the brand's third reinvention since Alessandro Michele's departure in 2022. But it was not the clothing that provoked the strongest reactions. It was the images that preceded it.

In the run-up to the show, Gucci shared a series of AI-generated images on Instagram. Alongside authentic archival photographs, including a shot of Sophia Loren leaving a Gucci boutique in 1966, appeared synthetic scenes of ostentatious wealth: a lacquer-haired woman striding through a wood-panelled restaurant as businessmen locked eyes on her, a sleazy 1980s couple perched on a muscle car. When the origins of the images became clear, followers reacted with outrage. Gucci belatedly added an AI label to the posts.

Demna himself seemed unfazed by the backlash. Backstage, he told Rachel Tashjian of CNN Style that he does not consider his use of AI controversial. It is 2026, he argued, and technology is a tool. He compared the resistance to how retailers in 2008 rejected e-commerce as incompatible with quality, an attitude he now calls ridiculous. (Source: Rachel Tashjian, "Can Gucci make luxury AI?", CNN Style, 27 February 2026.)

The emptiness on the runway

Expectations were high. Last autumn, Demna had commissioned a short film directed by Spike Jonze and Halina Reijn, starring Demi Moore and Edward Norton, that suggested something dark yet joyful about contemporary wealth. A first proper runway show, not a teaser collection, was to be the moment when the new brand identity declared itself.

What followed was, in Tashjian's assessment, surprisingly vacant. Rail-thin women and muscular men in skintight, under-designed clothes. The models swaggered and popped their hips, British rapper Fakemink paused mid-runway to answer a text. But humour was absent.

Tashjian described the show as a tour through what she calls the emptiness of our time: the flatness of popular culture, the unrewarding chase of followers online and status offline, the bleak beige aesthetics that pervade everything, the half-baked re-enactment of earlier decades without any real understanding of what drove them. Some looks were so unremarkable, a cheap-looking grey slip dress, leggings with a shrunken T-shirt, that they appeared designed as neutral canvases for selling bags.

The desire to belong

This is where Tashjian's observation touches something fundamental, something that reaches well beyond fashion. The cognoscenti who once attended couture shows like academics preparing papers, whose manicured hands could dexterously tell one house's cashmere from another's, barely exist anymore. And where they do survive, they have become exotic curiosities, precisely the kind of figure Gucci's AI images so aptly capture.

In their place are the people in Los Angeles, Paris, Dubai, New York and Shanghai who feel good about themselves because they spent a lot of money somewhere, at some point. It is no longer about what you buy or why. It is about the feeling the transaction itself generates. Owning a five-thousand-euro bag with a hundred-euro dress is not a style choice. It is a declaration of identity. I belong, because I paid.

That desire is not trivial, and it is not confined to luxury consumers. It touches on something Douglas Murray called existential tiredness: the sense that the story has been told, that the civilisation built over the preceding centuries simply 'is' without requiring maintenance. In a culture that defines itself primarily in terms of what it is not, not intolerant, not old-fashioned, not exclusionary, the substance you might orient yourself by evaporates. What remains is a void that demands filling. And in the absence of a binding narrative, of a shared sense of purpose, people reach for what is available: the transaction as surrogate identity.

Demna's empty runway inadvertently exposes this mechanism. The clothes need not be remarkable. They need only be expensive enough to function as a marker. Not as a sign of connoisseurship or taste, but as proof of access. Access to what, exactly, no one can quite articulate, and that is the point. A society that does not bother to articulate what holds it together produces the displaced, people who seek their footing in brand logos and price tags. Not out of superficiality, but for want of alternatives.

The question is whether that is enough for a brand that Kering desperately needs as an engine for recovery after years of steeply declining sales.

Quality as a precondition

Tashjian draws a sharp comparison with Tom Ford, who led Gucci from the 1990s through 2004 with an unapologetically sensual approach. Ford understood that to make sleaze truly work, the execution had to be impeccable: precise leather jackets, exact stitching, beautiful fabrics. The question Tashjian raises is whether Demna can convince anyone beyond those who desperately want to look basic-and-rich.

What this says about our time

The most interesting thing about Demna's Gucci debut is neither the clothing nor the AI controversy. It is the mirror it holds up to a culture that increasingly fails to distinguish between value and price, between meaning and display. The AI images are, in that respect, more honest than the show itself: they simulate wealth without substance, exactly as the clothes do.

Whether Demna orchestrated this deliberately is hard to say. Backstage, he mentioned that ChatGPT predicted he would design oversized bomber jackets with monograms, a detail he shared with visible pleasure. The line between provocation and product has always been thin with him. But the question that remains is not whether Demna can design good clothes. The question is whether a culture that can no longer tell its own story can resolve its displacement with a logo on a bag. And whether the brand that bets on this fills the void, or enlarges it.