Would you pay £575 for a Britney Spears tour T-shirt?
In March this year, it was announced that Demna Gvasalia would be leaving Balenciaga. His destination, however, was a curveball; Kering choppering him into Gucci, its spangly jewel in the crown, a house of hi falutin glamour and those distinctive double G branded bags. Granted, Demna knows how to create buzz with logomania – although how much design nous it takes to emblazon your brand name across everything and anything is debatable – but Gucci's signature sense of seduction, throughout all of its iterations from Tom Ford to Alessandro Michele, isn't something Demna's dark arts dabble in.
His is a deliberately jarring, quirky-ugly aesthetic that doesn't seem to tally with what Gucci stands for. Time will tell whether the house that once sold us must-have bags and defined the 1990s (and early 2020s) fashion is ready for a darkly turbulent aesthetic. Granted, Balenciaga couture can make some exceptionally beautiful clothes – as exhibited on the Cannes red carpet by Balenciaga ambassador Isabelle Huppert – but that's the rarity rather than the rule. Balenciaga is set to be taken over by Pier Paolo Piccioli, an Italian designer known for his sense of romance and feminine exuberance.
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