The marble, the dark wood, the bas-reliefs, the shelves of bags lit like relics, the whole internet has walked through Demna’s Gucci store, room by room. The store actually was a stage, a showroom with better lighting.

 On September 25, in an exhibition hall in Milan’s Portello district, Demna presented The Store Show, his third collection for Gucci and the first he describes as his complete vision for the house. The runway was a replica of a flagship. Models walked from room to room as if they had come in for a fitting and stayed for the drama. 

And the store wasn’t only scenery. Pieces of the set are expected to appear in real Gucci stores around the world as early as next month. Which means the most talked-about set of the week was also a prototype. Seen from a business point of view, that’s the cleverest thing in the room: the show paid for itself as retail research before a single look was sold.

Not a theme, but characters

Demna didn’t give the collection one idea. He gave it people. The horse girl, in riding clothes and a Lady Lunetta chain bag, a nod to Gucci’s equestrian fifties. The eighties power woman, in a mini skirt suit, opaque black tights and pointed pumps. The Tom Ford–era siren, in a low-slung pencil skirt and sharp shoulders. And the Milanese donna, in animal print and oversized sunglasses. A woman anyone who lives here will recognise.

But the look that stayed with everyone was the simplest one: white trousers and a Marmont belt. A few years ago, that double G was everywhere, worn loud and all at once, the logo of an Instagram decade. Here it sat on plain white, with nothing competing for attention, and suddenly it looked like what it was before it became a meme: a very good belt. Demna gave the old codes room to breathe within the collection.

The Beauty sounded like bossa nova

Told the same story. Makeup artist Sam Visser and hairstylist Anthony Turner designed two women. The party girl came out with smudged, colourful eyes and hair that looked like it had survived the night. Otherwise, the donna arrived with a soft smoky eye, a red lip and a blowout with serious volume. Neither of them looked “clean.” After years of skin pretending not to wear anything, Gucci’s women were wearing makeup and meant it. I loved it.

For the first time, Gucci’s music director Loki composed an original score instead of curating one. The men walked to bossa nova, reworked with jazz, piano and Brazilian percussion. The women walked to tango: darker, slower, building until the room was all orchestral drums. As a Brazilian, that first half is hard to ignore. Bossa nova is the sound of effortless elegance, the idea that looking good should never look like work. Tango is the opposite: desire that wants to be seen. Put together, it’s the whole collection in two songs. Propriety first, then sensuality.

Seen from a classroom

I’m newly in Milan and have just started Fashion Business and Digital Marketing at Istituto Marangoni. Among my classmates, the verdict was unanimous: this was the collection of the week. We all agreed. But the business lens shows something the applause doesn’t. Every room was a scene. Every character was a customer profile. Every look was a piece of content waiting to be posted. A runway sells an image and this one sold the whole path from image to checkout, and made it look like theatre.

So Demna didn’t hide the mechanism. Every runway sells and this one definitely admitted it. The store is where fashion stops being a picture and becomes something you carry out the door, and by staging the show there, he made the transaction part of the story instead of the thing we all pretend not to see.