Gucci to stage menswear show in Milan in January

By

Godfrey Deeny

Published
Dec 2, 2022

Gucci is to stage a dedicated menswear runway show in Milan in January, in the first major change in strategy at the house since last week’s departure of Alessandro Michele.

The show marks the first occasion since before the pandemic that the Florentine house has staged a menswear only runway show. Since then, under Michele, the house had presented co-ed collections ranging about the planet from Puglia to Los Angeles.
 
Gucci’s menswear show will be staged early afternoon on Friday, January 13, the opening day of the Milano Uomo Moda, the twice-yearly Italian menswear catwalk season held in Milan. 

In a busy day in the Italian fashion capital, Gucci’s show will be followed by DSquared2 with a co-ed collection in the evening. The next Milan menswear season will run for five days from January 13 to 17 presenting autumn/winter 2023/24 collections.
 
“It’s very good news for the season that Gucci is coming back to Milan, with separate men’s and women’s shows. It’s sort of a comeback,” enthused Carlo Capasa, president of the Camera della Moda, Italian fashion’s governing body.
 
“The Gucci show will probably be held early afternoon on Friday, and thus be the opening show of the season,” added Capasa.
 
​A spokesperson for Gucci confirmed to Fashion Network that it will stage the opening show of the Milan season on Jan. 13.
 
The Camera della Moda has not yet released the official schedule of shows, but some 40 brands will stage runway shows including such stellar brands as Giorgio Armani, Dolce & Gabbana, Versace, Prada, Moschino and Etro.
 
It remains unclear who Gucci will claim actually designed the clothes it will show in Milan next month. Or if any designer, or team, will take a bow. Gucci officially announced the departure of Michele on November 23. So far, the house has not named a successor.
 
Italian fashion media has bandied about a whole slew of names as possible successors, though according to Capasa, in conversations with Gucci they insistently repeated that the next collection would be created by an in-house design team.
 
Michele and the house’s CEO Marco Bizzarri are understood to have been at loggerheads in the designer’s final month of tenure. Already in October, industry observers were stunned when Jean-Marc Duplaix, the CFO of Kering, the French luxury conglomerate which controls Gucci, announced to analysts that the company had created the position of studio director, entrusted to a senior member who had long worked with Michele. The remarks were widely seen as publicly undermining Michele, under whose seven-year direction Gucci had grown exponentially - tripling annual revenues to over €9 billion.
  
Previously, during Michele’s tenure, Gucci had reduced the frequency of its runway shows. Back in spring 2020, the creative director released a series of aphoristic notes in which he insisted the brand needed to reject “the worn-out ritual of seasonalities and shows to regain a new cadence.”
 
During the discussion with analysts, Kering indicated it could increase the rate of shows to as many as six annually. In contrast, Michele and the pandemic led to a radically reduced calendar.
 
The decision to stage a menswear show in the official Milan season indicates the renewal of a far more business-like approach, and the first imprint of the new general manager Maria Cristina Lomanto. She joined Gucci this spring after stints at Roger Vivier, Miu Miu and Prada.