Eleven quarters later, Gucci still misunderstands its crisis

On May 16, Gucci shut down Times Square to present GucciCore, Demna’s Cruise 2027 collection. Tom Brady walked the runway in head-to-toe leather. Paris Hilton appeared as a brunette. Cindy Crawford closed in a feathered gown. Kim Kardashian and Mariah Carey sat front row. Fifty skyscraper screens projected the spectacle to the hundreds of thousands moving through Times Square each day. The collection underneath all that noise? Peacoats, pencil skirts, business suits, trench coats, and denim — a basics program wrapped in the most expensive show production Kering has staged in years, at a moment when the brand can least afford it. The financial reality is devastating. The last five reported quarters tell the story in sequence: Q1 2025 down 25%, Q2 2025 down 25%, Q3 2025 down 14%, Q4 2025 down 10%, and Q1 2026 down 8%, all on a comparable basis. While some analysts frame the deceleration as progress, it reflects one of the worst brand declines in the history of luxury. The uncomfortable truth: it is completely self-inflicted. Declining less slowly is still declining. From 2022 to 2025, Gucci’s annual revenue collapsed from €10.5 billion to approximately €6 billion. Recurring operating income was halved. Kering’s stock has lost roughly 80% of its value from its 2021 peak. The Q1 2026 results missed market expectations, and shares fell over 10% in a single session. Kering’s own management pointed to “over-distribution and low cultural relevance” in China. That diagnosis is too narrow. Gucci’s relevance problem is global. Reinvention without memory When Sabato De Sarno took over the creative helm, the brand made a deliberate decision to distance itself from the Michele era, the very period when Gucci was the most desired luxury brand in the world. Millions of clients had formed emotional bonds with that version of Gucci. They were not consulted. They were abandoned. Brands can reinvent themselves, but they cannot disown what made people fall in love with them and expect those people to stay. Bernstein analyst Luca Solca offers a blunt verdict: “It is easier and faster for the market to believe in a revival than it is for management to produce it.” Demna was the hail Mary. Appointed in early 2025 after De Sarno’s tenure collapsed in under two years, he arrived with a record of generating cultural heat at Balenciaga and a mandate to do the same for Gucci. What many commentators overlooked: the same Demna who revived Balenciaga was also the creative director when the child advertising scandal broke in late 2022, and Balenciaga never recovered. The brand posted double-digit revenue declines in 2023, and its operating income collapsed in 2024. Demna did not leave Balenciaga at the top. He left a brand in decline. Kering’s shares fell on the announcement. Consumers have longer memories than boardrooms assume. From cultural disruption to familiarity Gucci’s two most successful eras share one characteristic the current leadership seems to have forgotten. Under Tom Ford, the brand was about sexual rebellion when the rest of luxury was restrained and conservative. Ford relied on models and the era’s top photographers; when celebrities wore his Gucci, the brand conferred status on them. Under Alessandro Michele, the brand channeled aesthetic non-conformism, gender fluidity, and maximalist self-expression when everyone else trended minimal. His celebrity casting carried genuine creative risk and expanded what Gucci could mean. In both cases, the brand told its audience: the mainstream does not own you, and we will give you the tools to prove it. That proposition created desire. Desire created pricing power. Pricing power built a €10 billion business. The GucciCore cast does the opposite. Brady, Hilton, Crawford, Kardashian — peak establishment celebrity. They confirm what is already familiar, and familiarity is the enemy of desire. Gucci used to export meaning. Under Demna, it imports it by the hour. The fur question crystallizes the deeper problem. Gucci committed to going fur-free in 2017, joined the Fur Free Alliance, and positioned the decision as a statement of brand values. The GucciCore runway featured fur-heavy styling that multiple publications described without any faux qualifier, raising serious questions about whether the commitment still holds. Gucci has made no public statement clarifying its position. When a brand's own runway creates confusion about its stated values and the response is silence, the values have become negotiable. The leadership that made the original commitment is entirely gone. When spectacle replaces substance Kering is attempting to commercialize its way out of a desire deficit. GucciCore is a permanent wardrobe collection designed to stabilize revenue. The problem is that desire does not work in that sequence. Nobody pays Gucci prices for a pencil skirt because the construction is superior. They pay because the brand carries meaning. When meaning erodes, no amount of commercial optimization compensates. Spectacle without a point of view is just an expense. Five days after the show, the internet is still discussing Tom Brady Terminator memes and Mariah Carey’s health. Nobody is talking about a single garment. When the celebrity spectacle becomes the entire conversation and the product disappears, the brand has lost control of its own narrative. Ford’s spectacle worked because it expressed a specific worldview. Michele’s worked because it expressed a different one, equally uncompromising. Both followed a clear story of rebellion against the establishment. Demna’s GucciCore expresses competent commercial product and borrowed celebrity. That is not a point of view. That is a mood board. Desire cannot be rented. It has to be built from conviction so clear that the product becomes its own signal. Gucci achieved that twice in its modern history. If CEO Luca de Meo and his team do not define what Gucci stands for beyond wardrobing basics and nostalgia, the brand will fade. The lesson for every luxury executive: when your audience remembers the celebrities and forgets the collection, you are not building a brand. You are financing entertainment. Eleven quarters of evidence say the clock is running. This is an opinion piece by Daniel Langer, CEO of Équité, recognized as one of the “Global Top Five Luxury Key Opinion Leaders,” and advisor to some of the most iconic luxury brands in the world. He serves as an executive professor of luxury strategy and pricing at Pepperdine University in Malibu and as a professor of luxury at NYU, New York. Daniel has authored best-selling books on luxury management in English and Chinese, and is a respected global keynote speaker. Daniel conducts in-person masterclasses on various luxury topics across the world. As a luxury expert featured on Bloomberg TV, Forbes, The Economist, and others, Daniel holds an MBA and a Ph.D. in luxury management and has received education from Harvard Business School. Sign up for his online luxury masterclasses at the Jing Academy.

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Eleven quarters later, Gucci still misunderstands its crisis

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