{"id":234647,"date":"2026-05-17T18:37:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-17T18:37:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/234647\/"},"modified":"2026-05-17T18:37:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-17T18:37:08","slug":"tom-brady-in-times-square-inside-demnas-audacious-nyc-gucci-show","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/234647\/","title":{"rendered":"Tom Brady in Times Square: Inside Demna\u2019s Audacious NYC Gucci Show"},"content":{"rendered":"

There has never been a luxury fashion show in the heart of Times Square, and there probably never will be one again. \u201cIt\u2019s a fucking logistic nightmare,\u201d said Demna<\/a> on the eve of his first Gucci cruise show, which shut down a few blocks of Broadway on a balmy Saturday night where it felt like the entire city was outside. Which was kind of the point. The designer chose the location because it is \u201cthe most impossible thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

As I noted in my report<\/a> from the Dior cruise show last week in LA, one purpose of these mid-season extravaganzas is to wine and dine very important clients, so the \u201cresort\u201d experience tends to be seamless and smooth, with everything designed to reinforce an airtight fantasy narrative wrapped up in a vacation-like atmosphere. But where\u2019s the fun in that?<\/p>\n

At around 8:20 p.m., a group of Cond\u00e9 Nast editors polished off the last handful of french fries at Sardi\u2019s and trooped a few blocks uptown to the show entrance. We wound our way through a river of tourists, navigated a couple of barricaded sidewalks, sidestepped a Spider-Man street performer and a whirling 360-degree selfie platform, and eventually made it to 48th and Broadway, where Gucci had erected a block-long photo call that fed into a walled-off slice of asphalt right at the bottom of the canyon of Times Square\u2019s famous advertising screens.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/p>\n

The Gucci Times Square takeover.<\/p>\n

JP Yim\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

A few minutes later, the screens\u201450 in all, which stretched for blocks\u2014flickered and came back online beaming gonzo Gucci ads for products that mostly don\u2019t exist: Gucci chocolate, Gucci automobiles, Gucci pets. It was as funny as it was impressive. As soon as they turned on the crowd went quiet and still, standing strangely awed by this absurd luxury manifesto in the center of the consumerist universe. (One wondered what the tourists a few blocks away made of the 360-degree campaign for \u201cGucci Life\u201d longevity supplements framing their selfies with Times Square Elmo.) In an only-in-Times Square scene, Mariah Carey, Esdeekid, and Kim Kardashian sat near the drag queen Lady Bunny, who was perched on a front-row bench with a towering blonde bouffant.<\/p>\n

Other designers could learn from Demna\u2019s audacity and his finesse for uncannily humorous spectacles. So many fashion shows are weighed down by a heavy-handed dollop of house codes and history, to the point where the idea of making pants is laden with a gravity that feels totally out of step with the moment. But Demna is a master of popping the fashion fantasy and corrupting it with our bizzaro reality. And he\u2019s not afraid to challenge himself.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was talking to my shrink and she was like, \u2018You\u2019re ready for this, Demna.\u2019 This is like an ultimate exercise of letting go of control, because there’s nothing in your control,\u201d Demna told me. Given the location, rehearsals were near-impossible, and everything had to be loaded in and out in only four hours.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There has never been a luxury fashion show in the heart of Times Square, and there probably never…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":234648,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[28639,9,6231,56,63,65,64,14880,2407,989,2381,990],"class_list":["post-234647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-gucci","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-fashion-week","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-news","tag-onecolumn","tag-style","tag-textbelowcentergridwidth","tag-tom-brady","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234647"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234647\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/234648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}