There has never been a luxury fashion show in the heart of Times Square, and there probably never will be one again. “It’s a fucking logistic nightmare,” said Demna 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 “the most impossible thing.”
As I noted in my report 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 “resort” 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’s the fun in that?
At around 8:20 p.m., a group of Condé Nast editors polished off the last handful of french fries at Sardi’s 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’s famous advertising screens.
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