TIMES SQUARE has hosted many things over the years. A Gucci resort collection was not previously among them. This month, Creative Director Demna shut down several blocks of Broadway on a Saturday – the logistics and city costs boggle the mind – and sent 900 guests into a Times Square that the Georgian designer had remade in his own image.

Before the show began, the district’s fifty screens flickered back online beaming fictitious Gucci products – Gucci chocolate, Gucci automobiles, Gucci Life longevity supplements – that felt like a scene out of Bladerunner. To be the fair, the clothes that came out, and the choice of talent who wore them, added to the feeling of a hyperreality. Not real, but very tangible. An AI hallucination, almost.

The GucciCore collection – Demna’s fourth act at the house – was built around a simple premise: Gucci needed a wardrobe. Or, the Gucci man did. Actual clothes a lover of the house could wear to work, to a party, or apparently to a fashion show.

The menswear opened with dark business suits paired with technical backpacks – a very specific New York archetype, the kind of man who optimises everything including his commute. Peacoats and trenches followed, cut cleanly and offered in slim, normal, and oversized fits. 

Soft tailoring appeared alongside slouchy denim; baggy jeans were worn with tight leather jackets. Technical outerwear was lined in goat hair and shearling, pragmatic on the surface and considered underneath. Alta moda construction – croc-scale sequins, beaded fringes – extended into the menswear, pulling the everyday toward something more deliberate.

The thread running through all of it traced back to Demna’s Fall 2026 Primavera show in Milan, where he put gigachad models in skin-tight compression tees and body-con silhouettes and admitted backstage that he – like apparently everyone else in the age of looksmaxxing and GLP-1s — had been thinking about his relationship with his body. 

Guccimaxxing, the internet duly decided, was the natural endpoint of that logic: a man so optimised he is essentially a walking mood board for himself. GucciCore dressed the same man the morning after. It feels entirely fitting that one of the OG looksmaxxers Tom Brady sauntered down the catwalk in a head-to-toe leather, mewing with the best of them.

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