For his latest looksmaxxed Gucci show, titled “GucciCore,” Demna brought VICs and influencers and media people to New York City to view his cruise collection in an undisclosed location. Apparently, he was determined to make these fashion people go to a part of the city they otherwise would never choose to visit. So he decided on one that slopified itself long before we thought of things as slop: Times Square. (Quoth Demna: “I wanted to do the impossible and place Gucci at the centre of this metropolis.”)

Yes, in this land of flashing billboards, throngs of mall brand-wearing tourists, chain hotels, and an offensively large M&M store, Demna erected a runway within giant shipping containers, then set Tom Brady loose on the catwalk in what may be the sweatiest clothes he’s worn since playing professional football.

Interview editor Mel Ottenberg did a brilliant job with the GucciCore videos posted to social media before the show, including Lauren Santo Domingo in full animal print saying into a phone, “It’s giving stock brokers and business people in pinstripes, ladies who lunch…” Another model used her iPhone’s selfie camera to do her lipstick and fix her hair. It was all very relatable narcissism.

And so on Saturday night, the former home to Condé Nast’s headquarters became a place for one of its key advertisers to stage wealth porn theater that may as well have been cast by DeuxMoi. Given its own theater industry is in the throes of a financial crisis, this seems, well, ironic. Which was, of course, the whole point of all this — only, it may not have been ironic enough.  

First, if Demna wanted to push fashion people out of their comfort zone, to force them to engage with REAL NYC versus the members-only, Dimes Square, Jacks Wife Freida NYC frequented by people who own Lauren Manoogian sets and whose $20 cocktails never come from restaurants owned by Food Network stars, he frankly could have gone for the jugular. The Pret at Penn Station. A decommissioned New Jersey Transit train. A commuter bus stop at an office park on the other side of the Hudson. Staten Island. 

You know where a designer at a brand like this has the power to make Anna Wintour go in 2026?

Port. Authority.

But to Times Square she went. Before Brady’s smirky jaunt projected on a screen beneath the dated logo of the Marriott Marquis, celebrities flocked to this large gathering of cameras for their next hit of viral attention like antelope to a watering hole.

But it’s never just antelope. Along with the celebrities come handlers. Alix Earle, wearing a pale blue pantyhose-tight tank dress that was surely Gucci but could have been TikTok shop, was trailed by a woman in sensible shoes carrying a bag that could fit a few laptops. Kim Kardashian, wearing an entire throw blanket's worth of brown fur around her neck, entered the premises with what looked like a dozen or more attendants, including someone who stopped her to pick at a spot on her torso where the ends of the fur chunk met. When Mariah Carey came in, two to three people helped her remove her coat (it was 70 degrees) before she sat down. Once seated, one person petted her long straight hair while another tugged at imperceptible flaws in her clothes (a plain dark button-down shirt and black pants that may have been “giving business people”).

These scraps of content illustrated how stars are treated like babies who can’t walk into a venue on their own, sit on their own, or hold anything other than a bag they were paid to carry on their own. Such extreme vanity is exactly what Demna seemed eager to depict in his last ready-to-wear show and in this cruise show, featuring looksmaxxed makeup, giant furs, snakeskin-print pants, and sunglasses-wearing, phone-wielding models whose vibe is purposely, perhaps cartoonishly, self-conscious.

It was a fantastic display of utterly mid fashion. I started to wonder if the scraps of content of stars getting picked at and fussed over were part of an underground marketing campaign, the kind Lane Brown described in his recent New York magazine piece about how our feeds are fake because agencies just pay people to make videos about things in order to make them go viral. Was this a clever clipping campaign to boost Demna’s imagining of cell phone-era solipsism? Or was it an uncomfortably clear view into just how fake and self-important this world actually is?

I’m not totally sure if Demna is fully in on the joke.

If the Feed is Fake… Was the Gucci Hype Fake, Too?!

Speaking of Brown’s story, it’s well worth a read. He documents how “viral” songs, influencers, memes, Coachella sets, movies and more are often the product of clipping campaigns. These involve agencies paying social media users to post video clips resembling “the unscripted output of ordinary users.” These videos, Brown writes, “are now being used to fool people on every app they go to in order to find out what other people think, not just in music but across entertainment, politics, consumer products, and celebrity gossip.”

I wondered if social media fashion hype — Chanelmania, GucciCore, the Met Gala — is all fake, too. I emailed Brown to ask if he’d seen any fashion campaigns in the Discord and Whop groups where ads for clipping jobs get posted. (Brown notes in his piece that the people behind the viral events aren’t always the ones paying for the clipping.)

Brown replied:

I did a quick search on Whop this morning and found campaigns for fashion brands and products, but not Gucci. If you haven’t listened to Brown on the Back Row podcast, that episode — about how mega wealth changes people — was one of the most listened to. Check out part one here and part two, for paid subscribers, here.

Men Hungry for Swatch x AP Watches

The Audemars Piguet Swatch collab, a collection of eight colorful Royal Pop pocket watches priced $400 or $420, dropped Saturday. Crowds were so intense that Swatch stores around the world — from Dubai to New York to Orlando — closed, citing safety concerns. People started lining up outside the Times Square store right after Mother’s Day.

Unpolished newsletter author Tony Traina went to check out a Chicago area store before it opened, where, in absence of any line barriers that Swatch could have theoretically planned well in advance to erect, hundreds of men waited outside in an aimless mass. Police then taped signs to the door saying the store would be closed on Saturday, but some told Traina they would come back another day because they hoped to resell the watches, which are going for thousands on eBay. Traina blames Swatch for bungling the release.

“Looking back at my videos from Saturday morning,” Traina wrote, “there is not a single woman in frame.”

Everlane’s Investors = Probable Losers (Reportedly)

Over the weekend, Puck reported that Shein would buy Everlane, the DTC brand that marketed itself as “clean luxury” with “radical transparency” into its supply chain. (Other major outlets seem to have been unable to confirm Puck’s reporting though they’re generally picking the story up anyway.)

The discourse around this report has largely focused on the irony of a “sustainable” brand selling out to one of fashion’s biggest polluters and least successful greenwashers (bad combo). Everlane may have tried to sell values to consumers along with its T-shirts, however private equity doesn’t care about ethics, they just care about money.

Anyway, seeing as we’ve already established that everything is fake, allow me to draw your attention to financial terms. If this all sickens you as so many things do in 2026, just know that private equity firm L Catterton is likely losing money on the deal. PE firms typically look for a two to three times return on their investments. L Catterton invested $85 million in Everlane in 2020, but according to reports on the sale, common holders got wiped out and preferred holders are only getting back a portion of their investments.

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