“Are you going to create your own Demna Gucci silhouette, and if so, when?”

It’s a fair question, put to Demna by an analyst at a Kering investors’ meeting this spring, with the house’s revenues having almost halved since 2022. Demna went back to his hotel room and began to imagine.

For our cover story, Cathy Horyn followed the designer’s first year at Gucci as he worked out, in real time, what ‘his Gucci’ should be. Behind the spectacle lies the unseen work – a new prototyping atelier, a holographic fittings system linking Milan and Los Angeles, the re- engineering of how Gucci sizes its clothes, the time required to explain his more radical practices to seasoned artisans in Tuscany and Piedmont – and the ever-nebulous question of how much of his own DNA to bring to a Gucci the world already recognises. He calls the year a ‘prologue’.

It’s the ‘when’ that lingers. We have grown used to the instant – an answer, an image, an idea, now summoned by AI in seconds – and that impatience, it seems, reaches into the design studio as much as the quarterly results. Yet a fashion house is, at heart, a place of research and development, where instinct is worked and reworked into something that endures. At Jil Sander, creative director Simone Bellotti has been delving into the founder’s 1980s catalogues, which bear little resemblance to the minimalism so synonymous with her name. That signature purity took years to refine. It’s no different for the emerging designers we profile in our new series, ‘Coming up’, where trust with one’s customer, as Kinyan Lam puts it, “takes a long time to build”.

Norma Kamali , still designing at 81, cut up her own sleeping bag in 1973 to make a coat designers have revisited ever since – Demna included, in his sublime Balenciaga couture puffers. An early adopter of AI, Kamali studied the technology at MIT, exploring how it might safeguard the longevity of her pioneering design legacy. Yet when she recently pressed it for an original idea, it replied, “If you give me an original idea, I can give you many ideas after that.”

Which rather changes the analyst’s question. If the era-defining original idea still has to come from a designer, perhaps what matters isn’t when – but whether we’re prepared to wait.