The Return of Sexy Denim Starts With Demna

Fashion is ushering in a new era of loud luxury and Gucci creative director Demna is at the helm.  

This is according to Amy Leverton, founder of Denim Dudes, the Los Angeles-based denim consultancy. Last week at Denim Première Vision in Milan, Leverton described how the controversial designer is transforming overt sexuality and status into a spectacle that challenges the “restraint minimalism” that has homogenized fashion in recent seasons.

Whether it’s reviving the exposed Gucci double-G thong or sending Tom Brady dressed in Tom of Finland-inspired leather down a runway in the middle of Times Square, Leverton said Demna is delivering a prescription to fight fashion’s “good taste fatigue.”

As Gucci’s luxury competitors turn to more commercial designs and viral accessories, Demna is somewhat on an island perusing his own brand of brash and sometimes offensive style. However, traces of it are filtering into other brands’ collections. “He is very copied in the industry, and what he is doing—whether we like it or loathe it—is something against the system. He does something that’s very different,” Leverton said.

Y2K celebrity culture and the aspirational “footballer style” that David Beckham and Victoria Beckham personified in the 2000s are some of the more widely adopted references, she said. Diesel, Dsquared2 and Jaded London are good examples, as well as 7 For All Mankind’s collection of coated low-rise jeans creative director Nicola Brognano presented at New York Fashion Week earlier this year.

“Loud luxury really presents this appetite for high-impact styling, body-conscious silhouettes, high shine materials and overt displays of wealth and glamor and status,” Leverton said.

As a denim trend, Leverton said the Demna-led loud luxury trend calls for a neutral color palette splashed with red, gold and silver. Glossy surfaces and embellishments co-mingle with sporty stripes. Resin coatings give denim a dry, matte hand feel, while logo jacquard adds just the right amount of cheesiness. Skin-tight café racer jackets, subversive skinny fits and jeggings—elevated with coatings and seam details that show off the body—are all part of the story.

“There’s this clear shift toward something that’s louder, sharper, more unapologetic and more divisive,” she said.

The theme also creates an opportunity for overtly sexual and tongue-in-cheek advertising inspired by Gucci’s Tom Ford era. “As the world is kind of on fire, we need a distraction,” Leverton said about the attention-seeking marketing strategy. She added that French luxury brand Alaïa played into this mood in a recent campaign that showed denim but also a lot of skin.

“Jeans and skin—it’s the best combination,” she added.

With the chatter around inclusive sizing growing quiet, and the rise of GPL1 drugs and cosmetic enhancement, Leverton questioned whether perfect bodies are becoming the ultimate status symbols.

She pointed out how Demna was criticized for sending “a lot of absolutely perfect bodies down the runway,” especially very skinny women. Whereas a lot of brands have remade Y2K in a more inclusive way, she said Demna has doubled down on less inclusive direction almost to show how bad it was.

“I’m hoping that’s what he’s doing,” Leverton said. “I feel like Demna really shows us the ugly as well as the beautiful.”