NEW YORK NEW YORK MAY 16 Demna walks the runway at Guccicore Gucci Cruise 2027 at Times Square on May 16 2026 in New... — Demna takes a bow during his Times Square takeover for Gucci’s cruise collection.

My mom first took me to New York in the summer of 2011. Naturally, we hit Times Square first—a perfunctory ritual for any virgin tourist. I felt like I’d stepped into a Nam June Paik video installation where competing billboard ads for American Eagle, Domino’s, and Glee coalesced into a chorus of commerce, hijacking my attention from all angles. I had found the control room of the monoculture.

When Demna took over Times Square for his first Gucci cruise show this week, he clarified his intentions for reviving the brand: Gucci should be everything, everywhere, all at once, coming at you 24/7 in 8K and surround sound. He called the show “GucciCore,” and even from the livestream, the spectacle was awesome: a smirking Tom Brady garbed as a Gucci’d down leather daddy; Mariah Carey, Kim Kardashian, and Lady Bunny seated front row; 50 screens blasting ads for fake Gucci products. At the Italian label, Demna is evolving the populist approach to fashion that became his signature at Balenciaga. But this time he’s abandoning the high-minded commentary on politics and power, the conceit behind his Balenciaga-fied Bernie Sanders campaign logo and a previous runway show staged in an ersatz parliament building to sinister effect. Instead, he’s proposing an aesthetic that is straightforwardly sexy and universally legible, no matter which Manhattan you live in—the Big or Little Apple. In that way, he’s operating like another creator whose ubiquitous oeuvre has redefined a different mass medium in his own yassified image: Ryan Murphy.

Their similarities aren’t so surprising. As a designer and a TV producer, respectively, Demna and Murphy rank among the most influential in their industries. Both are prolific, polarizing, commercial hitmakers, while also being master world-builders with shared sensibilities: an appreciation for high glamour and high camp, and a tendency to treat trash as treasure. Both understand entertainment. Of the Times Square show, CNN’s Rachel Tashjian tweeted, “Tacky, incredible Gucci show in Times Square that looks the actual consumers of most luxury fashion square in the eye and says ‘come on in.’” To me, Murphy appeals just as brashly and broadly.

They also share an impulse to be horny rather than heady. After his first official Gucci show in February, Demna told Tim Blanks that in this new chapter, “I want to be tempted. I want to desire. I want to like myself.” Blanks also noted that these lines had the ring of a Ryan Murphy script; turns out Demna had been watching The Beauty, Murphy’s sci-fi horror about a sexually transmitted disease that turns civilians into supermodels before something really bad happens. (Regarding this latest runway, I also wondered if Demna or his makeup artist had recently watched The Neon Demon.)

Kim Kardashian a muse to both Demna and Ryan Murphy attended the Met Gala with the former in 2021. Both were swathed in...

Just as some viewers slam Murphy as the king of “capitalist camp,” a cynic might say that Demna is a marketing wizard whose clothes are the sartorial equivalent of tourist traps: under-designed, overpriced merch that’s catnip for fashion victims. But, in a 2024 GQ profile set during Demna’s final chapter at Balenciaga, Samuel Hine observed that he is deeply wounded by the trolling accusations. The designer also insists his work is sincere; that he isn’t not mocking his audience, but respects and humanizes them. He mused on this more explicitly after his winter 2025 show for the house, telling GQ, “Do I really want to do something that is pretending to be fashion just because it grabs attention? Or do I want a person who wears my clothes telling me, ‘This is the best coat I’ve been wearing for the last five years and I don't need another one?’”

Perhaps where Demna and Murphy diverge is in their preferred aesthetic codes. Murphy is a fantasy auteur, constructing immersive universes with a singular visual language that’s hyper-stylized, high-gloss, and color-saturated. In his recently renewed legal drama All’s Fair, wealthy LA divorce attorneys plot revenge in Alaia, toast to done deals with Baccarat flutes, and vroom-vroom from their Vervoordt-inspired office to their secluded McMansions. (The show’s production designer told IndieWire that every detail had to be “iconic.”) Murphy’s characters can sometimes feel like cartoons, reduced to an assemblage of luxury signifiers and looks served. But the aesthetic is the point; style over substance.

Demna, on the other hand, is a fashion sociologist. He inverts the language of luxury branding to elevate the provincial and pedestrian, sparking critical debates and fan quests trying to demystify the designer’s intentions. Is he privileging substance (or stuff) over style? Is he making normal clothes without a wink or commenting on normal clothes? For example, in his Los Angeles fantasy, as seen in a destination Balenciaga show he staged in late 2024, Erewhon grocery bags become luxury totes and toned abs and manicured lawns transmit a sense of bliss. After that LA show, the designer told reporters, “Often people perceive my work as ironic—actually it’s the opposite. I was showing my love to the influence that I got from this city, it’s my favorite city in the world.” Demna’s archetypes always feel 3D. Murphy's characters can feel flat, like outlines.

The most useful comparison between the two titans is in their collaborations with one Kimberly Noel Kardashian. When Demna sheathed Kardashian in a black Balenciaga couture gown for the 2021 Met Gala, he was, indeed, commenting on the power of celebrity. Obscuring Kardashian didn’t anonymize her—it cemented her recognizability. Even when reduced to a swanning silhouette, anyone could identify the most famous woman in the world.

Image may contain Kim Kardashian Furniture Table Desk Person Sitting and Adult — Ser Baffo / Courtesy of Hulu

Meanwhile, in Murphy’s All’s Fair, Kardashian plays Allura Grant, a high-powered divorce lawyer getting hers while getting revenge on the man who jilted her. In one scene, she’s sitting in her oversized, minimalist office overlooking Los Angeles, clad in a Balenciaga couture 2023 coat better befitting a Maleficent-caliber villain: blood red and double-breasted with an exaggerated stand collar and a sharp, deep neckline. In the lookbook, the model wearing it looks like a corrupt dignitary who could have you disappeared if you glanced at her askance. If anyone could pull it off or literally buy such a garment IRL, it would be Kim—but on the show, Allura’s coat reads as an obvious statement on power dressing that saps it from subtext that might enrich or complicate our understanding of a character that's already thinly drawn. The menacing collar looks goofy, not grand. The stunt without subversion feels like slapstick. And suddenly, the most famous woman in the world looks like she’s wearing a silly costume.

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Is Demna the Ryan Murphy of Fashion?