Gucci Opens Its Avenue Montaigne Flagship in Paris, the First Store Built on Demna's Store Show Set

Gucci's spring 2027 set is now a real shop. The house opened its new flagship at 56 Avenue Montaigne in Paris on October 30, and its release calls it the first store in a new shop concept: four floors and 1,480 square metres, built from the ideas Demna first showed as the set of The Store Show, his spring 2027 runway in Milan on September 25. Gucci says the concept will be brought into the rest of its store network step by step.

WWD, which walked the store with Gucci president and CEO Francesca Bellettini, reports that it replaces Gucci's previous Avenue Montaigne boutique two doors down, and that redesigned stores in London, Shanghai and Chengdu are due by the end of the year.

What's inside

Gucci's release says the layout takes its plan from an Italian Renaissance palazzo and its look from Milan: 1930s rationalist architecture in the spirit of the architect Piero Portaluppi, softened with details from Milanese interiors of the 1950s to the 1970s. Each room gets its own mix of materials, among them Ceppo di Gré stone, travertine in several shades, Emperador and Breccia marble, green stone and bronzite, walnut, zebrawood and teak, terrazzo and pigmented concrete. The walk ends upstairs at Gucci Appartamento, a private space on the second floor.

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WWD fills in the floors: bags and luggage in the front rooms, ready-to-wear, silk, eyewear and fragrance at the back, men's on the lower ground floor and women's on the first. It also reports that the shop has no price tags, that staff pull extra pieces from stock rooms on each floor, and that the Appartamento, which can be split into three salons, holds exclusive pieces including evening gowns and new Flora-print tableware made with Ginori 1735.

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The read

The timing is the story. The concept went from show set to store in barely a month, as WWD puts it; Bellettini told WWD that with the chance to relocate on Avenue Montaigne, Gucci didn't want to miss it, and called it a bold choice to debut a new concept somewhere this prominent. It lands while Kering under Luca de Meo is closing stores: WWD reports that Kering shut 105 in the first nine months of the year, 25 of them Gucci's, and that Gucci plans to cut its network by 30 percent by 2030 with total floor space falling less than the store count, so some new stores will be bigger.

That makes the concept the brand's statement more than the clothes on the rails. WWD describes three years of rapid churn in Gucci's creative directors, and reports that Bellettini wanted a store built on brand values that go beyond any one designer; earlier concepts, it says, left much of the network looking out of date. She told WWD this one is designed to endure. The test is the rollout: whether London, Shanghai and Chengdu open on schedule, and how much of the old network gets this treatment rather than the closure list.

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