Gucci Puts GucciCore on the Sidewalks of New York

Photographer Peter Funch fills Manhattan crossings with groups in peacoats, trenches and pencil skirts, the street-level follow-up to Gucci's Times Square runway.

A yellow printed dress, a tailored suit and a pair of jeans walk down a Manhattan sidewalk with a Dalmatian. That is the GucciCore campaign, and it is exactly as New York as it sounds.

Gucci unveiled the images on October 21, 2026. They are the sequel to the show the house staged in Times Square in May, when GucciCore first appeared on the runway as part of the Cruise 2027 collection. Back then the clothes met the crowd by invitation. Now they have been sent out to meet it on its own terms, in the middle of the commute.

Crowds, on purpose

The photographer is Peter Funch, and the casting call is essentially the city itself. Rather than isolating one model against one wall, Funch shoots groups of people mid-stride, each in a different register of the same wardrobe. Among those appearing are Bobby Brazier, Meredith Mickelson, Colt MacLean, Candice Swanepoel, Meng Yu, Sabine Getty and Paul Segurola, crossing streets and sidewalks in tailoring, denim and leather. Yellow taxis and passing pedestrians crowd the frame, so the clothes have to compete for attention the way real clothes do.

Funch is a good match for the idea. Between 2007 and 2016 he worked on 42nd and Vanderbilt, a project documenting pedestrians passing through one Manhattan intersection near Grand Central during the morning rush. He has long been interested in how people behave around each other in public space, and how a personal identity sits inside a collective one. Danish by birth, he lived in New York for more than a decade, and his best-known work is rooted in its streets. The Gucci project grew out of an earlier series, Babel Tales, in which he photographed crowds at chosen city locations.

Gucci says his perspective brings out both personal character and the connections that form within a group. In the pictures that shows up as clothing, expressions and movement: together they make a visual record of the city’s many approaches to getting dressed, with different characters sharing one frame and none of them upstaged.

The wardrobe in question

GucciCore is Demna’s practical offering for the house: the peacoat, the trench coat, the tailored business suit, the essential shirt and the pencil skirt. These are familiar garments, filtered through Gucci’s Italian design identity, with a dose of glamour added to pieces that are meant to be worn on a Tuesday.

The campaign’s point is that a basic is only as fixed as the person wearing it. A suit reads differently depending on who is inside it, and a coat gets its character from proportion and styling. Put a group of strangers in the same vocabulary and you get a lot of different sentences.

The collection isn’t all restraint. Reversible technical outerwear sits next to soft leather, and Gucci’s Web stripe turns up as a bandeau top. Sequins, beaded fringe and feather embroidery bring extra texture to menswear, so the tailored foundation has some sparkle waiting underneath.

Why New York, again

The city has a long history with the label. Gucci opened its first store outside Italy there in 1953, and the Times Square show and this street campaign add two more chapters to that relationship. One is staged, loud and lit. The other is the same clothes at ground level, in the ordinary traffic of a weekday.

That sequence is satisfying in its own right: runway first, sidewalk second, with the garments making the trip from spectacle to daily use. For a collection built on the idea that Gucci’s future lies in clothes people actually wear, putting them among people who are actually walking somewhere is a sound way to make the case.

Via DSCENE