THE SOUND
OF Milan
IS AUGXST

To understand why Demna's choice of Milan by Augxst matters, you have to understand the man who made it. Demna Gvasalia was born in 1981 in Sukhumi, in the Abkhazia region of Georgia — a place torn apart by war before he turned twelve. When separatist forces destroyed his family's home, he and his family fled through the Caucasus Mountains toward Tbilisi, before eventually moving through Ukraine and into Russia. He grew up stateless in spirit, displaced in body, a refugee in a world that didn't know what to do with him.

He channeled all of that — the dislocation, the silence, the hunger for beauty in ugly circumstances — into fashion. After studying at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium, he went on to hone his craft under the legendary Martin Margiela and at Louis Vuitton before co-founding Vetements with his brother Guram in 2014. Vetements wasn't just a brand. It was a provocation — an act of creative subversion that launched inside a Paris gay club and broke every rule the industry had carefully preserved for decades.

Then came Balenciaga. When Demna was appointed creative director in 2015, the storied house had lost its cultural edge. What he did over the next decade was staggering: he grew revenues from an estimated $390 million to close to $2 billion, introduced the brand to an entirely new generation, and made Balenciaga one of the most talked-about names in culture — not just fashion.

In March 2025, Kering announced the unexpected: Demna was leaving Balenciaga to take the helm at Gucci. The Italian fashion house had been struggling — sales had declined significantly — and the brief tenures of his predecessors had failed to reconnect the brand with its cultural authority. The industry held its breath.

His first full runway show for Gucci — staged on February 27, 2026 at the Palazzo delle Scintille — was the moment the fashion world had been waiting for. Every detail, from the casting to the set design to the soundtrack, was a deliberate statement. And Demna chose Augxst.

Augxst arrived at this moment not through algorithms or industry machinery, but through the undeniable gravity of the music itself.

Milan is the kind of song that does what great music has always done — it creates a world so vivid and emotionally true that anyone who enters it finds something of themselves inside it. Its atmosphere is cinematic, intimate, and sweeping all at once. It is precisely the kind of record that a creative mind like Demna's would recognize as a companion to his vision, not a decoration of it.

When Demna invited Augxst out to Milan, it was not a transaction. It was a recognition. One creator seeing another and saying: what you've made belongs here, in this room, at this moment in history.

The photographs Augxst brought back from those days in Milan tell the story better than any press release could. The behind-the-scenes images — a stylist kneeling to adjust his shoes, the backstage stillness before the storm, the Gucci store glowing against the Milan night — are the visual diary of an artist crossing a threshold.

For Augxst, the moment represents something that cannot be reverse-engineered. It is the reward of making music that matters — not music calibrated for virality, not content manufactured for consumption, but art made with the kind of honesty that eventually finds its way to the places it was always meant to be.

Emily Ratajkowski — known to millions simply as EmRata — has long occupied a singular position in contemporary culture: beautiful enough for the highest runways, sharp enough to deconstruct the industry from within. Born in London to American parents and raised in Encinitas, California, she rose to international prominence through a combination of extraordinary presence and fierce intellectual independence.

She appeared in Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines," walked for Marc Jacobs and Miu Miu, starred in David Fincher's Gone Girl, and wrote the New York Times bestselling essay collection My Body — a fierce dismantling of the way the world consumes female image. She launched her own fashion brand, Inamorata, and has never been simply a model. She is a full creative entity who chooses her collaborations with deliberate care.

At Demna's Gucci Fall 2026 show, Emily Ratajkowski walked the runway in a figure-hugging silver-studded mini dress — all '90s club energy, all unapologetic glamour — to a packed house that included Demi Moore, Donatella Versace, and Romeo Beckham. She was, by every account, electric.

And she walked to Milan by Augxst.