The Riviera in summer has long been a muse for fashion houses seeking a shorthand for effortless glamour, but Gucci’s latest campaign refuses the cliché. Titled simply Gucci Monte Carlo, the imagery — shot by the photographer duo Mert and Marcus — trades the horse-print nostalgia of the Alessandro Michele era for something leaner, bluer, and altogether more sensual. Starring models Anok Yai and Amelia Gray, the campaign unfolds across Monte Carlo’s terrain of infinity pools, yacht decks, and casino limestone, but the story it tells is not about wealth display. It is about the particular quality of light at the edge of the Mediterranean in June.
The collection showcased in the campaign reads as a summer wardrobe built for movement rather than static glamour. Fluid silk dresses in ice blue and shell pink, cropped tailoring in cream linen, swimwear cut with the precision of ready-to-wear — each piece is photographed in action, caught mid-stride or mid-laugh. Yai appears in a bias-cut slip dress that pools at the ankles, the fabric picking up the reflection of the pool water; Gray wears a cropped blazer over high-waisted swim briefs, the silhouette an exercise in proportion play that only a house as fluent in juxtaposition as Gucci could pull off without irony.
The setting — La Rose des Vents, a beachfront hotel perched on the Cap d’Ail — has been dressed by Gucci for the season, with the brand’s Flora motif printed on beach umbrellas and chaise lounges. The takeover extends the campaign into a lived experience, one of several brand activations that large luxury houses now use to deepen seasonal narratives beyond the magazine page. But there is also something more intimate at work: the campaign’s best images are not the wide shots of hotel architecture but the close-cropped frames of Yai and Gray in conversation, their faces half-shadowed, the diamond studs at their ears catching the late-afternoon sun.
Creative director Sabato De Sarno, who took the helm of Gucci in 2024 and has since worked to recalibrate the brand’s identity away from Michele’s maximalist maximalism and toward a more restrained, body-conscious vocabulary, finds in Monte Carlo a natural setting for his vision. The campaign’s palette — whites, creams, pale blues, flashes of coral — is narrower than Gucci’s kaleidoscopic past, but the restraint reads as confidence. In a season when many luxury brands are retreating to the safety of heritage imagery, Gucci has instead trained its lens on the present tense: a woman in a silk dress, the heat rising off the stone, the sound of a motor yacht idling in the harbor.
