Has Sabato De Sarno Found His Feet At Gucci? (SS25 Menswear Review)

In today's video I am reviewing Sabato de Sarno's Gucci Spring Summer 2025 collection. “Playing with color for me is like dancing. And when the outfit is done, that’s my wave.” Sabato De Sarno was merrily mixing his metaphors before a Gucci show this afternoon that demonstrated his steadily increasing assurance at this rhetoric-buffeted house. Today’s surfwear theme—this collection’s most eye-catching departure—was less a metaphor and more a simile that expressed shared currents. These ran between De Sarno’s lifelong passion for galleries and museums and something he said he detected in the William Finnegan memoir Barbarian Days: “He spends his 20s traveling around the world surfing, having many experiences and encounters with different people, and these are what help him to discover his own sense of freedom.” Just as Gucci’s most recent resort show was held at Tate Modern in London, this spring menswear collection—De Sarno’s first here—was shown at Milan’s Triennale di Milano. The Triennale is currently showing an exhibition about the work of designer Gae Aulenti, one of whose quotes was pinned to De Sarno’s mood board: “Tradition is not something that is inherited but is built day by day.” Here you could detect multiple fresh layerings of elements already established during the designer’s not-quite year at the house. These dwelt in the opening leather coat’s same so-called rotten green we saw in fall ’24; a neoprene surf slipper gridded in the same 3D interlocking-G m