Gucci declared itself carbon neutral, then took it back. Here’s where the house’s sustainability ambitions stand under Demna and Luca de Meo.
Times Square belonged to Gucci on May 16. The house shut down the plaza for its Cruise 2027 show, commandeering some 50 of the district’s skyscraper-climbing screens while a cast of New York archetypes walked a runway laid between Seventh Avenue and Broadway. Cindy Crawford closed the show in a feather plume gown; Tom Brady appeared in head-to-toe leather; Paris Hilton wore a ladylike printed yellow frock; and oversized faux-fur coats anchored a collection creative director Demna has named GucciCore, his blueprint for a permanent Gucci wardrobe. The casting ran toward downtown royalty and uptown reality, with the designer Athena Calderone in faded denim and the gallerist Jeanne Greenberg in hand-painted white leather, and the whole production was, by Demna’s own admission, his most commercial outing yet, the products on the towering screens supplying the layer of metacommentary he rarely resists.
“I wanted to show this collection on the kind of people you might pass on the street, individuals with their own way of wearing clothes, a plurality of styles that intersect like the streets of the city,” Demna said in a statement reported by W Magazine. “Most of what you’ll see in this show is part of GucciCore, a permanent collection that will evolve over time, shaping my vision by building the foundation of a Gucci wardrobe grounded in pragmatic, wearable pieces that are unmistakably Gucci.”
If there’s a tell, it’s the faux fur. It is the most durable artifact of a period, not so long ago, when Gucci wanted to be known as luxury’s conscience as much as its id; the house that bathed itself in the glow of the most electrified block in America once promised that its entire global business, down to the last tannery, added no net carbon to the atmosphere at all. That promise has since been withdrawn, the executives who made it have moved on, and what sustainability will mean at Gucci under its current management, Kering chief executive officer Luca de Meo, a turnaround specialist imported from the car industry, and Demna, a provocateur with a taste for monumental staging, has become one of the more consequential open questions in fashion.
Gucci’s carbon-neutral promise and how it unraveled
In 2019, Gucci announced it was “entirely carbon neutral,” a claim that covered not only its stores, offices, and warehouses but its full supply chain, which the company acknowledged generated 90 percent of its emissions. The math ran through offsets: Gucci had dedicated $8.4 million in 2018 to forest-conservation projects under the UN-backed REDD+ framework, and whatever emissions it could not eliminate, the forests would absorb on its behalf. The program came with a hierarchy: avoid and reduce before restore and offset, and a corporate architecture to match, from renewable electricity across stores, offices, and warehouses to design inefficiencies engineered out of the line. The pledges kept compounding; the company committed to cutting its greenhouse gas emissions, water use, and waste production by 50 percent by 2025.
“Gucci will continue to work in a smart and strategic way to avoid and reduce our impacts, while simultaneously investing in innovation as a driver for sustainability,” Marco Bizzarri, then Gucci’s president and chief executive officer, said in a release. “However, in my view, this is just not enough nor will it happen fast enough given the sustainability challenges we are up against.”
Then, the unraveling arrived. In early 2023, the Dutch investigative outlet Follow the Money reported that a large share of the carbon credits behind corporate neutrality claims like Gucci’s represented emissions reductions that had never actually occurred. By May of that year, Gucci had removed the carbon-neutral language from its website and said it was reevaluating its approach to offsetting; Bizzarri, the architect of both the brand’s commercial explosion and its climate evangelism, departed Gucci before the year was out. The claim had lasted less than four years.
From fur-free to Off The Grid
What made the offset episode sting was that Gucci’s environmental record was otherwise substantive and frequently ahead of its peers. The house stopped using animal fur in 2017, when mink was still a fixture of the Milan runways. In 2020, it launched Off The Grid, a circular collection cut from recycled, bio-based, and organic materials, including Econyl, a nylon regenerated from discarded fishing nets. A year later it introduced Demetra, an animal-free leather alternative developed in-house from wood pulp and bio-based polyurethane, and by 2023 the material had migrated into the house’s signatures; the Horsebit 1955 bag in Demetra collected PETA’s award for best vegan bag. That same year, Gucci stood up its Circular Hub, a production model built to recycle, repurpose, and reduce waste at industrial scale.
The pattern across that decade is hard to miss: material innovation moved from the margins of the business toward its center, even as the headline climate claims grew more cautious. The brand learned, expensively, that a new textile is easier to defend than an accounting method.
Kering’s ReconKering turnaround
De Meo, who arrived at Kering from Renault, presented his answer in April at the group’s Capital Markets Day in Florence: a four-year plan called ReconKering that aims to more than double Kering’s operating margin, shutter more than 200 stores, restore full-price sales, and reduce the group’s dependence on Gucci. Sustainability survived the restructuring as one of five hubs in the group’s shared platform, filed alongside industry, customer, technology, and support functions. Whether that constitutes a demotion or an institutionalization depends on the reader; what is certain is that the subject no longer gets its own stage.
It also no longer gets a sympathetic customer. As CNBC reported in May, Gucci is promoting circular polyester to shoppers who, executives across the industry concede, are largely unwilling to pay a premium for ethically produced goods, which has recast sustainability inside fashion companies as risk management and margin protection rather than marketing. The 2019 version of Gucci asked to be applauded for its emissions math. The 2026 version would prefer the math stay out of the spotlight entirely, somewhere behind the fifty screens.
De Meo, for his part, insists the discipline is intact, and his Florence performance was studded with aphorisms that suggest where his instincts lie. “Everyone in our industry talks about luxury. For me, beyond the word desirability, the word that truly matters is excellence. Luxury is a perception; excellence is a discipline. Luxury can be claimed. Excellence must be earned every day, in every detail, across the entire value chain,” he said, in remarks reported by WWD. On the environmental question, he applied the same vocabulary. “Sustainability is, my opinion, a non-negotiable execution discipline across all decisions, from design and collection planning to sourcing, operations, capital allocation and governance — with measurable KPIs and no tradeoffs accepted between sustainability and performance.”
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