If Wall Street is the beating heart of American capitalism, then Times Square is its beat face. Flooded with advertisements the size of literal skyscrapers, its neon screens are an assault on the eyes, burning the logos of the world’s biggest brands into your retinas, firing them into the farthest recesses of your brain.

A fashion show, at its basest form, is an advertisement – it’s how brands grab your attention, seep into your conscious and subconscious, and show you what you want before you even know what you want yourself. Perhaps that’s part of what informed Demna’s decision to present his first Cruise collection for Gucci (titled GucciCore) here, in this crucible of commerce.

Staged last night, as the sun set behind New York’s shining metal and glass monoliths, those flashing screens were taken over with giant Gucci ads, which rushed past like enormous Instagram Reels. Produced by digital artist Ryan Drake, these AI-generated videos advertised not just Gucci clothes but Gucci underwear, Gucci fine jewellery, Gucci motor vehicles, Gucci pet accessories, and even a Gucci hotel – all laden with the house’s unmistakable trademarks of sex, glamour, provocation, and the Italian dolce vita.

AI-produced art is a thorny topic right now, with many people fearing the demise of creativity or creative labour more broadly. Demna doesn’t seem to care about this – he’s always liked to poke and provoke, and here the message seems to be: AI is here, get on board.

Beneath these hovering cinema screens, black fences enclosed the show space, barely containing the thronging crowds, whose numbers had swelled beyond Times Square’s already claustrophobic norm. The fences may have banished the crowds, but they didn’t keep out the cacophony of the city (people, cars, sirens), which pulsed through the space, adding a layer to the soundtrack that accompanied the show.

The city of New York pulsed through the collection too, which was inspired by its various archetypes; the cycling city boys, the yoga mat-toting working girls, the women dolled up for a night out and the guys swaggering about in their wake. Traversing Madison Avenue, Brooklyn, SoHo and Harlem, these archetypes weren’t tired and clichéd like they could have been; they were Guccified; current and precise, tongue-in-cheek but not pointed. This new, urbane vision of Americana was brought to life by a cast of models, celebrities and characters with unique faces: vintage power couple Cindy Crawford and Tom Brady; pop princesses Emrata and Paris Hilton (seen for the first time in living memory as a brunette); runway royalty Alex Consani and Anok Yai; internet baddies Gabbriette and Amelia Gray; Victoria’s Secret alumnus Candice Swanepoel and recent Dazed cover star Vivian Wilson; along with a range of street-cast models.

“Gucci’s love story with this city began more than seven decades ago on Fifth Avenue, so bringing this show to New York feels like a homecoming for the brand,” Demna said in a ‘manifesto’ sent out after the show. “To do something that felt real to New York, 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 is clearly playing with (or again, poking at) our ideas of good taste, offering an unprejudiced reflection of our current beauty ideals: shrunken forms, swollen lips, glassy foreheads and contoured faces. Maybe that’s not what we’re used to seeing on the runway, but we’re seeing it everywhere else, so why not here? Just look at the Met Gala.

The sex of Tom Ford’s tenure was conspicuous throughout this collection – in the short skirts and high heels (which I’m confident my colleague Emma Davidson would appreciatively describe as ‘slaggy’); in the sensual feathers, leathers and (faux) furs. The bags – slick, slouchy versions of the brand’s most beloved models – will undoubtedly elicit desire among a wide range of consumers.

Meanwhile, the men’s tailoring was cinched or else cocooned in tubular pillows. The casual wear was street-led, with sheeny tracksuits and shiny denim coated in latex. It’s flashy and it’s fun, which is kind of what Gucci should be.

Towards the end of Demna’s ‘manifesto’, sent out just prior to the show, was a telling line about his aim for the collection: “Most of what you’ll see in this show is part of GucciCore,” he wrote, “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.”

We’re getting a clear sense now of what this new era of Gucci looks like: a flashy fusion of the house’s codes and Demna’s own signatures – layered irony, internet fluency, wry observation and playful provocation. And he’s right: it’s a wardrobe, it’s unmistakably Gucci, and it’s full of wearable pieces that people will no doubt flock to buy.