The Store Is the New Runway: Gucci and Moncler Turn Shopping Into an Experience

Gucci and Moncler offer two examples of experiential retail in luxury in 2026, as luxury houses turn their stores from places that close a sale into places that create the wish to buy. Gucci staged Demna’s Spring/Summer 2027 show on 25 September inside a full-scale replica of its new store concept, which opens first on Avenue Montaigne in Paris at the end of October. Moncler opened its largest store in the world at 767 Fifth Avenue in New York on 10 September, with a made-to-order atelier, a floor for skiers and a monthly program of events.

For one afternoon in Milan, Gucci opened a store built to be looked at. On 25 September, inside the Allianz MiCo convention centre, the house raised a full-scale Gucci boutique, with display cases, racks and plush leather chairs, and used it as the stage for Demna’s Spring/Summer 2027 show. Models walked past canvas cardholders and Horsebit mules and stopped now and then, as if they were browsing. That night the same address held an invitation-only party with live performances. Then the shop came down.

Two weeks earlier and an ocean away, Moncler opened a store built to stay. Its largest shop anywhere opened on 10 September at 767 Fifth Avenue in New York, where a column of three rough stones, one black, one white and one a startling blue, rises from a checkerboard floor. Upstairs, skis wait under a ceiling printed with falling snow.

For most of the past twenty years, the luxury store was the last stop on a long road. The runway created the wish, the campaign spread it, and the shop took the payment. This season the road runs the other way. Gucci put its runway inside a store, and Moncler built a store around things to do. The shop has taken over the runway’s job.

Luxury Stores Shift From Selling to Experience

Luxury brands now use their stores to build awareness, draw people in and deepen relationships, with the sale as one part of the visit, according to an eMarketer analysis of Cushman & Wakefield’s latest European retail data. The store has become a destination, with cafés, bars and restaurants, concierge services and rooms for private clients.

The figures show a business that keeps building while it barely grows:

• Worldwide luxury sales grew 0.9 percent in 2025, and brands still opened 96 stores in Europe, 13 percent more than a year earlier.
• LVMH, Kering and Richemont accounted for about 30 percent of those openings. The other 70 percent came from nearly 60 brands, among them Tumi, Prada and the Spanish jeweller Carrera y Carrera.
• The openings reached into lifestyle. Paris alone saw six fragrance openings, including the European flagship of Acqua di Parma.

Physical luxury retail is losing share to ecommerce more slowly than other categories, because luxury clients prefer contact they can feel. The formula is a quarter of a century old, and Apple built its stores on it. Luxury has given it a new purpose. Claudia D’Arpizio, who leads Bain & Company’s luxury practice, put the shift in one line last November: “After the shopping spree era, experiences and emotions have become the true engine of luxury growth.”

The luxury brand pyramid once filled itself. The aspirational middle bought a first piece, then a second, and walked in without being asked. In July, LVMH’s chief financial officer, Cécile Cabanis, said the group had to keep nourishing the pyramid, “because we need to continue to recruit.” The invitation is a room worth the visit.

Gucci Previews Its New Store Concept at Demna’s Store Show

Gucci’s new store concept, which Demna previewed at “The Store Show” in Milan on 25 September 2026, opens first in a renovated Gucci store on Avenue Montaigne in Paris at the end of October, and stores around the world follow. Demna, the house’s creative director since July 2025, built the set as a full-scale replica of that concept, in effect a pop-up store on the scale of a flagship, standing for one afternoon of runway and one night of performances.

What the guests saw:

• Models paused at display cases holding canvas cardholders and Horsebit mules, as a shopper would.
• The front row, among them Cardi B, Jannik Sinner and Naomi Watts, sat in plush leather chairs.
• Menswear came first and womenswear second, in the order the lines hang in the store.
• Artists and designers commissioned by Demna furnished the set with original works.

The show turned the order of the business around: the audience saw the store before the clothes. The shop floor is also where Gucci’s recovery has to show. The house’s revenue nearly halved in the three years before Demna arrived, according to The Guardian, and Kering returned to growth in July. In a note posted before the show, Demna summed up the house in one line: “Gucci is about luxury that wants to be seen.”

Moncler’s Largest Store Opens at 767 Fifth Avenue

The largest Moncler store in the world opened on 10 September 2026 at 767 Fifth Avenue, with 23,680 square feet on two floors of the General Motors Building, a few steps from Central Park. Moncler describes it as a destination for community, discovery and cultural exchange, with a new program of events every month.

What a visit holds:

• A stone sculpture by the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone on the ground floor, among Moncler Collection, the Genius collaborations and footwear.
• A floor for Moncler Grenoble, with Stöckli skis, POC helmets and snowboards developed with Shaun White.
• Moncler to Measure, a made-to-order atelier, and an AI-powered Outerwear Guide with a Virtual Dressing Room for those who start at home.
• Six New York patches made for this store alone: a yellow taxi, an apple, a guitar case, a drum set, a bear’s paw print and a vinyl record.

The Paris studio Gilles & Boissier, which has designed around 250 Moncler stores over two decades, spent three years on it. Remo Ruffini, Moncler’s executive chairman, said the opening was also about “being part of the life of the people in this city.” On the opening night, guests stepped in from a hot, muggy evening and tried on down.

Moncler to Measure Makes the Logo a Choice

Moncler to Measure, the house’s new made-to-order atelier, lets each client decide how the brand appears on a coat: the classic felt logo, a tonal outline, or a front left entirely plain.

The work starts from four outerwear silhouettes, two for women and two for men, in fabrics that include cashmere flannel, silk, suede, shearling and a shaggy fil coupé. Clients can add hand embroidery, crystals or beadwork, adjust the sleeve length and have their name set on a leather tag inside. An appointment there is a visit in itself.

Demna’s Gucci wants to be seen. On Fifth Avenue, a client can now leave the front of a Moncler coat entirely plain. Both answers begin with a visit.

Luxury Brands Turn Their Stores Into Places to Spend Time

Fifth Avenue shows the shift block by block, as luxury brands add cafés, ateliers, art and events to their stores and buy the buildings they stand in. Tiffany & Co. reopened its flagship as the Landmark after a four-year renovation, with a Blue Box Café by Daniel Boulud, and on a Friday morning a year later dozens of people stood in line outside, some of them holding lunch reservations. In 2025 Prada opened a men’s-only flagship at 720 Fifth Avenue, and the city began widening the sidewalks and planting trees in a 400 million dollar redesign of the avenue.

The houses have also bought the ground they stand on:

• Prada bought 724 Fifth Avenue, home to its flagship since the late 1990s, for 425 million dollars, and 720 Fifth Avenue next door for about 410 million dollars.
• Kering bought the retail space at 715-717 Fifth Avenue for 963 million dollars in January 2024, reportedly as a future home for Gucci.
• Tiffany owns the building of the Landmark.

The rents have stood still. Upper Fifth Avenue, between 49th and 60th Streets, has held at about 2,000 dollars a square foot, and in Cushman & Wakefield’s ranking of the world’s most expensive shopping streets it has slipped from first place to third, behind London’s New Bond Street and Milan’s Via Montenapoleone. The brands are paying for the building and for the hours people spend inside it.

At the end of October, the store Gucci built for one afternoon opens for good on Avenue Montaigne.