GUESS JEANS IS REPOSITIONING ITSELF AS AN IT GIRLS BRAND
Nicolai Marciano, Chief New Business Development Officer of GUESS, is the one person responsible for giving relevance to the established brand for a few years now. Breaking the American market with GUESS USA, a compilation of American clothing vocabulary, where tradition is reworked under photographs of Eli Russell Linnetz. An experiment that gave new coolness in the minds of millions of people to what GUESS could be.
With GUESS JEANS, the creative seeks to revitalize and redefine the brand’s jeans legacy with a modern and sustainable vision. Proposing different in-store experiences all over the world and creating culture around the family business. Redefining the question of who is the GUESS consumer in today’s society. For example, I was impressed by the installation they did two years ago in Galeries Lafayette, in the Champs-Élysées location, where you could customize your denim in situ.
The revamp of the brand came with an aesthetic that was aligned with the vision that Gen Z has over sustainability and fashion. There is a pure and minimalistic approach in every space that feels connected to reality, making GUESS a brand to watch out for after years of creative frustration. Marciano takes the responsibility as a member of the Marciano family to pursue a better and prosperous way of carrying a brand like theirs.
Building on that vision, idk… GUESS emerges as the clearest articulation of Marciano’s intent to push the brand beyond nostalgia and into the now. Set against the Los Angeles skyline, the campaign introduces a new generation of GUESS girls—emerging, largely unknown, and entirely self-defined—who take control of the image-making process. Shot, styled, and captured by the talent themselves on iPhone 5c devices, the project embraces radical nonchalance and unfiltered immediacy. Moving in guerrilla fashion between social platforms and physical billboards, idk… GUESS dissolves the idea of a single GUESS archetype, replacing it with a fluid, plural identity shaped by personal perspective and real-time self-expression. It’s fashion in “create mode”: unconventional, self-authored, and culturally attuned, marking a decisive new era for GUESS JEANS.
A new take of what an It girl can be for a clothing brand, a collaboration between internet stars and models that fit into the aesthetic proposed by the brand. A very raunchy commercial that picks the leftovers of Abercrombie & Fitch and Brandy Melville to construct a storytelling more contemporary. Faces like Amelia Gray, Chessa Subbiondo, Claire Cameron, Echo Seireeni, Lexee Smith, Mazzy Joya, Taya Salley and Victoria Davidoff that are capable of transmitting an idea with so little, just by pushing a certain aesthetic beyond the standard. Where unpolished and personal takes on fashion are welcomed and where cheekiness is a shared adjective.
Ultimately, Nicolai Marciano’s work positions GUESS JEANS not as a brand chasing relevance, but as one actively shaping it. By collapsing the distance between creator and subject, campaign and consumer, idk… GUESS encapsulates a broader shift within the house: fashion as a living, participatory language rather than a fixed image. It’s a vision rooted in heritage yet unafraid of letting go—where denim becomes a canvas, identity remains in flux, and GUESS moves forward by allowing its community to define what comes next.