How Affaire designed the graphic system for Gucci’s La Famiglia

Few fashion campaigns have arrived under heavier expectation than Gucci’s Spring/Summer 2026, the first under Artistic Director Demna. Rather than answering with a traditional runway, the house answered with a cast – 37 archetypes directed by Mau Morgó and captured by Catherine Opie, presented as a ‘famiglia,’ each figure named for the role they play. Barcelona-based studio Affaire, founded by Josep Román Barri, was commissioned to build the graphic system that holds the visuals together: a custom crest, a title credit treatment and the typographic language. The system rests on a typeface that Affaire identified within Gucci. “The custom serif was developed previously for Gucci, so we revisited it within their archive and identity materials, with the support of their creative team,” Román Barri tells us, adding that while the typeface had not been widely used, it “naturally resonates with the brand, echoing the logotype’s proportions and its historical foundations.” It appears at an extreme scale across the campaign, set in cream against the cool backdrops, broken up so that lines fragment into stacked compositions that sit directly over the figures. The typeface carries the contrast and elegance of a classical serif, but Román Barri is clear that the work was in pushing it elsewhere. “Through scale, line breaks and fragmentation, we pushed it into a more assertive and contemporary space,” he explains. Anchoring the type at the foot of every image is a custom crest – a heraldic shield containing an armoured knight, flanked by ‘SS’ and ‘26,’ topped with a Gucci banner and bracketed by a small daisy and a rose. It is a constant across all 37 archetypes, but never a static one. “The variations were not driven by a strict system, but by a shared compositional logic that could adapt across all characters,” Román Barri reveals. “Each iteration responds to its specific image while still feeling part of a cohesive whole.” Given that many of the pieces are designed to live alone across different formats, from social to large-format placements at Times Square and Piccadilly Circus, the crest does the structural work of identification when the wider campaign context isn’t present.