Gucci unveiled its latest Made in Italy campaign featuring Jannik Sinner, the world’s number-one tennis player and Gucci’s global brand ambassador since 2022, dressed in a pristine white suit against a green and red background, the brand’s signature colour combination, striking a pose that recalls him swinging a racket on a tennis court. The imagery is clean and direct in the way that Demna’s Gucci tends to be when it is not being deliberately confrontational: a famous Italian face, the house’s Italian colours, and a sport that carries its own codes of elegance and precision. The Made in Italy campaign has always been about identity as much as product, and Sinner, born in San Candido, raised on clay courts, world number one, is about as Italian as a campaign subject gets.
The Dinner
The campaign launch was followed the same evening by an intimate dinner hosted by Salma Hayek-Pinault at Claridge’s Dante Mayfair restaurant in London, timed to coincide with Sinner’s sixth consecutive return to Wimbledon and attended by a guest list that reflected Gucci’s cultural reach across sport, film, fashion, and royalty. Hayek-Pinault wore a leopard print gown from the Pre-Fall 2026 Gucci collection with a Horsebit 1955 bag, and was joined by her daughter Valentina Pinault, alongside Naomi Ackie, Fabien Frankel, Lila Moss, Sabine Getty, Kaytranada, Alton Mason, Princess Maria-Olympia of Greece, and others, many of whom wore Demna’s Gucci looks for the occasion. Sinner himself opted for a more casual look in black for the dinner, a deliberate contrast to the white suit campaign imagery that had been released just hours earlier.
Why It Works
The pairing of tennis and fashion has become one of the more productive creative territories in luxury marketing over the past five years, and Gucci’s investment in Sinner sits at the more considered end of that conversation, a genuine brand ambassadorship built over four years rather than a one-season opportunity tied to a ranking. Hayek-Pinault, who will co-host the Serpentine summer party alongside Mexican Academy Award winners Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu later in the week, brought a specific kind of cultural gravity to the evening, as both a Gucci presence and as someone with her own relationship to the house through her husband’s ownership of Kering. The dinner did what the best fashion events do: it made the campaign feel like the beginning of something rather than the announcement of something already finished.
