By Kuya Allen
Fashion has a long habit of mistaking a joke for a lack of rigor. A Hello Kitty sweatshirt gets filed under novelty before anyone checks the seams.
Giuliano Calza has spent a decade letting people make that mistake, and then letting them find out.
He started GCDS in Milan in 2015 with a hundred sweatshirts and a website. He built it out with his brother Giordano into a brand whose collaborations run from Bratz and One Piece to Betty Boop and Valentino Rossi. He moved production from China back to Italy, stepped away from the runway, and came back to it this year. Even the name runs two ways, Giuliano Calza Design Studio and God Can’t Destroy Streetwear, and he’s never picked one.
We went back to the beginning with him: what he wanted before there was a logo, what coming home changed, how humor and craft end up on the same garment, and what he’s protecting as GCDS heads toward twenty.
Ten years is about how long it takes an industry to decide what you are.
Giuliano Calza has watched fashion file GCDS under fun for most of that time. He’s never argued the point. He keeps putting the cut and the construction underneath the joke and waits for people to look closer.
The detail I keep coming back to is the last thing he said. Strangers stop him on the street to tell him he made their favorite piece, or the thing they wore on a day they still remember. A brand built on cartoons and logo play ended up holding people’s memories. That’s what the hundred sweatshirts were for.
At twenty, he wants GCDS bigger in imagination before it’s bigger in size. And the name still means both things at once, a studio and a dare. Ten years in, he’s still taking his own advice and not behaving.