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Milan Fashion Week attendees arrived yesterday to find the Italian fashion capital cloaked in a thick, hazy smog. The persistent gray fog was just one reason why the outset of MFW, normally the nourishing primi piatti of the fashion calendar, had a bit of an elegiac feel. Rather than the new and the next, this season is being defined by endings, with a half-dozen designers set to show what many insiders believe will be their final collections for their respective houses.

First up: Gucci. Inside a gleaming dark green box constructed on the outskirts of town, the air felt a bit clearer—but only to a point. As guests milled around on the impressive glossy catwalk, laid out in the shape of a retro Gucci logo, all anyone seemed to be talking about was how not three weeks ago the luxury house parted ways with Sabato De Sarno, its creative director who had only shown two men’s runway collections. This was supposed to be his third, a co-ed Milan Fashion Week kickoff.

Instead, the show was another episode in an industry-wide creative shakeup that is getting downright vertigo-inducing. “Do you think he’s offering him the job?” joked one observer as Kering kingpin François-Henri Pinault chatted with tennis player Jannik Sinner on the sidelines of the glossy catwalk.

Victor VIRGILE/Getty Images

Contrary to some pregame speculation, Gucci’s white knight didn’t materialize on Tuesday afternoon. Remember—this was the house that, a decade ago, handed the keys to a then-unknown studio hand named Alessandro Michele with five days to spare before his watershed debut. De Sarno’s own debut was moved from the rain-soaked cobblestone streets of the Brera to Gucci HQ at the eleventh hour. Companies with Gucci-sized resources can move fast.

Instead of a clear break we got what accompanying show notes called a “continuum,” an ode to Gucci’s pedigree of Italian style, officially presented by the design studio. The show was choreographed in two parts, with male and female models parading simultaneously on opposite sides of the GG set so that the audience saw only one at a time. A live orchestra conducted by Justin Hurwitz of La La Land fame provided an appropriately cinematic soundtrack for a series of nebbish ’60s-style suits (when Gucci began producing clothing), which played off a number of handsome cropped car coats in green and yellow bouclés. The thread picked back up in the ’90s Tom Ford era with some glam eyewear and faux-fur coats, and there was even a bit of Michele in the horsebit slipper-slides worn by most of the boys.