Gucci

Guccio Gucci was born in Florence and worked as an elevator operator at the Savoy Hotel in London in 1899, where the luggage of English aristocrats — the leather cases, the equestrian accessories, the entire material culture of wealth moving through space — made an impression deep enough to redirect his life. He returned to Florence and in 1921 founded a leather goods company employing local artisans, and the house’s early decades produced a series of objects that would become some of fashion’s most enduring icons: the bamboo-handle bag in 1947, conceived during postwar material shortages when Japanese bamboo replaced unavailable leather; the green-red-green web stripe in 1951, derived from the girth straps of horse saddles; the horsebit loafer in 1953, whose double-ring hardware translated equestrian culture into everyday footwear with an elegance that made the shoe a permanent fixture of the Western wardrobe. The interlocking GG monogram, introduced on canvas in the 1960s, completed the visual vocabulary that would survive a century of family self-destruction, corporate warfare, and creative reinvention.

The family drama was Shakespearean in scale and operatic in execution. The feuds between Aldo and Rodolfo Gucci escalated through the next generation: Paolo Gucci sued his father Aldo, his brothers, his uncle Rodolfo, and his cousin Maurizio for breach of contract and assault in 1982, then tipped off the IRS about Aldo’s tax evasion, resulting in a prison sentence of one year and one day for evading seven million dollars. Maurizio, who had inherited a majority stake when Rodolfo died in 1983, fled to Switzerland after being accused of forging his father’s signature to avoid inheritance taxes, spent the 1980s battling to push out the family members he believed were cheapening the brand through mass production, and was ultimately acquitted. In 1987, the investment firm Investcorp bought half the company. By 1993, Maurizio sold his remaining shares for a hundred and seventy million dollars, ending the family’s association with the brand. On March 27, 1995, Maurizio was shot and killed by a hitman outside his Milan office — three shots in the back, one in the head. His ex-wife Patrizia Reggiani, who had written “paradeisos” in her diary the day of the murder, was convicted of ordering the killing and sentenced to twenty-nine years.

The company Maurizio left behind was losing over thirty million dollars a year with debts exceeding a hundred million, and the resurrection that followed was one of fashion’s most dramatic transformations. Tom Ford, promoted to creative director in 1994, replaced the logo-laden aesthetic with a vision of louche, jewel-toned sensuality inspired by 1970s Studio 54: plush velvet suits, satin shirts, provocative advertising campaigns shot by Mario Testino and styled by Carine Roitfeld. Between 1995 and 1996, sales increased by ninety percent. By the end of Ford’s decade, annual revenue had grown from two hundred and thirty million to three billion dollars, and Gucci had evolved from a single brand into a luxury conglomerate — acquiring Yves Saint Laurent in 1999, Bottega Veneta and Balenciaga in 2001, and partnering with Alexander McQueen. The conglomerate-building occurred under the protection of François Pinault’s PPR, which had acquired a forty-two percent stake in Gucci Group for three billion dollars as a white knight defense against Bernard Arnault’s LVMH — a corporate battle that concluded in 2001 when Pinault paid Arnault eight hundred and six million dollars for his remaining Gucci shares.

Ford and CEO Domenico De Sole departed in April 2004 after failing to agree with PPR over control of the group, and the decade that followed under Frida Giannini — who served as creative director from 2006 to 2014 — was a period of heritage consolidation and declining creative energy. Then, in January 2015, CEO Marco Bizzarri asked a relatively unknown accessories designer named Alessandro Michele to design the menswear show with two days’ notice, and the result was a revolution. Michele’s Gucci was maximalist, gender-fluid, eclectic, romantic, and borrowed from everywhere — cinema, post-punk, Renaissance painting, geek culture, grandmother’s attic — in a manner that felt less like fashion design and more like the visual expression of a highly specific and slightly overwhelming inner world. Revenue rose from under four billion euros in 2015 to ten and a half billion euros in 2022. The Gucci Garden in Florence — a transformation of the Palazzo della Mercanzia into archival exhibition, boutique, and Massimo Bottura restaurant — became a pilgrimage site. The “hacking” collaboration with Balenciaga for Fall 2021 — in which Michele and Demna Gvasalia contaminated each other’s codes — was the most discussed fashion event of its year.

Michele’s tenure also produced the controversies that accompany any brand operating at Gucci’s cultural visibility. The Dapper Dan episode — in which Gucci’s Cruise 2018 collection replicated a 1989 design by the Harlem couturier without credit, triggering a backlash that was resolved through a formal partnership and the opening of a new Dapper Dan atelier — exposed the asymmetry of fashion’s relationship with Black culture. The 2019 balaclava sweater, a black turtleneck with red oversized lips that evoked blackface, provoked boycotts from Spike Lee, T.I., and Soulja Boy and forced the company into a reckoning with its own diversity failures.

Michele departed in November 2022, and Sabato De Sarno — appointed in January 2023, with his first show in September — has attempted a recalibration, stripping back the maximalism in favor of a quieter sensibility anchored by the oxblood red of his debut “Ancora” collection. The timing has been difficult: Gucci’s revenue fell to seven and a half billion euros in 2024, down twenty-three percent, as the luxury market contracted and affluent consumers shifted toward the understated brands that Michele’s extravagance had temporarily displaced. The arc from Guccio Gucci’s elevator at the Savoy to a ten-billion-euro maximalist empire to a post-Michele correction is the most extreme version of a story that defines luxury fashion itself — the perpetual oscillation between excess and restraint, between spectacle and discretion, between the conviction that fashion should be everything and the suspicion that it might work better as less.