Dress to impress with Gucci
Among this month’s festivities was a New York screening of director Federico Fellini’s film La Dolce Vita, which the company partnered with Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation to have digitally restored.
For readers who don’t speak Italian, the classic film’s title screams ‘Gucci’, because the label has been accessorising and symbolising the sweet life since 1921.
Tastes have changed since Fellini’s day but Gucci has stayed in the mix, evolving its original élan, while growing from a family-run Florentine store to the behemoth of a French luxury conglomerate. The house was built on fine Italian craftsmanship and an almost century-long romance with the rich and famous. Gucci loves the glitterati and they can’t resist Gucci.
It is a mutually-beneficial affair that creates status and the kind of aspiration that sells €5,000 bags. The unmistakable, interlocking double-G motif creates a longing so intense it’s been bottled and branded: Gucci Envy.
The label’s story begins improbably with the bankruptcy of Gabriello Gucci’s straw-hat-making business in 1898. Seeking his own fortune, his son Guccio left their home in Florence and earned his passage to London stoking on a steamer.
He waited tables at The Savoy hotel, then frequented by international royalty, and celebrities like Oscar Wilde and opera diva Dame Nelly Melba. The experience sowed in the teenager’s mind an appreciation for luxury goods. From its inception, Gucci owed as much to a voyeur’s admiration for the accoutrements of the rich as any artisanal tradition.
Not that Guccio was undistinguished in the atelier when he started his company. After serving in the Italian army through World War I, he took a job at Franzi, a Roman fine-leather goods company, and learned everything from tanning to retail management. He was by then supporting a young family, having married his teenage sweetheart Aida Calvelli. The couple had three sons, Aldo, Vasco and Rodolfo.
In 1921, ambitious Guccio opened the first Gucci luggage store and saddlers in Florence. The origin of Guccio’s connection with equestrianism is unclear, but it is likely he sought to cater to the favourite pastime of the Tuscan aristocracy.
The association evolved into a family crest featuring a man on horseback that remains a brand insignia. Guccio’s small business quickly developed cachet among the cosmopolitan elite, especially after he opened stores in Milan and Rome.
Ironically, design changes made to accommodate war-time austerity generated some of Gucci’s most famous hallmarks. Gucci coped with leather restrictions by using jute, hemp and linen. Craftsmen dignified fabric cases with the now unmistakable, interlocking-Gs monogram print and red-and-green racing stripes. Bags had bamboo handles, another enduring signature detail. The Gucci bamboo bag was particularly popular with Princess Diana’s Sloane ranger set.
When Guccio died in 1953, Gucci was ripe for development. His three sons inherited equal shares but Aldo and Rodolfo dominated the business. Aldo moved to Manhattan, where he set about pioneering Italian design in the US and Asia. He went on to open Gucci’s first US store in the Savoy Plaza Hotel. Rodolfo chaired the company’s Italian operations with great success. A failed actor, he shared his father’s affection for high society. When High Society’s leading lady, Grace Kelly, visited the Roman store in 1966, Rodolfo worried that none of the scarves she examined were worthy of a princess. He had famed illustrator Vittorio Accornero create the 37-colour Gucci Flora pattern in her honour. The floral pattern still features in post-millennium collections.
Princess Grace remained a loyal customer, as did many Hollywood icons of the day, including Elizabeth Taylor, Deborah Kerr and, of course, Anita Ekberg. “This period in Gucci’s history was heart-stoppingly glamorous: the time of the original paparazzi, the real dolce vita,” says Sarah Mower, author of Gucci on Gucci: 85 Years of Gucci.
Gucci’s golden age continued into the 1970s. Studio 54 revellers sang ‘Halston, Gucci & Fiorucci’ along with Sister Sledge’s He’s The Greatest Dancer and threaded skinny Gucci belts around their hip-huggers. The new jet-set toted Gucci luggage. Despite their success, sibling rivalry between Aldo and Rodolfo was out of control. Their one-upmanship led to the damaging over-licensing of the brand. By the ’80s, Gucci was trading on an outdated image and brand symbols adorned low-quality goods. The interlocking Gs lost their allure, much like the over-saturation of Burberry in the early 2000s. In 1982, Gucci went public and Rodolfo’s son Maurizio was made CEO. He appointed Domenico De Sole, an Italian-born Washington lawyer, to overhaul Gucci America and poached a new creative director, Dawn Mello, from Bergdorf Goodman. De Sole imposed a new business plan, buying back franchises, reigning in licensing and hiring experienced retail managers. Mello brought in a talented design team, that included Texan ex-model/actor Tom Ford, to revamp the brand’s staid image.
The brand was in recovery but family in-fighting continued. Gucci was also on the verge of bankruptcy as a result of over-spending and foreign-market losses caused by the US recession and war in the Middle East. Maurizio signed Gucci over to an Anglo-Arab bank, Investcorp, in 1993. He was tragically murdered a year later after his ex-wife hired a hitman.
Tom Ford and Domenico De Sole, as the new creative director and CEO, saved the house by starting ‘Guccimania.’ “They worked very hard to give the brand back its burnish,” says luxury expert Dana Thomas, author of Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Lustre. “They insisted on top-of-the-line quality in production, and brought most of the production in-house. Their mission was to regain control, because through all that licensing, quality and design control had been lost. And their strategy worked.”
Ford created a chic, overtly sexy clothing line, using Carine Roitfeld, then editor of French Vogue, as his muse. Author SarahMower recalls his first show as her favourite Gucci moment. “With blonde hair flying, velvet boot-cut flares, satin undone blouses and GG buckle belts … you literally felt the ground shift under you, watching that. Everything was so glum or grungy before. This was hot and exuberant and glamorous, just the girl you suddenly wanted to be. It was fashion changing before our eyes, in real time,” she says.
Some critics moaned Ford’s style wasn’t Gucci but the public loved it, the high street copied it and celebrities couldn’t get enough. Ford was a friend to the stars and an icon in his own right. The label screamed wealth again.
Ford designed literal G-strings and slim-cut clothing that laced–up rather than buttoned. Gucci loafers became stilettos with pin-thin heels and barely-there straps. The company set a world record for the most expensive jeans ever produced with Ford’s $3,134, ripped-and-feathered Genius jeans.
Success resulted in a strategic alliance with prestigious French luxury group Pinault-Printemps-Redoute, which took Gucci public before taking it over. Ford and De Sole left in 2004, unhappy with the increased corporatisation the conglomerate imposed. Gucci’s design team was then led by a trio of Ford’s protégés, one of whom emerged as overall creative director in 2006.
Frida Giannini spearheaded the ongoing heritage trend, fashion’s equivalent of going to home-ground to wait out the financial storm. She focused on updating Gucci’s classic accessories and creating accessible pieces.
Giannini’s clothes are softer, more subtly sexy and inspired by the brand’s 1970s heyday. “I want to create a duality which, on one side, represents our roots, our rich heritage and craftsmanship,” she told the Agence France-Press. “At the same time, I’m always looking to the future and incorporating new fabric, new technology and new skins. This balance is the new key image for the brand.”
The company continues to thrive, allowing Giannini to come into her own and up the glamour stakes, of late, with fur and brightly-coloured leathers. Current CEO Patrizio di Marco gave a robust description of the brand at age 90, during the 2010 International Herald Tribune Luxury Conference.
“If you think of the many lives and tragedies this brand has lived [through], if you look at how it has remained strong and grown and if you consider that when two very important people [Ford and De Sole] left many said it would disappear in a nanosecond … I think you can consider Gucci invincible,” he said.
La dolce vita continues towards Gucci’s first century in fashion, leaving other brands green and red-striped with envy.
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