Image from Guccimuseo.com. Many of Guccio’s Italian clients were local horse-riding aristocrats, and their demand for riding gear led Gucci to develop its unique Horsebit icon - an enduring symbol of the fashion house and its increasingly innovative design aesthetic. like a costume designer,” he said. “I try to put some soul in the outfit—the idea of a character.” Upon graduating, though, he began working for an Italian knitwear company in Bologna. He then returned to Rome, to work at Fendi, where he met Frida Giannini, who was designing handbags. In 2002, Giannini was hired by Gucci. She moved to the company’s design offices in London, and took Michele with her. The company had evolved significantly in the eighty years since Guccio Gucci opened his Florence shop. In the nineteen-twenties, Gucci sold luggage of the sort that Guccio had observed being used by guests at the Savoy Hotel in London, where he had worked as a young man. As Sara G. Forden relates, in “The House of Gucci” (2000), in the mid-thirties countries in the League of Nations protested Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia by imposing sanctions against Italian industry; Gucci, facing a leather shortage, was forced to innovate. The company began making fabric handbags with spare amounts of leather trim. It developed its signature diamond print and incorporated materials such as raffia and wicker into its designs. The new designs were very popular, and in 1938 Gucci opened a luxuriously appointed boutique on Via Condotti, in Rome. By the fifties, when it added its first New York store, the company had become a status symbol for royalty and celebrities, including Elizabeth II, Grace Kelly, and the future Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. But by the eighties Gucci had gone into decline, having become a predictable standby of the duty-free store. (Its horse-bit loafers were part of the Washington lobbyist’s uniform.) Seeking to revive the brand, Maurizio Gucci, then the company’s chairman, lured away Dawn Mello, an executive at Bergdorf Goodman. In 1990, Mello hired Tom Ford, then a little-known designer at Perry Ellis, to 20 the difference in philosophy “I didn’t have the mind to appoint him,” Bizzarri recalled. “But when I was listening to him I really understood that he is Gucci. He has been living the brand for many years, understanding the history. He is more Gucci than anybody else.” Marco Bizzarri, Gucci’s president and C.E.O. on Alessandro Michele create Gucci’s first ready-to-wear collection for women. When Mello left the company to return to Bergdorf Goodman, as president, four years later, Ford became Gucci’s creative director. Ford gave Gucci a radical makeover, emphasizing slinky, bias-cut gowns, in black or white jersey, that featured plunging necklines, cutouts at the hip, and buckled waists. His designs evoked the louche allure of Studio 54 in the disco era. Ford, who grew up in New Mexico, and attended N.Y.U. and the Parsons School of Design, had a peculiarly American attachment to ideas of European sophistication. In 1996, he proclaimed, to the Times Magazine, “Too much style in America is tacky. It’s looked down upon to be too stylish.” Ford’s ostentatiously sexy designs had a broad influence. If, twenty years ago, you lived in narrow, low-waisted pants with a leg-lengthening flare at the calf, that was Tom Ford’s gift to you. Michele has a very different sensibility, but he admires Ford’s conjuring of the sartorial past. “I feel myself very close to Tom,” Michele told me. “He didn’t have another Faye Dunaway, or another Lauren Hutton, or another Bianca Jagger, but he wanted to create the illusion that they are still around us. He tried to make, in that time, something that didn’t exist anymore.” Sales initially surged under Ford, and Gucci once again became a formidable brand. In 1999, the company was acquired by Pinault-Printemps-Redoute, a French conglomerate. Luxury sales slumped after September, 2001, and in the early aughts Ford seemed, at times, to be losing his touch. (The Times decried “silly affairs involving cursive logos” and “too much fur.”) Ford and Domenico De Sole, Gucci’s C.E.O., were soon at loggerheads with their corporate parent, and in 2004 they exited the company. Ford’s post was split among three designers, including Giannini; two years later, she was appointed sole creative director, and Michele became her No. 2. “I did a lot of huge and beautiful bags,” Michele told me of this period. “I don’t have a problem to say I am a good merchandiser, because I love objects.” But the job was not a venue for self-expression. “I was not creative—I was more executive,” he said. “My job was to more or less work quite exactly from the idea of another person. I didn’t have freedom. I just put in ten per cent of my creativity.” When Giannini was fired, the fashion press bruited about many names as possible successors, including Riccardo Tisci, who had revitalized Givenchy, and Hedi Slimane, of Yves Saint Laurent. In some quarters, there were calls for a restoration of Tom Ford, who had gone on to establish his own label, and to direct movies. It was suggested to Marco Bizzarri, Gucci’s new president and C.E.O., that he should talk to Michele, whose long standing at the company might be useful in informing the search. “It was unplanned,” Bizzarri told me in London this spring. “Someone said to call him. They said, ‘He’s a good guy.’ ” The two met, and talked for hours. “I didn’t have the mind to appoint him,” Bizzarri recalled. “But when I was listening to him I really understood that he is Gucci. He has been living the brand for many years, understanding the history. He is more Gucci than anybody else.” Michele’s collections have highlighted his knowledge of Gucci’s past. A dress in delicate grass-green lace with a frilled plunging neckline has a ribbed waistband in the brand’s signature red-and-green stripe. The famous double-G motif proliferates on belt buckles and handbag prints, including one that Michele collaborated on with Trevor Andrew, a graffiti artist who goes by the name GucciGhost. Alexandra Shulman, the editor-in-chief of British Vogue, told me, “When I saw the first women’s collection, in all honesty, I thought it looked a bit too vintage. There weren’t that many accessories—I couldn’t quite understand how that could be Gucci. But the way that he has taken the core of that idea, and in such a short time has made it what we think of as Gucci, is extraordinary.” Since Michele’s appointment, revenues at Gucci have risen: in the fourth quarter of 2015, sales were up thirteen per cent from the fourth quarter of 2014. Last fall, Bizzarri announced that, in defiance of retail convention, Gucci would not mark down prices, so that a Gucci garment bought at the start of the season would not lose its value when Black Friday dawned. François-Henri Pinault, the C.E.O. of Kering, as Gucci’s parent company is now known, told me, “When you look for a designer, you need someone who really understands the brand, and loves the brand. When you realize that what the designer is proposing is his own life, and his own creativity—it is not something that he does for the brand, but it’s his own personality—it’s very rare.”
Images from Gucci.com