The founders of Gucci
The original Guccio Gucci workshop opened in Florence in 1921, on Via della Vigna Nuova, a street of saddlers and leather craftsmen where the smell of tanned hide travelled through open doorways. Gucci had spent the better part of a decade in London, working at the Savoy Hotel, watching the luggage that arrived in the hands of guests — leather trunks with brass corners, pigskin cases lined in suede. He returned to Florence with a clear sense of what wealth looked like when it travelled, and an equally clear sense that he could make it himself.
The early work was modest. Equestrian gear, mostly: saddles, bridles, riding boots. Gucci employed local artisans who knew how to work vegetable-tanned leather, who understood the mechanics of a gusset or a strap under tension. By the late twenties, the shop had begun producing small leather goods — wallets, belts, handbags — still rooted in the vocabulary of the stable but increasingly aimed at a clientele that no longer rode horses. The aesthetic, such as it was, borrowed heavily from English saddlery: burnished leather, minimal hardware, an emphasis on construction over ornament.
What changed the house, and arguably what made it legible as a luxury brand rather than a skilled workshop, was the material crisis of the Second World War. Italy's trade sanctions cut off access to quality leather, and Gucci was forced to improvise. Canvas became the primary material. Bamboo, abundant and cheap, replaced metal for bag handles. The constraints produced the house codes by accident: the bamboo-handle bag, introduced in 1947, became one of the first pieces of Gucci design vocabulary that had nothing to do with horses. It was a substitution born of necessity, but it read as invention.
By the early fifties, Gucci had opened a store in Milan and another in Rome, and Guccio's sons — Aldo, Vasco, Ugo, and Rodolfo — were running much of the operation. Aldo, the eldest, understood branding in a way his father did not. He pushed for the interlocking double-G logo, registered in 1953, and for the green-red-green stripe that would become the house's most recognisable motif. Both were invented wholesale, not drawn from any historical archive. The stripe, in particular, had no precedent in the Florentine craft tradition; it was pure marketing, a way to make a canvas bag identifiable at a distance.
The American expansion followed quickly. Gucci opened on East 58th Street in Manhattan in 1953, and within a decade the brand had become a fixture of a certain kind of transatlantic elegance. The clientele included Grace Kelly, Peter Sellers, Audrey Hepburn — people whose taste was assumed to be unimpeachable. The house leaned into this. Advertisements from the sixties show sleek, anonymous models in sunglasses and headscarves, carrying bamboo-handle bags with the strap slung over one shoulder. The message was less about craft than about belonging to a particular social stratum.
What Aldo understood, and what his father had not fully grasped, was that a luxury brand could be franchised. By the seventies, Gucci had licensed its name to manufacturers of eyewear, scarves, perfume, even playing cards. The double-G appeared on products that had never been near a Florentine atelier. The strategy was lucrative — Gucci became one of the most profitable brands in the world — but it also diluted the house's claim to exclusivity. You could buy a Gucci lighter at an airport duty-free shop. The logo had become detached from the object.
The family, meanwhile, was tearing itself apart. Aldo and Rodolfo clashed over control of the business. Rodolfo's son, Maurizio, inherited his father's stake in 1983 and manoeuvred to take over the company entirely, pushing Aldo out in a protracted legal battle that involved accusations of tax evasion and forged documents. By 1993, Maurizio had sold his shares to Investcorp, a Bahraini investment firm, and Gucci was no longer a family business. Two years later, Maurizio was shot dead on the steps of his Milan office by a hitman hired by his ex-wife, Patrizia Reggiani. The story, operatic and sordid in equal measure, became the public face of the brand for a generation.
What saved Gucci — or, more precisely, what reinvented it — was the arrival of Tom Ford in 1994. Ford, then thirty-three, had been hired as creative director by Domenico De Sole, the CEO brought in to stabilise the company. Ford's first collection for Gucci, shown in 1995, had almost nothing to do with the house's equestrian heritage. It was louche, overtly sexual, and unapologetically contemporary: velvet hip-huggers, satin shirts unbuttoned to the navel, metal-heeled boots. The bamboo handle appeared, but only as a detail on a handbag styled with a slip dress and a fur coat. Ford understood that the archive was useful only insofar as it could be recontextualised, made to feel urgent rather than nostalgic.
The Ford era — which lasted until 2004 — turned Gucci into a billion-dollar business and established the template for what a modern luxury house could be: historically rooted but not historically bound, capable of producing both a $3,000 handbag and a $200 logo T-shirt without apparent cognitive dissonance. The double-G, which had been passé in the eighties, became covetable again, worn by a new generation that had no memory of the airport lighters.
Since Ford's departure, Gucci has cycled through creative directors at a pace that suggests either restlessness or indecision. Frida Giannini leaned into the archive, bringing back the flora and fauna motifs and the equestrian hardware. Alessandro Michele, who took over in 2015, turned the house into a maximalist fever dream: clashing prints, anachronistic references, a kind of deliberate garishness that felt, for a time, like the only possible response to the minimalism that had dominated the previous decade. Michele's Gucci was eclectic to the point of incoherence, but it sold. His exit in 2022 marked the end of an era defined by abundance.
What remains of the original house is difficult to say. The Florence atelier still exists, still produces leather goods using some of the same techniques Guccio Gucci would recognise. But the brand is now owned by Kering, a French conglomerate, and its creative direction is determined by market analysis as much as by any individual vision. The bamboo handle, the double-G, the green-red-green stripe — these are design elements that have been repeated, reinterpreted, and occasionally discarded, but they no longer signify a coherent aesthetic philosophy. They are, instead, assets. Flexible, monetisable, and utterly detached from the circumstances that produced them.
Whether that constitutes a betrayal or simply an evolution depends, one supposes, on what you think a luxury house owes to its past. Gucci began as a workshop that made saddles. It became a logo that could be applied to anything. The question is whether those two things can coexist, or whether the latter has simply consumed the former.
