Grace Coddington once said that a fashion house doesn't remember its history — it remembers its women

Grace Coddington once said that a fashion house doesn't remember its history — it remembers its women. At Gucci, that memory is selective, occasionally mythologised, and anchored by three figures whose influence shaped not only collections but the very grammar of the brand. They are not ambassadors in the contemporary sense. They are muses in the older, more exacting meaning: women whose presence reoriented a designer's eye.

Charlotte Casiraghi — L'Intellectuelle

Charlotte Casiraghi entered the Gucci orbit in 2021, not through a campaign but through a series of philosophical salons co-hosted with the house. The choice was deliberate. Frida Giannini had leaned on Hollywood. Alessandro Michele, in his final seasons, wanted something else: a woman who could anchor his references to literature, to the Bloomsbury set, to the kind of cerebral femininity that doesn't photograph easily but lingers.

Casiraghi is the daughter of Princess Caroline of Monaco and the granddaughter of Grace Kelly, which gives her a kind of inherited visual currency. But what Michele seemed drawn to was her work as a philosophy graduate and her involvement with Les Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco, an annual forum she founded in 2015. She wore Gucci to those events — high-necked blouses, tweed suiting, the occasional velvet slipper — and the clothes looked less like endorsement than like a natural extension of her world.

The collaboration took form as Les Rencontres d'Arles, a series of talks on fashion, philosophy, and image-making. Casiraghi moderated. Michele attended. The press was invited but not pandered to. What emerged was a vision of Gucci as a house interested in ideas, not just in moving product. Whether that registered with the average customer is debatable. Whether it mattered to Michele's creative process is not.

In person, Casiraghi is composed, careful with language, and notably uninterested in performing accessibility. She doesn't do red carpets outside of Cannes. She doesn't post. Her relationship with Gucci was, in that sense, a refusal of the usual terms. The house wasn't buying her reach. It was buying her discretion.

Vanessa Redgrave — The Radical

Tom Ford's Gucci was not, on the surface, a house for radicals. It was louche, commercial, unabashedly sexual. But Ford understood that provocation requires a counterweight, and in 1996 he cast Vanessa Redgrave — then sixty, a committed socialist, and one of the most uncompromising actors of her generation — in a campaign photographed by Mario Testino.

The images are startling even now. Redgrave in a bias-cut slip dress, her hair unstyled, her gaze level. No jewellery. No obvious seduction. The campaign ran opposite editorials featuring Georgina Grenville and a very young Kate Moss, both shot in Ford's usual register of high-gloss eroticism. Redgrave's images were quieter, almost austere, and they suggested that Ford's vision could accommodate more than one kind of woman.

Redgrave had spent the previous two decades as much in activism as in film. She was a vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause, a critic of Western intervention, and a member of the Workers Revolutionary Party. She did not, in other words, seem like an obvious fit for a brand then synonymous with Studio 54 revivalism and logo belts. But Ford was canny. He wanted credibility, and Redgrave — who had never appeared in a fashion campaign before — gave him that.

She wore Gucci to the Oscars that year, a simple black column with a plunging back. The dress was praised, but Redgrave used her acceptance speech to condemn "Zionist hoodlums" and was booed offstage. Ford, to his credit, did not distance himself. The campaign ran through the season. Redgrave became, briefly, the face of a house that was learning to hold contradictions.

Her influence on Gucci was less about aesthetics than about permission. Ford had built his reputation on sex, but Redgrave's presence suggested that the house could also speak to women for whom sex was beside the point. It was a small shift, easily overlooked in the noise of the late Nineties. But it registered.

Dani Miller — The Anarchist

When Alessandro Michele cast Dani Miller — frontwoman of the Los Angeles punk band Surfbort — in Gucci's Beloved campaign in 2021, the choice felt almost perversely on-brand. Michele had spent six years at Gucci cultivating a magpie aesthetic: Edwardian collars next to logomania, Renaissance cherubs next to Mickey Mouse. Miller, with her gap-toothed grin and her habit of performing topless in thrift-store trousers, fit that logic perfectly.

Miller is not a model. She is not an actor. She is a musician whose stage presence is built on confrontation and whose lyrics tend toward the scatological. She wore a Gucci gown to the Met Gala in 2022 — a black lace number with a high neck and a train — and looked, in the best possible sense, like she'd borrowed it. The dress didn't tame her. She didn't elevate the dress. They coexisted.

What Michele seemed to recognise in Miller was a kind of authenticity that the fashion industry talks about incessantly but rarely tolerates. She doesn't code-switch. She doesn't clean up her language for press. When asked about working with Gucci, she told Vogue that she "never thought a punk could wear Gucci," which is both obvious and, in the context of a brand campaign, mildly subversive.

Miller's influence is harder to quantify than Casiraghi's or Redgrave's. She didn't shift the house's direction. She didn't open a new market. What she did was give Michele permission to follow his instincts all the way to their logical end, which in his case meant casting a woman who looked nothing like a Gucci girl and letting that dissonance stand.

The Thread

These three women share little beyond their association with Gucci. Casiraghi is European aristocracy with a philosophy degree. Redgrave is a socialist actor who used fashion as a platform. Miller is a punk musician who treats luxury as costume. What they represent, collectively, is a house that has spent the last thirty years trying to define itself against its own history.

Tom Ford made Gucci desirable. Michele made it strange. Sabato De Sarno, the current creative director, is trying to make it coherent. Whether the next muse will be an intellectual, a radical, or an anarchist remains to be seen. One suspects Gucci will continue to surprise itself.