Portrait : le directeur artistique de Gucci

The fitting room at Gucci's Via delle Caldaie atelier runs narrow, tall-ceilinged, lit by a bank of north-facing windows that have not been replaced since the Fifties. Sabato De Sarno stands to one side, arms crossed, watching a house model turn in a double-breasted coat whose lapels he has recut three times in as many weeks. He does not speak. The coat moves. He nods once, then gestures to the première—unpick the shoulder, drop it a centimetre, recut on the bias. The model steps out. De Sarno returns to his desk. This is not theatre. It is adjustment.

Since January 2023, De Sarno has served as creative director of Gucci, succeeding Alessandro Michele, whose seven-year tenure turned the Florentine house into a cultural juggernaut and a revenue engine that, at its peak, generated close to ten billion euros annually. Michele's exit was abrupt; Kering, Gucci's parent, cited a need for "a new chapter". What followed was not a palace coup but a calculated reset. De Sarno, then forty years old and largely unknown outside the industry, was named to the post in late January. His first collection debuted that September. The house, in the interim, went quiet.

Formation

De Sarno was born in 1982 in Potenza, a small city in Basilicata, southern Italy. He studied at the Istituto Europeo di Design in Rome, then moved to London, where he enrolled at Central Saint Martins. His cohort included names that would later surface at Loewe, Bottega Veneta, and The Row's atelier—designers who learned to drape before they learned to sketch. De Sarno has said, in interviews with WWD and Business of Fashion, that his training emphasised construction over concept. He did not graduate with a manifesto. He graduated with a portfolio of jackets.

His first industry role came in 2005, at Prada, where he worked under Miuccia Prada in the womenswear studio. He remained there for sixteen years, eventually ascending to senior designer. Prada, during that period, moved through several aesthetic phases—minimalism, ornamentation, a return to clean lines—but the house's approach to craft remained consistent. Seams were pressed flat. Hems were weighted. Proportions were tested on the body, not the screen. De Sarno absorbed this discipline. Colleagues from that era describe him as precise, patient, and uninterested in self-promotion.

In 2021, he moved to Valentino, where he served as design director under Pierpaolo Piccioli. The role was largely invisible to the public; Piccioli remained the singular author of Valentino's collections. But De Sarno's hand was evident in the tailoring—sharper, more architectural than Valentino's romantic codes typically allowed. He stayed eighteen months. When Kering approached him in late 2022, he was not the obvious choice. He was, however, the considered one.

The brief

Gucci, by the time De Sarno arrived, had become a house in search of a centre. Michele's vision—magpie eclecticism, archival pastiche, a kind of joyful excess—had redefined what a heritage maison could be in the twenty-first century. But it had also, by 2022, begun to feel diffuse. Sales had softened. The house's identity, once thrillingly unstable, now seemed unmoored. Kering's brief to De Sarno was, by several accounts, straightforward: return to the product. Make clothes people want to wear. Do not attempt to replicate Michele. Do not attempt to erase him either.

De Sarno's first collection, shown in September 2023 during Milan Fashion Week, opened with a series of tailored coats in camel, navy, and charcoal. The cuts were clean, the fabrics dense, the silhouettes neither retro nor aggressively modern. A leather trench followed, then a series of slip dresses in silk crêpe, then handbags—lots of handbags—in supple calfskin with minimal hardware. The show was received with what one might call polite interest. Critics noted the absence of Michele's ornament. They also noted the precision of the seams.

The collection's commercial performance told a different story. By the second quarter of 2024, Gucci's leather goods category—historically its most lucrative—had begun to stabilise after several quarters of decline. The Ancora bag, a top-handle style with a bamboo clasp, became the house's fastest-selling new silhouette since the Marmont. De Sarno had not invented a new language. He had returned to an old one, spoken with a different accent.

Signature

What, then, is a De Sarno garment? It is not easily summarised, which may be the point. His work resists the kind of instant legibility that defined Michele's tenure. There are recurring elements—rounded shoulders, high waists, a preference for tactile fabrics like boiled wool and grained leather—but no single motif dominates. He does not traffic in symbols. His collections are not organised around a theme or a mood board. They are organised around the body.

This approach has drawn comparisons to the work of Phoebe Philo, another designer who built a following by refusing to perform. But where Philo's minimalism felt cerebral, almost austere, De Sarno's work retains a softness. His proportions are generous without being oversized. His colour palette runs to warm neutrals—rust, olive, a particular shade of brown he has described, in a Vogue Italia interview, as "the colour of good leather after five years of use". He is interested in patina, in the way a garment ages, in the idea that luxury might be quiet rather than declarative.

His handbags, in particular, reflect this philosophy. The Ancora, the Blondie, the new iteration of the Jackie—all are constructed with a level of detail that recalls Gucci's archive without directly quoting it. The bamboo handle, a house signature since the Forties, reappears not as nostalgia but as a functional element. The leather is vegetable-tanned, a slower and more expensive process than chrome tanning, but one that allows the material to develop character over time. These are not bags designed to photograph well on Instagram. They are designed to last.

Reception and resistance

Not everyone has been convinced. Some critics have argued that De Sarno's work lacks ambition, that it represents a retreat into commercial safety after Michele's risk-taking. Others have noted that his collections, while technically accomplished, do not generate the kind of cultural conversation that Gucci commanded under his predecessor. The house's revenue, while stabilising, has not returned to its pre-2022 peak. Kering's share price remains under pressure.

De Sarno, for his part, has not engaged with these critiques publicly. He does not give many interviews. He does not maintain a visible social media presence. His public statements, when they occur, tend toward the procedural. In a rare on-stage conversation at Business of Fashion's Voices conference in late 2024, he said only that he was "building for the long term" and that "a house is not a trend". The comment was met with applause, though whether from conviction or politeness was unclear.

What follows

The question now is whether Gucci, under De Sarno, can sustain both critical interest and commercial momentum. His work is deliberate, methodical, and—this is not a slight—undramatic. It does not lend itself to viral moments or instant canonisation. It asks for patience, a quality the fashion system does not often reward.

But there is something to be said for a designer who begins not with a manifesto but with a coat, who measures success not in headlines but in the way a lapel holds its line after a day of wear. De Sarno is not trying to rewrite Gucci's history. He is trying to make it wearable again. Whether that is enough remains to be seen. For now, the work continues. The shoulder drops another centimetre. The fitting room stays quiet.