The Gucci atelier in Florence occupies a former convent
The Gucci atelier in Florence occupies a former convent. Stone floors, vaulted ceilings, north light through tall windows. On a Tuesday morning in March, a woman named Lucia Moretti sits at a wooden bench, turning a piece of calfskin inside out with the precision of someone who has done this roughly twelve thousand times. She is working on a Horsebit loafer — not the finished article, but the upper, which she will hand to another artisan who will attach the sole. Moretti has been with Gucci for thirty-one years. Her name does not appear on the box.
This is not unusual. Fashion trades on names — creative directors, brand founders, the occasional muse — but the people who cut, stitch, and burnish the objects we associate with those names remain, by design, anonymous. Gucci is no exception. The house employs roughly four thousand artisans across its Italian workshops, most of them in Tuscany, and until recently the company made little effort to introduce them to the public. That has begun to change, not out of altruism but because luxury consumers increasingly want to know who made their bag and how. Gucci has responded with a series of short films and atelier visits, gestures that feel both genuine and strategic. Either way, they offer a glimpse behind the curtain.
L'apprentissage
Moretti grew up in Scandicci, a town west of Florence known for leather work. Her mother sewed linings at a small factory. Her father repaired shoes. At sixteen, Moretti enrolled in a technical school that taught pattern-making and hand-stitching, the kind of programme that has largely disappeared in France but persists in certain pockets of Italy. She graduated in 1992, the year Tom Ford arrived at Gucci, though she would not meet him for another decade. Her first job was at a workshop that made belts for various maisons. The pay was modest. The work was repetitive. She stayed for two years, then applied to Gucci.
The interview took place in a room with no windows. A senior artisan named Carlo Benvenuti handed her a piece of leather, a needle, and a spool of waxed thread, then asked her to demonstrate a saddle stitch. She had done this hundreds of times in school, but her hands shook. Benvenuti watched in silence. When she finished, he examined the seam, said nothing, and left the room. She assumed she had failed. Three days later, Gucci offered her a position in the small leather goods atelier. She has been there ever since.
La pièce
The Horsebit loafer is Gucci's oldest signature, introduced in 1953 by Aldo Gucci, who ran the company after his father Guccio died. The design borrows from equestrian tack — a metal snaffle bit set across the vamp — and became a staple of the transatlantic leisure class. The loafer entered the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1985. It has been reissued, revised, and reinterpreted more times than anyone at the house cares to count. The current version, overseen by creative director Sabato De Sarno, hews closely to the original: almond toe, stacked leather heel, that unmistakable gold-toned bit.
Moretti works on the upper assembly. She receives pre-cut panels of calfskin — vamp, quarter, tongue — and stitches them together by hand using a curved needle and a technique called point sellier, the same stitch Hermès uses for its bags. Each upper takes roughly forty minutes. She completes eight to ten pairs a day, depending on the leather. If the skin is particularly supple, the work goes faster. If it is stiff or grainy, she must slow down to avoid puckering. Once the upper is assembled, it moves to another artisan who shapes it over a wooden last, then to a third who attaches the sole. The entire process involves seven people and takes, on average, three hours per pair.
Moretti has never met Sabato De Sarno. She has never been to a Gucci runway show. She does not own a pair of Horsebit loafers — they retail for 920 euros, roughly two weeks of her salary — but she owns a Gucci wallet, a gift from the company after twenty-five years of service. She keeps it in her bag, which is not Gucci.
Les autres mains
In the handbag atelier, an hour north in the town of Prato, a man named Filippo Conti oversees the construction of the Jackie 1961, the shoulder bag named after Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who carried an earlier version in the Seventies. Conti is forty-three. He joined Gucci in 2005, after apprenticing at a small workshop that made bags for Bottega Veneta. His job is to attach the piston clasp, a small cylindrical closure that requires a steady hand and a jeweller's patience. The clasp must align perfectly with the leather flap, or the bag will not close flush. If Conti is off by even a millimetre, the bag is rejected. He estimates his error rate at less than one percent.
Conti works alone at a bench near the back of the atelier. He prefers it that way. The room is loud — thirty artisans cutting, gluing, stitching — but he has learned to tune it out. He listens to the radio, usually a station that plays Eighties rock. When I ask if he finds the work monotonous, he shrugs. "It is the same motion, yes. But every piece of leather is different. You adjust." He does not elaborate.
In the same atelier, a woman named Elena Ricci applies the hand-painted edges to the Dionysus bag, the top-handle style with the tiger-head clasp. Ricci trained as a miniaturist — she spent five years restoring frescoes in Siena — before switching to leather goods. The work is similar, she says. Both require a fine brush, a steady hand, and the ability to repeat a gesture without variation. She applies four coats of edge paint to each bag, sanding between layers. The process takes ninety minutes. The paint is custom-mixed to match the leather, a formula that Gucci guards closely. Ricci knows the recipe but is not permitted to discuss it.
Ce qui reste
Gucci's decision to spotlight its artisans is part of a broader shift in luxury marketing. Hermès has done this for years, as has Brunello Cucinelli. Bottega Veneta under Matthieu Blazy has made craft the centre of its identity. Gucci, by contrast, spent much of the past two decades emphasising spectacle — the Alessandro Michele era was many things, but it was not about restraint. De Sarno's arrival in 2023 signalled a return to the house codes: leather, hardware, a certain Florentine sobriety. Highlighting the artisans fits that narrative.
Whether it changes anything for the artisans themselves is less clear. Moretti's wages have not increased since the films began circulating. Conti still works a forty-hour week. Ricci still cannot discuss the edge-paint formula. The work remains the work. What has changed is the visibility, and perhaps the pride. When I ask Moretti if she feels recognised, she pauses. "I am proud of what I make," she says. "But recognition is not why I do this. I do it because I know how."
That knowledge, accumulated over decades, is what Gucci relies on. The house can hire new designers, shift creative direction, reposition itself in the market. But it cannot replicate thirty-one years of muscle memory, the ability to feel when a stitch is too tight or a leather panel will buckle under tension. That belongs to Moretti, to Conti, to Ricci, and to the thousands of other artisans whose names you will never see on a box. They are the reason a Horsebit loafer feels the way it does when you slip it on, the reason a Jackie bag closes with that particular click. They are, in the most literal sense, the hands behind the house.
And they will be there long after the next creative director arrives.
