Gucci, or the
House of Gucci, is an Italian
haute couture establishment.
It was founded by
Guccio Gucci (1881-1953) in Florence in 1921.
History of the Gucci house
Like many other high-fashion companies,
Gucci began as a small, family-owned saddlery
and leather goods store. Guccio
Gucci
was the son of an Italian merchant from
the country's northern manufacturing region.
As a young man, he travelled to Paris and
London, where he "gained an appreciation
of cosmopolitan culture, sophistication,
and aesthetics." Gucci opened his first
boutique in the family's native Florence
in 1921 and quickly built a reputation for
quality, hiring the best craftsmen he could
find to work in his atelier. In 1938, Gucci
expanded and a boutique was opened in Rome.
Guccio was responsible for designing many
of the company's most notable products.
In 1947, Gucci introduced the bamboo handle
handbag, which is still a company mainstay.
During the 1950s, Gucci also developed the
trademark striped webbing, which was derived
from the saddle girth, and the
suede
moccasin
with a metal bit.
Guccio and his wife Aida Calvelli had
a large family, six children in all, though
only his sons
Vasco, Aldo, Ugo, and Rodolfo
would play a role in leading the company.
After Guccio's death in 1953, Aldo helped
lead the company to a position of international
prominence, opening the company's first
boutiques in London, Paris and New York.
Even in Gucci's fledgling years, the family
was notorious for its ferocious infighting.
Disputes regarding inheritances, stock holdings,
and day-to-day operations of the stores
often divided the family and led to alliances.
As the Gucci expanded overseas, board meetings
about the company's future often ended with
tempers flaring and luggage and purses flying.
Gucci targeted the Far East for further
expansion in the late 1960s, opening stores
in Hong Kong and Tokyo. At that time, the
company also developed its famous GG
logo (Guccio Gucci's initials), the Flora
silk scarf (worn prominently by Hollywood
actress
Grace Kelly), and the
Jackie O shoulder bag, made famous by
Jackie Kennedy, the wife of U.S. President
John F. Kennedy.
Gucci remained one of the premier luxury
goods establishments in the world until
the late 1970s, when a series of disastrous
business decisions and family quarrels brought
the company to the verge of bankruptcy.
At the time, brothers Aldo and Rodolfo controlled
equal 50% shares of the company, though
Aldo felt that his brother contributed less
to the company than he and his sons did.
In 1979, Aldo developed the Gucci Accessories
Collection, or GAC, intended to bolster
the sales for the Gucci Parfums sector,
which his sons controlled. GAC consisted
of small accessories, such as cosmetic bags,
lighters, and pens, which were priced at
considerably lower points than the other
items in the company's accessories catalogue.
Aldo relegated control of Parfums to his
son Roberto in an effort to weaken Rodolfo's
control of the overall operations of the
company.Though the Gucci Accessories
Collection was well received, it proved
to be the destabilizing force that brought
the Gucci dynasty crashing down. Within
a few years, the Parfums division began
outselling the Accessories division. The
newly-founded wholesaling business had brought
the once-exclusive brand to over a thousand
stores in the United States alone with the
GAC line, deteriorating the brand's standing
with fashionable customers. "In the
1960s and 1970s," writes
Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, "Gucci
had been at the pinnacle of chic, thanks
to icons such as
Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, and Jacqueline
Onassis. But by the 1980s, Gucci had lost
its appeal, becoming a tacky airport brand."
It didn't take long before counterfeiters
ravaged the company's pomp by flooding the
market with cheap knockoffs, further tarnishing
the Gucci name. Meanwhile, infighting was
taking its toll on the operations of the
company back in Italy: Rodolfo and Aldo
squabbled over the Parfums division, of
which Rodolfo controlled a meager 20% stake.
By the mid-1980s, when Aldo was convicted
of tax evasion in the United States by the
testimony of his own son, the outrageous
headlines of gossip magazines generated
as much publicity for Gucci as its designs.
Rodolfo's death in 1983 caused a major
shakeup in the company when he left his
50% stake in Gucci to his son,
Maurizio Gucci. Maurizio allied with
Aldo's son Paolo to gain control of the
Board of Directors and established the Gucci
Licensing division in the Netherlands for
tax purposes. (This action would later have
a drastic impact on the outcome of the company's
dispute with the world's largest luxury
goods company,
LVMH Moét Hennessy Louis Vuitton.) Following
the decision, the rest of the family left
the company and, for the first time in years,
one man was at the helm of Gucci. Maurizio
sought to bury the fighting that had torn
the company and his family apart and turned
to talent outside of the company for Gucci's
future.
Corporate Gucci
A turnaround of the company
devised in the late 1980s
made Gucci one of the world's
most influential fashion
houses and a highly profitable
business operation. The
Gucci brand is considered
one of the
most frequently mentioned
brands. The firm was
named "European Company
of the Year 1998" by
the
European Business Press
Federation for its economic
and financial performance,
strategic vision as well
as management quality.
New Management
In 1989, Maurizio managed
to persuade
Dawn Mello, whose revival of
New York's Bergdorf Goodman in the 1970s
made her a star in the retail business, to join the newly-formed Gucci Group as
creative director. At the helm of Gucci America was Domenico De Sole, a former
lawyer who helped oversee Maurizio's takeover of the company and the purchase of
the company's remaining shares by Investcorp, a Bahrain-b ased holding
company between 1987 and
1989. The last addition
to the creative team, which
already included designers
from
Geoffrey
Beene and
Calvin
Klein, was a
young designer named
Tom
Ford. Raised
in Texas and
New Mexico, he had been
interested in fashion since
his early teens but only
decided to pursue a career
as a designer after dropping
out of
Parsons School of Design
in 1986 as an architecture
major. Dawn Mello hired
Ford in 1990 at the urging
of his partner, writer and
editor
Richard Buckley.
Fashion Industry B2B
Example
of articles about Gucci :
Gucci Fall Collection 2009 at Neiman Marcus
In the early 1990s, Gucci underwent what
is now recognized as the poorest time in
the company's history. Maurizio riled distributors,
Investcorp shareholders, and executives
at Gucci America by drastically reining
in on the sales of the Gucci Accessories
Collection, which in the United States alone
generated $110 million in revenue every
year. The company's new accessories failed
to pick up the slack, and for the next three
years the company experienced heavy losses
and teetered on the edge of bankruptcy.
Maurizio was a charming man who passionately
loved his family's business, but after four
years most of the company's senior managers
agreed that he was incapable of running
the company. His management had had an adverse
effect on the desirability of the brand,
product quality, and distribution control.
He was forced to sell his shares in the
company to Investcorp in August of 1993.
Dawn Mello returned to her job at Bergdorf
Goodman less than a year after Maurizio's
departure, and the position of creative
director went to Tom Ford, then just 32
years old. Ford had worked for years under
the uninspiring direction of Maurizio and
Mellow and wanted to take the company's
image in a new direction. De Sole, who had
been elevated to CEO, realized that if Gucci
was to become a profitable company, it would
require a new image, and so he agreed to
pursue Ford's vision.
Tom Ford
Ford had long been an avid follower of
two of America's top designers,
Ralph Lauren
and
Calvin Klein.
Klein, much like Ford, was a 'superstar
designer,
the exemplar of his own brand: stylish,
suave, and modern. His scandalous advertisements
made the brand synonymous with eternal youth
and the mystery of adolescent sexuality.
Lauren, as Ford described, was
the only designer to really create an entire
world
you know exactly what his people look like,
what their houses look like, what kind of
cars the drive,
a mantra he would adopt at Gucci years later.
But where Ralph Lauren embodied the
WASP culture of New England, Ford created
a lifestyle brand for the hedonistic, urban-dwelling
fashionistas who emblemized the brand in
years past.
Ford's 1995 ready-to-wear line for Gucci
dazzled fashion critics. The collection
was reminiscent of the jet-set clientele
that created a buzz around the label in
the 1970s, with its unbuttoned silk shirts
and tight velvet hip-huggers. "It was
hot! It was sex!" Joan Kaner, fashion
director for
Neiman Marcus, exclaimed. "The
girls looked like they had just stepped
off someone's private jet. You just knew
that wearing those clothes would make you
look like you were living on the edge
doing it and having it all!"
While Ford's 1995 ready-to-wear line
was met with rave reviews by industry insiders,
it was the celebrity following that would
propel Gucci back to the top of the industry.
In 1995,
Madonna appeared at the
MTV
Video Music Awards to collect an award
for
Take A Bow
in head-to-toe Gucci. Soon thereafter,
Gwenyth Paltrow graced the red carpet
in the season's signature look, a red crushed
velvet tuxedo with an unbuttoned blue dress
shirt, and British actress
Elizabeth Hurley donned that season's
patent leather spiked boots to a movie premiere.
Celebrities, fashion models, and wealthy
young patrons around the world were clamoring
for pieces from the new collection. In the
years that would follow, nearly every major
celebrity in
Hollywood came to Ford for formalwear
on awards night, and celebrity sightings
once again became commonplace in the company's
boutiques.
Gucci's warm reception among the glitterati
had an unintended side effect: the elevation
of Tom Ford from designer to sex symbol.
Practically overnight, Ford became one of
the most celebrated new stars in entertainment.
He graced the pages of entertainment and
fashion magazines alongside advertisements
that featured his company's sexy new look.
People Magazine called him one of the
50 most beautiful people of the year. The
defining characteristic of Ford's work was
what came to be known as the
Gucci sex factor.
His spring 1996 collection, which was reminiscent
of the flower child fashions of the early
and mid-1970s, continued Ford's signature
trend of sky-high hemlines and plunging
necklines. By his third collection, it became
clear that the highly suggestive advertisements
and scanty clothing were not passing fads
at the generations-old fashion house, but
rather the attribute that would set Gucci
apart from its competitors.
Gucci Group became a publicly traded
company in 1995, incorporated in the Netherlands,
and listing on the New York and
Amsterdam Stock Exchanges. It issued
further shares in 1996.
LVMH Takeover Attempt
In the late 1990s, Gucci became mired
in a standoff with one of fashion's biggest
conglomerates,
LVMH Moét Hennessy Louis Vuitton. Just before Gucci
Group's IPO in 1995, Investcorp approached
LVMH chairman
Bernard Arnault with a proposition to
sell him the entire Gucci brand, including
its lucrative watch and fragrance divisions.
Arnault balked at the $500 million price
tag and was unsure that Gucci could ever
be revived. Four years later, he sorely
regretted that decision. Prada, in an effort
to replicate LVMH's success at consolidation,
had purchased a sizeable stake in Gucci
Group in an ill-fated attempt to take over
the company. Realizing that his company
didn't have the assets to execute the takeover,
Prada's
Patrizio Bertelli offered to sell the
shares to someone who could: Arnault. Arnault
jumped at the chance. In 1999, LVMH staged
an effort to acquire Gucci Group through
a creeping takeover, purchasing 34.4% of
the company's stock.
Ford Leaves Gucci
After a failed attempt at contract renewal
with PPR in 2003, Tom Ford and Domenico
de Sole decided to take their leave from
Gucci Group. Ford's last show for Gucci
returned to the roots of his first successful
collection: the culture of celebrity. Print
advertisements featured models in sleek,
simple gowns inspired by the glamour of
1920s silent film stars. Ford priced up
the ready-to-wear and used exotic fabrics
like alligator and boar hide. His collection
for Yves Saint Laurent followed the lead
of the previous season's Gucci women's wear,
with form fitting kimonos and Asian patterned
dresses, while the menswear collection featured
classic-looking tuxedos and smoking jackets.
The announcement of his departure led to
a complete presale of many items in New
York department stores, and waitlists for
his last accessories formed just days after
the collection showed in Milan. In 2005,
Tom Ford began designing a line of
cosmetics for
Estee Lauder, and planned to launch
his own line of ready-to-wear and accessories
under a Tom Ford label.
Fashion Definition
Italian Fashion
Designers
1550-1600
Fashion History
Designer Definition
(from U.S Department of Labor)
Clothing Definitions
Fashion
Accessories
Style
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