Fashion Definitions — fashion history, brands and industry terms from Apparel Search
Gucci, or the House of Gucci, is an Italian haute couture establishment founded by Guccio Gucci (1881-1953) in Florence in 1921. Like many other high-fashion companies, Gucci began as a small, family-owned saddlery and leather goods store, and Guccio opened his first boutique in Florence in 1921.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Using the capital obtained from the PPR issue, the Group has steadily expanded beyond just the Gucci brand through a series of takeovers. As of 2004, the Gucci Group maintained whole or partial interests in the following companies or brands:
Gucci (100% share of ownership, also watches 100%)
Yves Saint Laurent (100%, also perfume brand 100% and watches brand 100%)
Sergio Rossi (70%)
Bottega Veneta (78.5%)
Alexander McQueen (51%, also perfume brand 100%)
Stella McCartney (50%, also perfume brand 100%)
Balenciaga (91%)
Roger & Gallet
Boucheron (also jewelry and watches)
Van Cleef & Arpels
| The above article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/gucci 1/7/06 |
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From Saddlery to Signature ProductsGucci began as a small, family-owned saddlery and leather goods store, and its best-known products grew out of that craft base. Guccio Gucci, the son of an Italian merchant from the country's northern manufacturing region, travelled as a young man to Paris and London, where he gained an appreciation of cosmopolitan culture, sophistication and aesthetics. The bamboo handle handbag of 1947 is still a company mainstay, the trademark striped webbing of the 1950s was derived from the saddle girth, and the suede moccasin carried a metal bit. Later signatures followed the same pattern of a recognisable device repeated across products: the famous GG logo from Guccio Gucci's initials, the Flora silk scarf worn prominently by Grace Kelly, and the Jackie O shoulder bag made famous by Jackie Kennedy. Family Control, Expansion and DeclineAfter Guccio's death in 1953, Aldo helped lead the company to international prominence, opening the first boutiques in London, Paris and New York, and the company targeted the Far East in the late 1960s with stores in Hong Kong and Tokyo. The same family structure also produced ferocious infighting over inheritances, stock holdings and day-to-day operations. By the late 1970s a series of business decisions and family quarrels brought the company to the verge of bankruptcy; the Gucci Accessories Collection of 1979 spread the once-exclusive brand to over a thousand stores in the United States alone, counterfeiters flooded the market with cheap knockoffs, and by the 1980s the name had lost much of its appeal. Rodolfo's death in 1983 left his 50 percent stake to his son Maurizio, and for the first time in years one man was at the helm. The Ford Era and the Group It BuiltA turnaround devised in the late 1980s made Gucci one of the world's most influential fashion houses. Dawn Mello joined as creative director in 1989, Domenico De Sole led Gucci America, and a young designer named Tom Ford was hired in 1990. After Maurizio sold his shares to Investcorp in August 1993, the creative directorship went to Ford, then just 32, and De Sole, elevated to CEO, backed Ford's new image. The 1995 ready-to-wear line, Madonna's head-to-toe Gucci appearance at the MTV Video Music Awards, Gwyneth Paltrow's red crushed velvet tuxedo and the celebrity following that followed returned Gucci to the top of the industry. Gucci Group became a publicly traded company in 1995, survived LVMH's 1999 creeping takeover attempt after it purchased 34.4 percent of the stock, and expanded beyond the Gucci brand into houses including Yves Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta, Alexander McQueen and Balenciaga. Ford and De Sole left after a failed contract renewal with PPR in 2003. Common QuestionsWhen and where was Gucci founded?Gucci was founded by Guccio Gucci in Florence in 1921. Gucci opened his first boutique in the family's native Florence that year and quickly built a reputation for quality, hiring the best craftsmen he could find to work in his atelier. Which products did Guccio Gucci design?In 1947, Gucci introduced the bamboo handle handbag, which is still a company mainstay. During the 1950s, Gucci also developed the trademark striped webbing, derived from the saddle girth, and the suede moccasin with a metal bit. What revived Gucci in the 1990s?Tom Ford's 1995 ready-to-wear line for Gucci dazzled fashion critics, recalling the jet-set clientele of the 1970s with unbuttoned silk shirts and tight velvet hip-huggers, and a celebrity following propelled Gucci back to the top of the industry. More to Explore
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