The Gucci Family's Glory and Discord — The Craftsman's Spirit of Florence

At the beginning of the twentieth century, in the ancient Italian city of Florence, the skills of artisans handed down since the Renaissance were still alive. The handwork of tanning, stitching, and polishing leather was the pride of the city itself. To such a city a young man returned from London. He was a man who, while working at a luxury hotel, had watched up close what bags other nations’ wealthy carried and what kind of life they held to be good. His name was ‘Guccio Gucci’. The small leather-goods shop he opened in his hometown in 1921 was the very starting point of an Italian luxury that would later sweep the world. Yet that story would, along with its glory, come to harbor the shadow of family discord as well.

The Shop Opened by a Young Man Back from London

‘Guccio Gucci’ is said to have had the experience of working in his youth at a luxury hotel in London. Starting from dishwashing and serving guests as a bellboy, he observed almost daily what bags royalty, nobility, and the wealthy carried on their travels, and on what goods they spared no money. He cultivated an ‘eye’ for first-class living right there on the floor of service.

Returning to Florence, in 1921 he opened a shop dealing in leather goods and travel bags. This city had both fine leather and the skilled artisans to fashion it. Guccio crossed Florence’s sure handwork with the refined taste he had absorbed in London, and began to make leather goods of dignity. From his experience handling harness and riding equipment, motifs derived from saddlery — bits, stirrups, the clasps that join leather — were naturally taken into his designs. The ‘horsebit’ hardware that would later become a symbol of Gucci is said to have been born precisely from this memory of saddlery.

Around the time of the Second World War there were periods when materials, leather among them, were hard to obtain. Born out of that constraint, so it is said, was the ‘bamboo bag’, which used bamboo bent by heat for its handle. This bag, said to have appeared around 1947, is known as one example of turning the adversity of material scarcity into an inventive design. Drawing beauty out of scarcity — here was crystallized a wisdom befitting Florence, the city of artisans.

To the World, and into the Family’s Whirlpool

When the founder Guccio passed away in 1953, the business was handed down to his sons. The one said to have most actively pursued overseas expansion was one of the sons, Aldo Gucci. Opening shops in major cities such as New York, London, and Paris, Gucci’s red-and-green stripe and saddlery motifs spread as international signs evoking travel and splendor. The small Florence leather shop, over a single generation, grew into a brand the world knew.

Yet the larger the brand grew, the more tension ran through the relationships of the family that supported it. Over questions of management policy, the distribution of profits, and who would lead the brand and how, conflict is said to have arisen within the family, as a number of reports and records relate. From the 1970s into the 1980s, while goods bearing the brand’s name were rolled out widely, confusion over their management and over the family’s unity came to be pointed out as well. Glory and discord often stood side by side within the very same house.

Leaving the Hands of the Founding Family

Before long, in the late 1980s outside capital entered the management, and in the 1990s the family is reported to have withdrawn from the front stage of management. Leaving the hands of the founding family, Gucci began to walk the road of recovery under professional managers. From a brand the family ‘holds’ to a brand an organization ‘runs’. This was also a turning point at which a luxury that had depended on the founder’s individuality and the bonds of family was transforming into a modern enterprise.

It should be noted that, regarding this family, painful events are also recounted in later years and have become the subject of films and the like; but this article focuses on the brand’s course and refrains from entering into the details of private events. To separate the publicly known facts one can speak of from the territory before which one should keep a respectful silence — this, too, is a stance that must not be forgotten when dealing with the history of a brand.

Gucci, which began from a single shop in Florence, raised an artisan’s handwork into an international brand, and at the same time embodied the difficulty inherent in the form of family management. The joy of creating, and the weight of carrying it on. This family’s story teaches us both. Around that same time, meanwhile, Paris, wounded by war, was striving once more to recover its splendor. On the next stage, a single dress will herald the opening of fashion’s golden age.