The House of Gucci

by Sara G Forden

  Rodolfo, the youngest son of Guccio and Aida, showed no interest in working in the family business, even after his brothers and sisters were already helping behind the counter at their father’s shop on Via della Vigna Nuova. Rodolfo had other dreams. He wanted to act in films.

  “I wasn’t born to be a shopkeeper,” the young Rodolfo, whom his family called “Foffo,” protested to his father as the elder Gucci shook his head. “I want to work in the movies.”

  Guccio couldn’t understand where his youngest son had gotten such ideas and he tried to discourage him. One day in 1929, when Rodolfo was seventeen, his father sent him to Rome to deliver a package to an important client. The Italian director Mario Camerini spotted him in the lobby of Rome’s Hotel Plaza and invited the handsome young man to do a screen test. Shortly after, a telegram confirming the appointment arrived at the Gucci home in Florence. When Guccio read it, he blew up.

  “You are out of your mind!” he thundered at his son. “The film world is full of nutty people. You might get lucky and have your five minutes of fame but what happens when you are suddenly forgotten and never work again?”

  Guccio realized that Rodolfo was determined and allowed him to go to Rome to shoot the screen test, which was successful. At the time, the young Rodolfo still wore short pants, as was customary for boys in those days; he had to borrow a pair of long pants from his older brother Aldo for the occasion. Camerini liked Rodolfo and gave him a role in Rotaie, one of the masterpieces of early Italian cinema, a dramatic story about two young lovers who decide to commit suicide in a cheap hotel along the railroad tracks. Rodolfo had a sensitive and expressive face, perfect for the stylized cinema of the time. After Rotaie, he became best known for his comical roles, in which his contorted expressions and laughable antics reminded viewers of Charlie Chaplin. He used Maurizio D’Ancora as his screen name. None of Rodolfo’s later films had quite the same success, although he did have a part in Finalmente Soli alongside the young Italian actress Anna Magnani, with whom he is said to have had a love affair.

  During the shooting of one of his early films, Rodolfo noticed a bubbly blond actress on the set who played a minor part. Vivacious and unconventionally free-spirited for her time, she was Alessandra Winklehaussen, known professionally as Sandra Ravel. Alessandra’s German father was a chemical-plant worker; her mother was from the Ratti family near Lugano on the northern bank of Lake Lugano in the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland. Shortly after she had caught Rodolfo’s eye, Alessandra played opposite him in Together in the Dark, an early talkie about an adventurous young starlet who enters the wrong hotel room by mistake and slips into bed next to Rodolfo—who in life, as in the movie, had fallen head over heels in love with her. Their filmed encounter between the sheets led to off-screen love. Alessandra and Rodolfo married in 1944 in a romantic ceremony in Venice. Rodolfo had the wedding filmed, complete with footage of the young couple skimming the waters of the lagoon in a gondola and toasting happily at the reception dinner. When their son was born on September 26, 1948, they named him Maurizio in honor of Rodolfo’s nom de cinema.

  In 1935, when Rodolfo was still developing his film career with no thought of ever joining the family business, Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. While far from Italian shores, this event nonetheless greatly affected the Gucci business. The League of Nations imposed an international trade embargo on Italy. As fifty-two countries refused to sell their products to the nation, Guccio could no longer import the fine leathers and other materials he needed to make his exclusive bags and luggage. Terrified that his small venture would collapse as had his father’s straw hat business years earlier, according to some accounts, Guccio geared up the factory to make shoes for the Italian army in order to keep operating.

  Guccio also came up with alternatives, as did other Italian entrepreneurs, such as his neighbor, Salvatore Ferragamo, who created some of his most remarkable shoes during the darkest years of the embargo. Ferragamo didn’t overlook any possibility, cunningly using cork, raffia, even cellophane from candy wrappers to make shoes. The Guccis sourced as much leather as they could from within Italy and began using cuoio grasso from a local tannery in Santa Croce. Veal calves specially reared in the lush Val di Chiana were fed in their stalls to avoid abrasions on their hides. Their skins were then cured on the outside and treated with fishbone grease. The treatment made the skins soft, smooth, and supple; scratches miraculously disappeared with the swipe of a finger. Cuoio grasso soon became a Gucci trademark. Guccio also introduced other materials, such as raffia, wicker, and wood, into the products in order to reduce the leather content to a minimum. He made bags out of fabric with leather trim. He ordered a specially woven canapa, or hemp, from Naples. Using this fabric, the Guccis developed a line of sturdy, lightweight, and recognizable luggage that quickly became one of their most successful products. Guccio developed the firm’s first signature print—a precursor to the famous double-G print—with a series of small connecting diamonds printed in dark brown across the natural tan background. The print looked the same any way one turned the fabric. Guccio had also begun to make other items besides the bags and luggage that were the core of his business. He discovered that smaller leather accessories such as belts and wallets generated a nice income by bringing into his shop people who weren’t looking for large items.

  In the same period, Aldo traveled around Italy and parts of Europe to test interest in the business. The positive response he met first in Rome, then in France, Switzerland, and England, convinced him that having a shop only in Florence limited Gucci potential. If so many customers were coming to Gucci, why not take Gucci to them? He tried to persuade his father to open shops in other cities.

  Guccio would have none of it. “What about the risk? Think of the enormous investment. Where are we going to get the money? Go to the bank and ask them if they will finance you!”

  During their family battles Guccio shot down Aldo’s every idea, but behind his back he went to their bankers and told them that he backed Aldo’s plan.

  Aldo finally got his way. On September 1, 1938, just twelve months before the outbreak of World War II, Gucci opened its doors in Rome on the elegant Via Condotti at number 21, in a historical building called Palazzo Negri. At that time, the only other names on Via Condotti were the exclusive jeweler Bulgari, and a maker of fine shirts, Enrico Cucci, whose clients included Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, and the Italian royal family, the House of Savoy.

  Long before the days of la dolce vita, Aldo had identified Italy’s capital city as one of the most popular playgrounds of the world’s elite. While his father shook his head over the bills, Aldo insisted that no expense could be spared to make the Gucci shop a magnet for wealthy and cultivated tourists. The store occupied two floors and had double glass doors and ivory handles carved in the shape of olives stacked one on top of the other.

  “The handles were copied from the doors of the shop in Via della Vigna Nuova, and were one of the first symbols of Gucci,” recalled Aldo’s third son, Roberto.

  Massive glass-covered mahogany cases displayed the Gucci products; handbags and accessories downstairs, gift items and luggage upstairs. Rich-looking wine-colored linoleum covered the ground floor, while carpeting of the same color ran up the stairs and along a corridor leading to the first-floor sales area. Aldo moved to Rome with Olwen and the children, renting an apartment on the second and third floors above the shop. Having initially taken the boys to her home in England, Olwen decided to bring them back to Italy when the war broke out. The Allies treated Rome as an open city and didn’t bomb it at first. While Aldo managed to keep the shop open and profitable, the boys went to a school run by Irish nuns and Olwen worked with a group of Irish priests, helping Allied prisoners escape. In the final weeks, however, Allied planes began bombing railway yards on the outskirts of the city. Aldo moved Olwen and the boys out into the country, but was forced to return to Rome when city administrators ordered shopkeepers to keep their doors open for business.


  During the war, the Gucci family scattered. Ugo, who had participated in the Fascists’ march on Rome in 1922, became a Fascist administrator in Tuscany. Rodolfo signed up with the armed forces entertainment unit and moved with the troops, playing the comedy roles of his early silent films and talkies, while Vasco, after a short period of military service, had been allowed to return to the factory in Florence, where he oversaw shoe production for the war effort.

  At the end of the war, Olwen was given a special citation for her work. Loyal to her Italian family as well, when she learned that Ugo had been captured and was being held prisoner in Terni by the British army, she used her connections first to plead for better treatment for her brother-in-law, and later for his release. She also went to Venice with Aldo to rescue Rodolfo, who had been stranded with the troops after Italy’s capitulation.

  It took time for the country to rebuild. The factory along Lungarno Guicciardini had been cut off as departing Germans blew up the Florentine bridges, including Michelangelo’s Santa Trinitá. The family began to look for a new site to resume its production of leather goods. In the meantime, Guccio, terrified that Ugo’s position within the Fascist Party would prompt the new, democratic Italian government to sequester Ugo’s shares in the company as a penalty for his wartime activities, sat down with his adopted son one day and offered him land and a significant sum of money in exchange for his shares. Ugo accepted and went his own way, founding a leather workshop in Bologna where he crafted fine leather bags and accessories for the ladies of that city, in addition to supplying his products to the family business.

  Although Rodolfo had thrived on the acting life, the film industry changed dramatically after the war. Early talkies had superceded silent films and the new Italian realist directors—Rossellini, Visconti, and Fellini—weren’t looking for the stylized actors of their predecessors, so the young Gucci soon realized that the big parts and good scripts weren’t coming his way. With a wife and a young son to support, Rodolfo—at Alessandra’s insistence—asked his father if he could come back to the family business. Aldo, an advocate of the family-run business from the beginning, urged his father to welcome Rodolfo back. As the business expanded, he and Guccio needed more help. Guccio initially put Rodolfo to work in the Via del Parione store. Rodolfo proved an instant success with the ladies, who were thrilled to discover such a gracious and handsome salesman in the Gucci shop.

  “But aren’t you Maurizio D’Ancora? You look just like him!” some of the boldest customers would ask him curiously.

  “No, madam, my name is Rodolfo Gucci,” he would answer with a gallant bow and a delighted twinkle in his eye.

  For a year, Guccio observed his son and was pleased with his work. Dedicated, determined, and attentive to the problems of the business, Rodolfo proved his reliability. In 1951, Guccio invited the young couple to move to Milan to manage the new Gucci store on Via Monte Napoleone. Running between Via Alessandro Manzoni and Corso Matteotti in downtown Milan, Via Monte Napoleone was Milan’s principal shopping avenue, lined with fine jewelers, tailors, and leathermakers, among other establishments, putting it on a level with Via Tornabuoni in Florence or Via Condotti in Rome. The new shop also began to cater to Milan’s literary and artistic crowd, which gathered just around the corner at the Trattoria Bagutta, a popular meeting place.

  Meanwhile, Aldo’s gamble on opening in Rome was paying off. American and British troops who were there after the war bought up Gucci’s handcrafted leather bags, belts, and wallets, which were just the kind of souvenirs they were looking for. Particularly successful were suitcases called “suiters,” covered with the Gucci canapa and fitted inside with hangers and used by American and British officers to transport their uniforms. At first, business in Florence lagged behind that of Rome, but later caught up as American tourists flooded to Italy to visit its historical and cultural monuments, as well as to spend their abundant dollars in its elegant shops. Soon Gucci’s problem was keeping up production in pace with demand. In 1953, Guccio opened another workshop in the Oltrarno district across the river. Housed in a historic building in Via delle Caldaie, this workshop continued to be an important site for Gucci production well into the 1970s.

  Via delle Caldaie, named for the huge vats used in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to die wool, ran south from Piazza Santo Spirito. The palazzo Guccio bought had originally been a shop selling felt and wool fabric until a merchant family named Biuzzi built a spacious palace, Casa Grande, on the site in the late 1500s. In 1642, the building was acquired by the cardinal and then archbishop of Florence, Francesco de’Nerli, whom Dante mentions in his Divine Comedy. During the next two centuries, the palace figured in various accounts of diplomacy. After 1800, several leading Florentine families owned the property until Guccio Gucci bought it in 1953. Old frescoes covered many of the rooms; the most elaborate crept up the walls and across the ceiling of the large first-floor rooms where Gucci’s artisans cut and stitched the smooth cuoio grasso into graceful bags. Downstairs, under the arched ceilings of the ground-floor halls, other artisans made luggage.

  As demand grew, more young artisans were hired and apprenticed to Gucci’s senior leatherworkers, all under the watchful eye of the capo operaio, or head artisan. Each team, consisting of a junior apprentice and seasoned expert, was assigned to a workbench, or banco, and each artisan was issued a pin bearing the Gucci seal and an identification number—the same number on the time card he punched mornings and evenings. By the time Gucci opened a modern factory on the outskirts of Florence in 1971, the number of workers had more than doubled to 130.

  The Tuscan leatherworkers saw Gucci as the ultimate employer, who offered cradle-to-grave security no matter what the ups and downs of the market.

  “It was like getting a government job,” said Carlo Bacci, who started working in Via delle Caldaie as a young apprentice in 1960. “Once you got in at Gucci you knew you were set for life,” he explained in his warm, lilting Tuscan accent. “Other firms would send people home when work was scarce, but at Gucci you had security,” Bacci said. “Gucci just kept producing; they knew they could always sell what they had.” After working for more than eleven years at Via delle Caldaie, Bacci opened his own leather-working company, as did other Gucci artisans, and still supplies Gucci today.

  “We reported to work every morning between eight and eight-thirty,” recalled Dante Ferrari, another longtime Gucci employee. “The coffee break was at ten,” he recalled, “if the capo operaio saw you fumble for a panino under the bench, he would report you! Not only because you were wasting time, but because your hands could get greasy and ruin the leather!”

  The leatherworkers specialized in either preparing the hides or assembling the bags. In those days, preparing the hides also meant scraping down the inside of the precious skins, which often arrived with animal tissue still clinging to them. Other artisans cut out the pieces and still others pressed down the edges with a special tool, making the seams thinner and easier to stitch together, an operation called scarnitura.

  The true artists, however, were the artisans who assembled the bags. Each artisan was responsible for completing an entire bag, from start to finish, a task that sometimes involved putting together one hundred different pieces and took an average of ten hours.

  “Each workman was responsible for what he did and his number went into each bag—if there was some defect, they would go back to him. It wasn’t like an assembly line where someone did the pockets and someone else did the sleeves,” explained Ferrari, who kept a collection of black, cardboard-bound notebooks in which he painstakingly sketched and numbered each handbag style as it was created in order to keep a record.

  “Aside from the sewing machines, all you needed was a table, a good pair of hands, and a good brain,” said Ferrari.

  Most of the time, the designs for the bags came from the various members of the Gucci family, who also encouraged the artisans to develop new styles themselves, with family supervision an
d approval.

  The bamboo-handle bag, which was simply called by its code number, 0633, probably came into being this way. Although there is no longer a record of exactly when the bag was developed and by whom, fashion historian Aurora Fiorentini, who has helped create a Gucci archive, dates it around 1947. The introduction of bamboo came with the use of new materials under the prewar trade embargo. Some think the first “bamboo bag” was initially developed by Aldo and the capo operaio of that time, with a leather handle, possibly based on a bag Aldo brought back from one of his trips to London. The distinctive shape of the bag was inspired by the side of a saddle. Its rigid shape—more in the style of a small case, unlike the softer, less constructed bags Gucci had produced up to then—also distinguished it. The bamboo, shaped by hand over a hot flame, gave Gucci products a distinctive, sporty look. A few years later, in Roberto Rossellini’s 1953 Viaggio in Italia, a young Ingrid Bergman carries a Gucci bamboo-handle bag and Gucci umbrella.

  The Guccis established a friendly, personal relationship with the artisans who worked for them and spent time in the workshop, calling the workers by name, jovially slapping the backs of the old master craftsmen, inquiring about their families.

  “We knew each worker by name and we knew about their children, their problems, their joys,” said Roberto Gucci. “If they needed help to buy a car or put a down payment on a house—they came to us. After all, we all ate from the same plate—though obviously some of us had bigger spoons than others,” he added sheepishly.

  Vasco Gucci, who became responsible for the factory, jaunted around Florence on a small motor scooter called the Motom that was popular at the time. The workers in Via delle Caldaie knew when he was coming as the buzz and sputter of his scooter bounced off the buildings closely facing each other in the narrow street.

  “‘Uffa! Eccolo arrivato!’ we used to say,” recalled Ferrari. “Vasco was like a psychologist, he could really sense if you were interested in what you were doing or not!”