The House of Gucci

by Sara G Forden

  The workers came to have a love/hate relationship with the Gucci family. Proud and highly critical of their own work, they would nonetheless outdo themselves in order to hear a hearty “Bravo!” from Guccio, Aldo, Vasco, or Rodolfo.

  In the spring of 1949, Aldo, ever on the lookout for new opportunities, had gone to one of the first industry trade fairs in London. He spotted a stand featuring pigskin hides and was struck by their beautiful ginger color. He commissioned several skins from the tanner, a Mr. Holden from Scotland, asking him if he could have some of the pieces dyed in various colors, including blue and green.

  “The tanner said, ‘Well, my boy, we have never done this before, but if you want, we’ll try,’” Aldo later recalled. “He presented me with six skins in different shades, shaking his head and saying, ‘It’s up to you; we think they’re awful.’”

  According to family accounts, Mr. Holden was also the source of the brindle pigskin that became a famous Gucci trademark. As the story goes, the first spotted pigskin was actually a mistake. Something went wrong in the tanning process, marking the pigskins with darker, slightly raised spots.

  “Wait a minute, it looks new,” said Aldo, who ordered the skins made up into bags. Whether or not his decision was merely thrift, as some suggest, because Aldo was reluctant to throw the skins away, the decision created another signature look for the company that later proved a marvelous defense against counterfeits because it was difficult to reproduce. The pigskin became so crucial to the Gucci business that Aldo acquired the tannery outright in 1971.

  The postwar years marked Aldo’s rise within the Gucci business and the emergence of the ingenious marketing that made the Gucci name known worldwide. Guccio, growing older, wanted to consolidate the business in Florence. Reluctant to put all they had achieved at risk with Aldo’s far-reaching plans, he challenged his son’s ideas.

  Puffing irritably on his Havana cigar, Guccio would reach theatrically into his left pants pocket—he kept his pocket watch in the right one—and pull out an empty hand. “Do you have the money? If you have the money you can do what you want,” he would say.

  Nonetheless, Guccio privately acknowledged Aldo’s flair for the business. The Rome store flourished. Hollywood stars frolicked in the capital city, as portrayed in La Dolce Vita. The stars gave Gucci a new cachet, attracting still other customers. Slowly Guccio let Aldo have his way. While they still argued heatedly over Aldo’s ideas about expansion, privately Guccio backed him, again going to the banks to support his son’s plans.

  Meanwhile, Aldo began to look abroad to New York, London, and Paris. Why, he reasoned, wait for their customers to come to them? Why not go to them? He didn’t seem to worry about where the money for his schemes would come from. Despite Guccio’s reservations, Aldo had faith his ideas would pay for themselves.

  With his innate sense of marketing, Aldo picked up on his father’s dedication to quality and coined the motto “Quality is remembered long after price is forgotten,” which he had embossed in gold letters on pigskin plaques and displayed strategically around the stores.

  Aldo also promoted a “Gucci concept,” a harmony of styles and colors that would unify their products and identify the Gucci name. The world of stables and horses became a rich source of ideas for Gucci products. The double stitching used in saddlemaking, the green and red webbing from girth straps, and hardware shaped like linked stirrups and horse bits became Gucci trademarks. Soon Aldo’s marketing genius began spinning the myth that the Guccis had been noble saddlemakers to medieval courts—a fitting image for the elite clientele to which the Guccis were catering. Saddle tack and riding accessories displayed in the stores enriched the saddlemaking legend and some items were even sold. The myth lives on. Even today, members of the Gucci family and former employees still say that the Guccis were saddlers long ago.

  “I want the truth to come out,” Grimalda told a journalist in 1987. “We were never saddlemakers. The Guccis come from a family in the San Miniato district of Florence,” she said. According to a history of Florentine families, the Guccis of San Miniato were active as early as 1224 as lawyers and notaries, although this story is likely to have been embellished later, according to historian Fiorentini. The family crest featured a blue wheel and a rose on a gold banner floating above vertical red, blue, and silver stripes. Roberto spent a fortune in heraldic research and worked the rose and the wheel—said to symbolize poetry and leadership—into the company logo. The original logo featured a bellboy carrying a suitcase in one hand and a soft traveling bag in the other. As Gucci gained success, a knight in armor replaced the humble porter.

  By the early 1950s, a Gucci bag or suitcase established its owner as someone with refined style and taste. Princess Elizabeth, soon to become the Queen of England, visited the Gucci shop in Florence, as did Eleanor Roosevelt, Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly, and Jacqueline Bouvier, soon to marry John F. Kennedy. Many of Rodolfo’s movie star connections from his acting days became customers, including Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Sophia Loren, and Anna Magnani.

  “In the years after World War II, Italy became a center for fine-quality luxury goods—handcrafted leather shoes, handbags, and fine gold jewelry,” recalled retail veteran Joan Kaner, currently senior vice president and fashion director at Neiman Marcus.

  “Gucci was one of the first status labels to come out of Europe—after so many years of not having things—people really wanted to show off. That’s when I first became aware of the Gucci name. People felt with Gucci they were really getting quality for the money.”

  At the same time, the first Italian apparel designers gained recognition. A young Florentine nobleman, Giovan Battisti Giorgini, who had opened a buying office for American department stores in 1923 and toward the end of the war managed an Allied Forces Gift Shop, organized a fashion show in his own home in February 1951. He timed the event to follow the Paris couture shows and invited leading fashion journalists and buyers from American department stores such as Bergdorf Goodman, B. Altman & Co., and I. Magnin. The journalists raved over the stylish yet wearable designs, and the buyers cabled home for more funds. Giorgini’s showings evolved into Italy’s first pret-a-porter fashion shows, where names such as Emilio Pucci, Capucci, Galitzine, Valentino, Lancetti, Mila Schön, Krizia, and others debuted under the gleaming chandeliers of the Sala Bianca in Palazzo Pitti.

  3

  GUCCI GOES AMERICAN

  As American interest in Italian design grew, Aldo resolved to take Gucci to America, and especially to New York. Americans were Gucci’s best clients. They loved the quality and style of the handcrafted leather bags and accessories. Aldo pressed Guccio to let him open a shop in New York, and Guccio’s hand went into that left-hand pocket.

  “Risk your neck if you must, but don’t expect me to pay for it,” Guccio fumed. “Go to the bank if you must, see if they’ll stick their necks out for you! You may be right. After all, I am an old man,” he began to relent. “I’m old-fashioned enough to believe that the best vegetables come from your own garden.”

  Aldo didn’t need to hear any more. Guccio, in his way, had given him a green light. He flew to New York, a trip that in those days took nearly twenty hours with stops in Rome, Paris, Shannon, and Boston. Aldo met a lawyer, Frank Dugan, who said he could help him with his plan. He later returned to New York with his brothers Rodolfo and Vasco. When they got into the city, he animatedly walked them up and down Fifth Avenue, gesturing at the elegant shops in excitement.

  “How would you like to see the Gucci name in big letters along this chic avenue?” he asked them. They settled on a small shop at 7 East Fifty-eighth Street, just off of Fifth Avenue, with two display windows on Fifty-eighth Street. With Dugan’s help, they incorporated the first Gucci company in America, Gucci Shops Inc., with initial capital of $6,000. The new Gucci company was also given the right to use the Gucci trademark in the U.S. market—the only time the trademark was ever granted outside Italy. All of Gucci’s subsequent foreign opera
ting companies were extended franchise agreements.

  Aldo sent a telegram to Guccio in Florence, informing him they had appointed him honorary president of the newly founded company.

  Guccio was furious.

  “Come home immediately, you crazy boys!” Guccio cabled back. He accused them of being foolish and irresponsible, reminded them he wasn’t dead yet, and threatened to cut off their inheritance if they pursued such a reckless scheme. Aldo brushed off his father’s misgivings and threats. He also managed to bring the old Guccio to New York to see the new store shortly before he died. Guccio became as enthusiastic as if the New York opening had been his own idea—he even told his friends it was his idea!

  “Oh, Commendatore!” his friends would say to him, using the title bestowed on him by a national order connected to Italy’s former monarchy. “You are a man of great vision!”

  “He had lived to see that Aldo’s ideas were not so crazy after all,” recalled Grimalda.

  Guccio, by then in his seventies, had every reason to be satisfied. His business was plowing full speed ahead. The Gucci name had been received as well in faraway America as in Italy. His three sons were working actively and had produced grandchildren who would one day take on roles in the family company. When each new grandchild was born, as the family saying went, Guccio would say, “Let him smell a piece of leather, for it is the smell of his future.”

  Guccio encouraged Giorgio, Roberto, and Paolo to work in the shop wrapping and delivering parcels, as his own children had done, firmly believing that the only way to learn the business was from the ground up. At the time, Rodolfo’s son Maurizio was still a young child living in Milan and hadn’t yet been inducted into the Gucci family school.

  Just fifteen days after Aldo inaugurated the New York store in 1953, Guccio dropped dead of a heart attack one November evening as he was preparing to go to the cinema with Aida. He was seventy-two years old. When she came upstairs to see what was taking him so long, she found him lying still on the bathroom floor. The doctor said his heart had just stopped like an old watch. His devoted wife followed him two years later, at age seventy-seven. Once a poor dishwasher, Guccio Gucci had become a millionaire and his business had become famous on two continents. His sons were carrying on the empire he had created and he had been spared the bitter family quarrels that would come to characterize the Gucci dynasty years later. But Guccio himself had set the precedent; he had often played his sons off against each other, believing that competition would stimulate them to perform better.

  “He pitted one against the other, challenging them to show what kind of blood ran in their veins,” recalled Paolo.

  Guccio also caused the first major family rift: he excluded his eldest child and only daughter, Grimalda, from any inheritance in the company solely because she was a woman. Grimalda, who was fifty-two when he died, had served faithfully in his shop for many years and her husband, Giovanni, had helped save the Gucci business from bankruptcy in 1924. The old Guccio handed down an unwritten credo to his sons: no woman could inherit control of the company. Grimalda didn’t realize what had happened until her brothers refused to let her have an active role in business decisions. She discovered with dismay that they had inherited equal parts of the Gucci company; she received a farmhouse, some land, and a modest amount of cash.

  “It was an archaic concept,” admitted her nephew Roberto years later. “I never saw the statute, but my father told me that no woman was permitted to be a partner in Gucci.”

  After failing to reach an agreement with her brothers, Grimalda called in a lawyer to try and obtain her due. Her efforts were in vain. She said later she misunderstood a key question during the court hearing and inadvertently signed away her rights to the Gucci estate in exchange for a settlement, an experience that left her bitter for years.

  “What I really wanted was a part in the development of the company I had seen grow from nothing,” she said. Extremely fond of her brothers, she never imagined they would take advantage of her.

  “She didn’t get a stake in the company, but she did get other assets,” Roberto said years later, “though there is no doubt that the company subsequently appreciated in value and was worth much more.”

  For his sons, Guccio’s departure was a mixed blessing. Although they missed his firm, guiding hand, for the first time they were free to follow their own objectives and between them they divided up the business into three areas of influence that initially worked well for all of them. Aldo, finally free to pursue his dream of expanding Gucci overseas, traveled constantly. Rodolfo oversaw the Milan store while Vasco ran the factory in Florence. Harmony also reigned because Rodolfo and Vasco let Aldo have his own way, rarely countering him unless they felt he strayed too far from the values and directives Guccio left behind.

  Aldo moved Olwen into a spacious villa he built on land next door to Villa Petacci, a grand residence where Mussolini’s mistress, Clara Petacci, is said to have lived, along Rome’s Via della Camilluccia, an idyllic road bordered with greenery that wound up into one of the hills outside Rome and is today home to some of the city’s most exclusive residences. Aldo spent little time there as he traveled between Europe and the United States, opening new frontiers for the Gucci name. Although he and Olwen didn’t divorce until much later, their relationship had long since faded, and Aldo picked a dark-haired shop girl he had hired for the Via Condotti store to come to New York as his assistant. Her name was Bruna Palumbo and she resembled the sultry Italian film actress Gina Lollobrigida. She became Aldo’s companion and eventually moved into the small apartment he took at 25 West Fifty-fourth Street, across from the Museum of Modern Art. They lived together discreetly at first. Aldo worshipped Bruna, showered her with expensive gifts, and tried to share with her his excitement over the steady expansion of the Gucci business. He pleaded with her to travel with him, but she hesitated, in part due to her discomfort over her status as his mistress. He finally married Bruna in the United States many years later—even though Olwen had never consented to a divorce. After that, Bruna sometimes agreed to accompany Aldo to parties and openings, where he introduced her as “Mrs. Gucci.”

  Rodolfo, meanwhile, designed Gucci’s most expensive handbags and hardware, in addition to running the Milan store.

  “Rodolfo had very refined taste,” recalled Francesco Gittardi, who worked for Gucci for eighteen years and managed the Milan store under Rodolfo from 1967 to 1973. “He was the one who designed the eighteen-karat gold clasps for the crocodile bags; he loved those things and spent hours on them.”

  The most romantic of the three brothers, Rodolfo dressed like the actor he once was. He wore plush velvet jackets in unusual colors such as forest green and gold with shining silk pocket scarves, and in summer wore elegant beige linen suits and jaunty straw hats.

  At this time Vasco had begun to produce his own designs in the Florence factory, where he also supervised Aldo’s son Paolo, who started working in the factory in 1952. Vasco’s main passions in his free time were still hunting, his extensive shotgun collection, and his Lamborghini, pastimes that earned him a new nickname, “The Dreamer.”

  Of Guccio’s three sons, Aldo became the driving force behind the business, making most of the important decisions, though he always sought consensus from his brothers.

  “Aldo always wanted to do things with the agreement of the entire family,” recalled Gittardi. “He may have brought the ideas, but the decisions were always taken by the family board. That said, they usually let him have his way because he always had the right instincts, especially about where to open stores,” Gittardi said.

  Aldo flew between the United States and Europe, where in 1959 he moved the Rome store to Via Condotti 8, its current location across from the historic Caffè Greco and down just a few paces from the Spanish Steps. In 1960 he secured Gucci’s first direct Fifth Avenue exposure with a new store in the St. Regis Hotel on the corner of Fifty-fifth Street. The following year Gucci opened its doors in the Ital
ian spa town of Montecatini, on London’s Old Bond Street, and in Palm Beach’s Royal Poinciana Plaza. Gucci’s first Paris shop, on Rue du Fauburg Saint-Honoré near Place Vendôme, also opened in 1963. A second Paris shop opened on Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré at Rue Royal in 1972.

  Aldo pushed himself constantly and hardly took more than three or four days of vacation a year. He made at least a dozen transatlantic trips a year, kept apartments in London and New York, and later bought an oceanfront estate in Palm Beach, the only place he used to say he really relaxed. When a friend asked him if he had hobbies, he just laughed. Even if he were visiting Palm Beach on a Sunday, he would find an excuse to go into the store and look over some papers or check the merchandise. Every two or three weeks he met Rodolfo and Vasco in Florence to discuss business. No longer having a residence in Florence, he stayed at the Hotel de la Ville on Via Tornabuoni, which had opened in the early 1950s to rival the city’s older fine hotels, the Excelsior and the Grand.

  As his father had before him, Aldo encouraged his sons to join the business. Thanks to Olwen, the boys all spoke fluent English—they even called Aldo “Daddy.” Aldo brought his youngest son, Roberto, to New York to help him open the Fifty-eighth Street store, and Roberto stayed for nearly ten years, until 1962, when he returned to Florence to establish new administrative offices and showrooms back at the family headquarters. Roberto also opened the firm’s first franchise in Brussels in the late 1960s, a successful venture that would later be used as a model on which to develop Gucci’s franchise business in the United States. In Florence, he also established a complaints office to handle any problems customers had with Gucci’s goods or service. Aldo relied more and more on Roberto, whom he nicknamed “Sonny.”

  In 1956, Roberto had married Drusilla Cafferelli, the fair, blue-eyed daughter of a noble Roman family and a refined and pious woman. They had six children: Cosimo (1956), Filippo (1957), Uberto (1960), Maria-Olympia (1963), Domitilla (1964), and Francesco (1967). Of Aldo’s sons, Roberto was the most conservative and respectful of his parents, obedient and docile. Paolo later nicknamed him “Il Prete,” or “The Priest,” because of his formal ways and religious beliefs. Even Aldo at times found Sonny’s style a little somber. During the summer months, Roberto and Drusilla and their children lived in Villa Bagazzano, a family home of Drusilla’s in the countryside outside Florence. Winters, they moved back to their apartment in the city.