The House of Gucci

by Sara G Forden

  “When we would invite Aldo over to lunch or dinner at our country house,” Roberto recalled, “he would look up at all the portraits of the Virgin Mary in our dining room and say to me, ‘My God, Roberto! I feel like I’m in a cemetery.’”

  Giorgio joined Roberto in New York for a brief stint, bringing with him his first wife, Orietta Mariotti, the mother of his two sons, Alessandro, born in 1953, and Guccio, born in 1955. Orietta cooked up big spaghetti dinners in the Guccis’ small rented apartment and fed the entire clan at dinnertime in classic Italian family style. But the hectic pace of life in New York and having to live in his father’s shadow grated on Giorgio. He soon returned to Italy, took over the management of the Rome store, and looked after his mother, whom he would ferry to the nearby Porto Santo Stefano for sea holidays.

  “Giorgio was very timid,” recalled Chantal Skibinska, whom Aldo hired in 1974 as director of European public relations and international fashion coordinator. “He was crushed by the enormous personality of his father.”

  Aldo, like Guccio, was a tough and domineering father. Once, when Paolo was fourteen or fifteen and did something wrong, Aldo gave away his dog as punishment. Paolo, devastated when he discovered the dog missing, cried for a week. “My father was much tougher on his own sons than on his staff,” agreed Roberto.

  Giorgio, surprisingly, was the first son to break out of the family mold in adulthood. Despite his shyness, Giorgio had a spirit of his own and he infuriated both his father and his uncle Rodolfo in 1969 when he decided to open his own shop, Gucci Boutique, along with Maria Pia, a former Gucci saleswoman who would become his second wife. Located on Rome’s Via Borgognona, parallel to Via Condotti and one street to the south, Giorgio’s boutique had a slightly different concept from the other Gucci stores. He catered to a younger clientele, stocking the shop with lower priced accessories and gift items. He and Maria Pia developed their own line of bags and accessories, which were produced in the Gucci factory. Giorgio’s rebellion initially amounted to treason, although it paled compared to later family discord.

  When asked by a journalist about Giorgio and the second Rome shop, Aldo replied: “He is the black sheep in the family. He has left the cruise liner for a rowboat, but he will be back!” Aldo was right. In 1972, Gucci Boutique was reabsorbed by the family, although Giorgio and Maria Pia continued to manage it.

  After helping customers in the Rome store as a young boy, Aldo’s youngest son, Paolo, established himself in Florence. Considered by many the most creative of the three, he began working for his uncle Vasco in the factory, where he discovered he had design talent. He put his ideas into production and soon brought out an entire line of Gucci products. Knowing how difficult it was to be around his dynamic and authoritarian father, Paolo initially resisted going to New York, happy to work on his own designs back home in Florence. In 1952 he married a local girl, Yvonne Moschetto, and they had two daughters, Elisabetta in 1952 and Patrizia in 1954.

  Paolo lacked the deference and diplomacy of his older brothers and bitterly resented his father’s tyrannical attitude. His experiences working in the Rome shop as a boy had humiliated him—only begrudgingly did he offer gracious treatment to customers, who were often VIPs and celebrities. He grew a mustache in defiance of Guccio’s rule; his grandfather hated to see hair on men’s faces.

  Paolo flourished as long as he was given free rein to design and develop new products, and he created the firm’s first ready-to-wear items. In his free time, he raised carrier pigeons and housed some two hundred of them in an aviary he built near his home in Florence, later introducing dove and falcon motifs into the scarves he designed. Aldo saw early on, however, that it wasn’t going to be easy to make Paolo toe the family line.

  “Aldo always used to say that Paolo, who loved horses himself, was a purebred, but that unfortunately he would never allow himself to be ridden,” said longtime Gucci employee Francesco Gittardi.

  Aldo’s drive, energy, and ideas seemed limitless. While in New York, if he wasn’t jetting off to open a new store or give an interview, he rose between 6:30 and 7:00 A.M. and breakfasted in the Fifty-fourth Street apartment with Bruna, who watched his diet, did his laundry, and generally took care of him. After breakfast, Aldo’s first stop in New York (or whatever city he was in) was the Gucci store, where he greeted all the personnel by name.

  “Never say, ‘May I help you?’ to a customer!” he instructed the sales staff. “Please, always ‘Good morning, madam!’ or ‘Good morning, sir!’”

  He then checked the merchandise and the displays before taking phone calls in his office from the other continent. Once while visiting a store franchised to carry Gucci products, he ran his finger along a shelf and discovered it full of dust. He canceled the franchise contract instantly.

  Aldo’s mind worked double time thinking of new products, new store locations, and new merchandising strategies. He paced up and down in his office by day and in his bedroom by night, stopping only to make notes on what he needed to do.

  “He was a kind of one-man market research firm,” recalled a former employee.

  “He always burst in the store with that globe-trotter’s walk of his,” recalled Chantal Skibinska. “He scaled the stairs of the Rome store two and three steps at a time, staff members fluttering around him.”

  Aldo inspired loyalty in his employees through his own dedication and conviction that they were all working for something they admired and should be proud of. By treating his staff as extended family, he got their undying commitment and loyalty—a management model common in Italian family-run enterprises.

  “He stimulated the people who worked for him; he promised them a lot individually,” recalled one former employee. “That made them work very hard.” Some ended up disillusioned when they realized that even after a lifetime of hard work, they could never really become part of the family and, in those days, stock option plans weren’t part of the program.”

  Mercurial and intense, Aldo could be alternately a warm, paternal caretaker or a tough, domineering tyrant.

  “I was twenty-one years old when I went to work for Aldo,” recalled Enrica Pirri of her early days in the Via Condotti store. “For me, he was like a father or an older brother,” she said, recalling that she went to him for help when she needed it, including asking for a loan for a down payment on her first apartment, which he granted.

  “He was also very hard on me,” she said. “When I made a mistake, he would yell at me and make me cry. But he always had time for us; he was somebody you could joke with. He loved to laugh,” she recalled.

  Playful and mischievous as a child, Aldo charmed troublesome customers to their faces and made fun of them behind their backs, a practice that embarrassed his clerks as they tried to keep straight faces and ultimately set the tone for shabby treatment of Gucci customers that would later make news headlines.

  Once, at a formal dinner in London, an Englishwoman asked Aldo innocently why there were so many Guccis and he responded delightedly, “Because in Italy we start making love very early!” relishing the shocked expression on her face.

  Aldo loved women and had many lovers. According to company lore, he even set one of his mistresses up in a luxurious apartment on the outskirts of Rome where he installed his own private entrance directly from the hallway into her bedroom where he could pass unnoticed by her servants or her children. He flirted shamelessly and greeted fashion editors he liked with a full kiss on the lips. He knew how to be gallant, never forgetting that women were Gucci’s best customers.

  “He was a scoundrel,” recalled Enrica Pirri with a smile. “He knew perfectly well that every kiss on the hand of a wealthy lady of Palm Beach meant the sale of another handbag!”

  Aldo also had a knack for embellishing the truth to suit the message he wanted to give and was probably himself one of the most active architects of the stories about Gucci’s noble, saddlemaking past. Domenico De Sole, Gucci’s CEO today, who got to know Aldo very well when he was a
young lawyer representing first the family and then the company, recalled that Aldo would nonchalantly make statements that flew in the face of logic and all objective proof of the contrary.

  “He was the kind of guy who could come in out of the rain and look you in the eye and tell you it was a gorgeous sunny day outside,” said De Sole.

  If irritated, Aldo paced up and down even faster than usual, arms crossed over his chest, snorting to himself and rubbing his chin obsessively with the fingers of one hand, “Ahem, ahem, AHEM!” When he finally exploded, his face turned reddish purple, the veins on his neck swelled, his eyes bulged, and he banged his fists on the table or desk, breaking whatever he happened to have in his hands at the time. Once he inadvertently smashed his own eyeglasses; when he saw they were broken, he slammed them hard again and again and again on the table.

  “You don’t know Aldo Gucci!” he would roar. “When I decide something, I get my way!” Former employees have even seen irons and typewriters fly across rooms during Aldo’s rages.

  Aldo retained some of the thrift he had learned from his father, Guccio. In New York he loved to lunch, either alone or with a staff member, at the employee cafeteria under the St. Regis that served a warm meal for $1.50. He also patronized the Primeburger and Schraft’s restaurant, where he ordered a club sandwich and a hot apple pie. Another favorite was the roast beef sandwich at Reuben’s across Fifty-eighth Street from the store. An expensive lunch at “21” or La Caravelle was a big event, and sometimes his penny-pinching struck others as contradictory.

  “He would skimp on the hors d’oeuvres for a press lunch and then spend a fortune on a transatlantic phone call to discuss the invitations,” recalled Logan Bentley Lessona, an American writer based in Italy whom Aldo hired in 1968 to handle press relations—the first person Gucci took on in that capacity.

  Always impeccably dressed, Aldo cut an elegant figure in his distinctly Italian handmade suits and shirts. Winters, he wore fedora hats, cashmere coats, blue blazers, and gray flannel pants. Summers, he dressed in neatly tailored linen suits in light colors and white moccasins. Initially, he snubbed Gucci’s own loafers in favor of more traditional Italian styles—usually handmade wing tips from London. In those days, moccasins would have been considered too feminine for men. By the mid-1970s, however, Aldo made it a point to complete his attire with a pair of gleaming horse–bit loafers. He often wore a flower in his lapel too. “His suits were always just a little bit too tight, he was just a little bit too polished,” recalled Lessona.

  Aldo loved to be called dottore in Italy or “Dr. Aldo” in the United States, and he took full advantage of an honorary bachelor’s degree in economics he received from the San Marco College in Florence. In 1983, Aldo got his American title of “Doctor” in the form of an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York.

  Aldo continued the drive to open new stores. He identified Beverly Hills’s then-sleepy Rodeo Drive as a choice location long before it became a chic shopping avenue, and in October 1968 inaugurated an elegant new store there with a star-studded fashion show and reception. Set back from the sidewalk on North Rodeo Drive, the Beverly Hills shop was designed for the stars. It had an open, plant-filled loggia where bored husbands could watch the California girls go by while waiting for their wives. The massive glass and bronze door opened into an elegant interior featuring an emerald green carpet and lighted by eight Giotto-inspired chandeliers made from Murano glass and Florentine bronze. Rodolfo even hired a film crew to record the opening.

  The year before, in a long-standing dream come true, Gucci opened its doors on Florence’s Via Tornabuoni. The most elegant and luxurious shop to date, the Via Tornabuoni store had elaborate street doors, pastel decor, deep pile carpeting, gleaming walnut showcases, and discreet mirrors. An elevator, lined with leather and trimmed with the ubiquitous red and green webbing, carried the family and staff between the four floors of selling and office space. The Guccis also had a bank of video cameras installed in Roberto’s office, from which he could control every angle of the selling floor. “I could see everywhere,” Roberto recalled with a chuckle, “but after three years the unions made me take them out—they said it was an invasion of privacy of the workers.”

  With the opening of Via Tornabuoni, Gucci also required the sales staff to wear uniforms: white shirt, black jacket, black tie, and black and gray striped pants for the men; three-piece skirt suits for the women in burgundy for winter and beige for summer. The saleswomen wore simple pumps, never Gucci moccasins—it wasn’t considered appropriate in those days for the staff to wear the same items as were offered to customers.

  The Tornabuoni opening, initially set for December 1966, had been delayed by the famous flood of that November, when the swollen waters of the Arno overflowed its banks and flooded the city, damaging and destroying priceless works of art and historical archives and filling local shops and offices with five and six feet of water. When the alarm spread the morning of November 4, 1966, Grimalda’s husband, Giovanni, and Roberto, Paolo, and Vasco were the only family members in Florence.

  Together, they carried hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stock and merchandise to safety from the basement of the shop on Via della Vigna Nuova up to the second floor.

  “We weren’t due to move into Via Tornabuoni for several weeks yet and all the merchandise was still in Via della Vigna Nuova,” Giovanni recalled.

  The carpeting under their feet began to bulge and bubble as they carried the last of the goods from the basement up to the second floor. As they finished, they were wading in water up to their waists.

  “The shop was a mess, but we had saved ninety percent of the stock,” Paolo recalled, “and we didn’t have to go to the expense of redecorating because the new premises in Via Tornabuoni were due to open in a few months’ time. All in all, we got off lightly.”

  Fortunately, the factory in Via delle Caldaie was on higher ground and hardly suffered any damage at all. The floodwaters retreated, but the flood of orders continued to flow. The artisans in Via delle Caldaie worked overtime and still couldn’t keep up. The Gucci family soon realized they needed to expand and in 1967 the firm acquired a site in the Scandicci suburbs of Florence. Grimalda’s husband, Giovanni, was commissioned to build a new factory for the growing Gucci empire. It was to be a modern, 150,000 square-foot factory complete with design, production, and storage facilities. Aldo also envisioned hotel and meeting facilities for the twice-yearly company meetings of employees from around the world, yet these facilities were never built.

  In 1966, Rodolfo created another Gucci icon, the Flora scarf, with the help of Italian artist Vittorio Accornero. One day, Princess Grace of Monaco came into the Milan store, where Rodolfo hurried down from his office to greet her and show her around the shop. At the end of the tour, Rodolfo turned to the princess and said he wanted to give her a gift.

  She demurred, but when Rodolfo persisted, she said, “Well, if you insist, how about a scarf?”

  What Princess Grace didn’t know was that Gucci had hardly developed any scarves, except for some small, 70-centimeter (28-inch) square scarves with stirrup or train or Indian motifs on them that Rodolfo didn’t feel were appropriate for a princess. Caught off guard and trying to buy some time, Rodolfo asked her exactly what kind of scarf she had in mind.

  “Well, I don’t know,” she replied. “How about one with flowers on it?”

  Rodolfo didn’t know what to do. His mind raced.

  “Princess,” he said with a charming smile, “it just so happens we are developing just such a scarf right now. As soon as it is completed, I promise you, you will be the first to have it.”

  With that, he gave her a bamboo-handle bag and bade her farewell. The instant she walked out of the store, Rodolfo called Vittorio Accornero, whom he had met during his acting days. “Vittorio, can you come to Milan immediately? Something fantastic has happened!”

  Ac
cornero arrived in Milan from nearby Cuneo and Rodolfo described Princess Grace’s visit.

  “Vittorio,” Rodolfo said to his friend. “I need you to design a scarf that is an explosion of flowers! I don’t want a linear design, I want an explosion. I want it so that every way one turns to look at this scarf, one sees flowers.”

  Accornero agreed to try, and when he returned with the completed drawing, it was exactly what Rodolfo had envisioned, a magnificent cornucopia of flowers. He asked Fiorio, one of Italy’s great silk printers in the Como district just north of Milan, to print it in a large 90-centimeter (36-inch) square. Fiorio had developed a technique, similar to silk-screening, with which he could print more than forty separate colors without the hues bleeding. When the scarf was completed, Rodolfo hand-delivered it to the Princess. Although neither the original design nor the scarf itself have since been located, the Flora propelled the expansion of Gucci’s silk division and was subsequently adapted for use on apparel, bags, accessories, and even jewelry. A smaller version, called the “Mini-Flora,” became popular as well. The Flora also opened the door to an entire range of lighter-weight apparel a few years later. Accornero began creating two or three new scarves each year for Gucci.

  By the mid-1960s, Gucci was known to a savvy elite, who found its products high quality, tastefully elegant, and practical. However, the product that made Gucci a status symbol around the world had been an insignificant sideline up to then: a classic, low-heeled loafer with a metal snaffle bit across the instep. The men’s shoe, a classic, low-heeled moccasin, was called Model 175. A classier women’s version soon followed.