Paolo’s death and the company’s purchase of his commercial name and trademark did not, however, put an end to the internecine agitations within Gucci. The conflict simply shifted to another part of the family. Paolo’s initial estrangement and ultimate exit from the family’s business operations had coincided with the rise of his young cousin Maurizio, who would soon enter the family battlefield.
7
WINS AND LOSSES
On the evening of November 22, 1982, an audience of more than thirteen hundred invited guests, murmuring in excited anticipation, gathered at the Cinema Manzoni in Milan. Rodolfo had instructed Maurizio and Patrizia to invite friends for a showing of what would be the last version of his film Il Cinema nella Mia Vita, or Film in My Life.
Formal printed invitations went out announcing the screening with the melancholy phrase: “Never lose touch with the importance of the soul and one’s sentiments. Life can be a vast, arid field where the seed one sows often grows away from all that is good.”
After working in New York with Aldo for seven years, Maurizio, Patrizia, and their young daughters moved back to Milan in early 1982. Rodolfo’s health was deteriorating, his illness a well-kept secret. The Verona-based doctor who administered cobalt therapy to treat his prostate tumor died suddenly, sending Rodolfo on a desperate search for a new cure. He called Maurizio back to Milan to head up a new phase in Gucci’s growth.
Rodolfo made a grand gesture to Maurizio and Patrizia by turning the showing of his film autobiography into a social occasion. He wanted to close the door on their conflicts and show friends and acquaintances in Milan that the family warmly welcomed the young couple back.
Patrizia greeted the guests graciously, radiant in an Yves Saint Laurent dress and Cartier “Truth’s Eye” brooch. Things were working out just as she had envisioned. Maurizio’s reconciliation with Rodolfo put her husband in a prime position to bring fresh leadership to the family firm, which she felt had lost its glamour on Aldo’s and Rodolfo’s watch. For Patrizia, the premier at Cinema Manzoni marked the beginning of a new age, which she called “the era of Maurizio.”
As the lights dimmed and the velvet curtains swept open with a whisper, the documentary opened with a scene of young Maurizio running and tumbling in the snow at Saint Moritz with Rodolfo, just months after losing his mother.
“The following is a pathetic love story, a story that I wish would never end…the story of a man who wants to tell his son about his family, and help him see the world in the right perspective,” the narrator explained as the screen filled with the black-and-white images of Guccio and Aida and their children, of the family dinner table, of the original workshop in Florence. Then came stylized film clips of Rodolfo and his wife acting under their stage names, Maurizio D’Ancora and Sandra Ravel. Contemporary footage then chronicled the growth of the Gucci name: the opening of Via Tornabuoni; Rodolfo in the Milan store on Via Monte Napoleone, complimenting the manager, Gittardi, on a good sale; Aldo in his jaunty fedora entering the revolving doors of Gucci’s Fifth Avenue store; the dancing frenzy of Gucci-clad disco dancers in the seventies; Maurizio and Patrizia directing workmen in the renovation of their new Olympic Tower apartment; and the baptisms of Alessandra and Allegra. The movie ended with an idyllic scene of Rodolfo with Alessandra as a toddler on the immaculately clipped lawn at Chesa Murézzan in Saint Moritz playing with the manual crank of his old movie camera. Rodolfo’s narration ended with a touching message: “If there is anything left that I can teach you, it is to help you understand the deep relationship that exists between happiness and love and that life isn’t lived in decades, or even seasons, but in beautiful sunny mornings like this, watching your daughters grow up…true wisdom lies in what we can do with the real riches of this world—beyond the ones we can trade or manage—the riches of life, youth, friendship, love. These are the riches we must treasure and shelter always.”
The movie was an exact expression of Rodolfo’s character—romantic, grandiose, overdone. His masterpiece, his testament of love for his late wife, and for their son, the film symbolized his reconciliation with that son. But it also contained a message for Maurizio: Rodolfo had seen his son’s ambition, his zeal, and the way he managed his money. Through the frames of the film he wanted to remind Maurizio not to lose sight of what he, Rodolfo, in his final years, felt were the true values of life.
“Every human creature,” he used to say, “has three essential things that must always be in harmony among themselves: a heart, a brain, and a wallet. If these three elements don’t work together, problems will come.”
The guests were moved and impressed as the lights came back up.
“When is the next screening?” one of them asked Rodolfo.
“We’ll see, we’ll see,” he answered with a sad smile. Only those closest to him knew that cancer was consuming his body, that he had tried clinic after clinic searching for a cure to keep him alive. He tired more easily, his expression grew more melancholy. He still reported regularly to his offices in Via Monte Napoleone, but he began spending more and more time in his beloved Saint Moritz—where he had finally bought the charming L’Oiseau Bleu from his elderly neighbor—content to let Maurizio take more of a role in the business.
Maurizio returned to Milan from New York filled with enthusiasm for his new mandate. Uncle Aldo had taught him a lot and their relationship was affectionate and mutually respectful, although Aldo, as with his own sons, always made sure to keep Maurizio in his place.
“Vieni qui, avvocatino,” he would say to Maurizio when he wanted to talk to him. “Come here, little lawyer,” waving him over with a hand as though he were a child, making fun of his nephew’s law degree even though Maurizio at that point was the only one in the family who had completed advanced studies. Unlike Aldo’s sons, who bristled at their father’s domineering personality, Maurizio kept his head down and humored Aldo. He knew that if he wanted to learn from Aldo, he had to survive in Aldo’s tough school. He also knew there would be rewards.
“It wasn’t a question of living with my uncle, but surviving,” Maurizio once said. “If he does one hundred percent, you have to do one hundred and fifty percent to show you can do as well as he does.”
So he bided his time, knowing that to get what he wanted, he couldn’t always take the shortest route.
Still reserved and hesitant, Maurizio had absorbed much of Aldo’s teachings, bringing out his own charisma, charm, and ability to infect others with his enthusiasm. Aldo, more than Rodolfo, was Maurizio’s mentor.
“The difference between my father and my uncle was that my uncle was a marketing man, a developer,” recalled Maurizio. “He…had a completely different influence on everyone. He was very human, sensitive, creative. He was the one who was building everything up in the company and I saw how he was able to establish rapport with the people he worked with, as well as the customers. What fascinated me most was how different he was from my father, who was an actor in everything he did. My uncle wasn’t playing a part, it was the real thing with him,” Maurizio said.
As Aldo grew more outrageous and extroverted, Rodolfo grew more reflective and introverted, rarely confronting his brother directly. Over and over again, he furiously called Maurizio to drive to Florence with him to challenge yet another instance of Aldo’s abuse of power. With Rodolfo’s trusted driver, Luigi Pirovano, at the wheel of a sleek silver Mercedes, they pulled out onto the A-1 Autostrada leading south from Milan.
“This time he has gone too far! I am going to give him a piece of my mind,” Rodolfo sputtered as Maurizio consoled him and Luigi listened silently, guiding the speeding car down the autostrada—first along the plains to Bologna and then around the twisting switchbacks over the Apennine mountains to Florence. By the time, three hours later, that Luigi swung the car through the gates and past the guardhouse of the Scandicci factory, Rodolfo’s anger had calmed; his resolve faded.
“Ciao, carissimo!” he invariably greeted Aldo with an affectionate hug.
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“Foffino! What are you doing here?” Aldo would say with a surprised smile, as Rodolfo shrugged, made some excuse about a new bag he was developing, and invited Aldo to lunch.
Aldo, at seventy-seven, had hardly slowed his pace, though he was more interested in his parties and charity balls than in running the company day to day. He did abolish the noon closing policy in New York in 1980 and promoted the Gucci name to the masses with the Gucci Accessories Collection, but he began to seek his own rewards after a lifetime devoted to Gucci. He spent more time with Bruna and their daughter Patricia at his waterfront mansion in Palm Beach, gardened, socialized, and still strove to convert his merchant status to an artistic calling.
“We are not businessmen, we are poets!” Aldo intoned at his marquetry desk during an interview in his office on Via Condotti. “I want to be like the Holy Father. The Pope always speaks in the plural.”
Where starkly framed certificates once hung on bare white walls, now seventeenth-and eighteenth-century oil paintings glowed against velour the color of burnt umber under a vaulted ceiling painted with frescoes. The Gucci heraldic seal hung nearby with the key to the city of San Francisco that Mayor Joseph Alioto gave to Aldo in 1971.
While Aldo pontificated, someone needed to plan for the future of the business, and Maurizio, propelled by Rodolfo and Patrizia, became the heir apparent. By the time Maurizio returned to Milan in 1982, a wave of change had reshaped the Italian fashion industry, up to then centered on Rome’s Alta Moda couture presentations and Giorgini’s ready-to-wear shows in Florence’s Sala Bianca. The fashion spotlight shifted to Milan as newly recognized fashion designers such as Tai and Rosita Missoni, Krizia’s Mariuccia Mandelli, Giorgio Armani, Gianni Versace, and Gianfranco Ferré emerged in Italy’s financial and industrial capital. Valentino, who had started his couture business in 1959 in Rome, snubbed Milan for Paris, where he presented first his couture and later pret-a-porter collections.
Milan fashion organizers wrested the semiannual presentations of women’s ready-to-wear collections away from Florence, marking the end of the Sala Bianca–style shows and establishing Milan as the new center for women’s fashion. Since the postwar disappearance of the master tailor, young new designers had emerged to fill a creative gap. Initially, they created innovative styles for the brand-name collections of medium-sized Italian clothing manufacturers in Northern Italy: Armani, Versace, and Gianfranco Ferré all worked for small apparel producers. Growing demand for trend-setting designs showed them they could capitalize on their own names. As their budding businesses flourished, the young designers established ateliers along Milan’s most fashionable streets—Armani on Via Borgonuovo, Versace on Via Gesù, Ferrè on Via della Spiga, and Krizia on Via Daniele Manin, to name a few. Inspired, they worked long hours alongside faithful teams of design assistants to perfect their new styles, crowding late at night into the few surviving family-style trattorias in downtown Milan—Bice on Via Borgospesso, Torre di Pisa in the Bohemian Brera district, Santa Lucia near the Duomo—all of which are still popular among the fashion and business set.
Armani and Versace emerged as the sparring leaders of Milan fashion. Versace championed hot, flashy, provocative styles; Armani created cool, reserved, elegant looks. Versace bought impressive palazzos in Milan and on nearby Lake Como and filled them with precious art in the gaudy, baroque style he promoted. Armani, known as “The King of Beige,” preferred his quiet retreats in the Lombardy countryside outside Milan and on the island of Pantelleria off Sicily that he furnished in his understated, minimalist style.
Italian fashion buzzed with new energy. New money pumped up the designer names with the help of cutting-edge photographers, top models, and glossy advertising campaigns. Family-operated accessories houses such as Fendi and Trussardi bought into the new way of doing business—they updated their images and stole market share from Gucci, which began to seem old hat. In those days, Prada, where founder Mario Prada’s granddaughter, Miuccia, took over in 1978, was still considered a sleepy luggage company.
Maurizio understood that to remain competitive, Gucci had to find a new direction. Gucci still symbolized class and style, but the glamour it had personified in the sixties and seventies had faded. Maurizio’s mission in Milan became to realize Aldo’s long-held dream of making the Gucci name as famous for ready-to-wear as it was in accessories. Patrizia, an avid consumer of designer clothing, had been pushing Maurizio for some time to hire a big-name designer for Gucci apparel.
“For Gucci, ready-to-wear was the big challenge,” recalled Alberta Ballerini, who had started working on the first Gucci apparel alongside Paolo in the 1970s and is still with the company today as ready-to-wear product manager. Paolo’s sportswear collections had met with success, but they remained a minimal part of the overall business.
One day in the late 1970s, Ballerini recalled, Paolo gathered his staff around him in the design studio in the Scandicci factory.
“My cousin Maurizio has come up with a crazy idea,” he said. “He wants to hire an outside designer.”
“Well, maybe it isn’t such a crazy idea,” volunteered Ballerini.
“He keeps talking about this guy called Armani,” continued Paolo. “Who is he?” When no one seemed to know, Paolo concluded, “We don’t need him.”
Paolo continued to design the collections for several seasons and did bring in a young Cuban designer named Manolo Verde for one season, but as relations soured with his family, he left Florence for New York in 1978 and was ousted from any operational role in the company by 1982. Gucci found itself without a designer for ready-to-wear at a moment when the other Italian fashion names surged in popularity. For a few seasons, the family tried to manage on its own, working with Ballerini and the internal staff, but they soon realized they needed help.
Maurizio again floated the idea that Gucci needed a known designer to revive its image. He knew Armani’s work and thought he could do the kind of casually elegant sportswear that was right for Gucci. By that time, however, Armani had dedicated himself to his own business, which was growing rapidly. Gucci openly started looking for someone.
In leading Gucci into the new territory of ready-to-wear, Maurizio had to tread a fine line: he needed to relaunch the Gucci name in a changing fashion market, but he didn’t want a designer who would overshadow the Gucci brand or alienate the traditional customer. He wanted Gucci to be recognized as a trendsetter without losing its identity as a luxury house.
In June 1982, Gucci hired Luciano Soprani, a designer from Italy’s central Emilia-Romagna region who had distinguished himself with a limited color palette and expertise with wide-weave, gauzy fabrics, to design its ready-to-wear. Maurizio prepared the company for its first fashion presentation in Milan that fall. He wanted to establish Gucci’s presence in the Milan fashion network—away from Florence, which he viewed as provincial.
Gucci presented the first Soprani collection, which featured an Africa theme, in Milan in late October 1982. Unmoving mannequins posed in tableaux decorated with 2,500 red dahlias imported from the Netherlands. It was an instant commercial success.
“I’ll never forget that first presentation,” recalled Alberta Ballerini, the longtime Gucci employee who helped develop and coordinate the apparel collections. “The showroom stayed open all night and all these exhausted buyers kept coming in with swollen feet and we were all working around the clock. Everybody bought so much, too much; we sold an incredible amount. That was the beginning of a glory period,” she said.
The Italian press praised Gucci’s new direction as keeping pace with the times: “In the moment of crisis, Gucci shed its Florentine roots and turned its sights on Milan as a laboratory for new ideas and new entrepreneurial strategies,” wrote Silvia Giacomini in La Repubblica. “They decided to enter the star system of Milan fashion, taking advantage of all the resources the city offered.”
“Gucci is drastically updating its image,” wrote Hebe Dorsey for the International Herald Tribune after v
iewing the collection. With Aldo uncharacteristically home in Rome with the flu, Maurizio explained the company’s new direction to the respected fashion journalist.
“We want Gucci to set trends instead of following them,” Maurizio explained. “We are not fashion designers and we don’t want to create fashion but we want to be part of it because fashion today is the vehicle to reach people faster,” he said.
But Dorsey didn’t rave about the Soprani influence and had trouble picking a theme out of the plethora of looks Gucci presented.
“The new image is a sharp departure from the classic—and classy—leather-skirt-with-colorful-silk-blouse image. The new style had several facets, including a Colonial look—a fashion takeoff from Agatha Christie’s ‘Death on the Nile,’” Dorsey wrote. She noted that the new coordinated Gucci luggage in white and beige, without the GG monogram, was the most noteworthy part of the tableaux.
Maurizio hired Nando Miglio, who ran a leading fashion communications and advertising agency at the time, to produce a campaign—a sharp departure from Aldo’s strategy of personal contacts. When Aldo saw the images by noted fashion photographer Irving Penn, he blew up.
“It’s clear he doesn’t understand the least bit about what Gucci really is,” said Aldo, fuming and firing off a stinging letter to Penn. But Aldo was too late. The campaign, featuring a top model of the period, Rosemary McGrotha, posing against Penn’s signature white background, had already been committed to a wide range of fashion and lifestyle magazines. Maurizio refused to cancel it. The next four campaigns, one of which featured Carol Alt, were shot by Penn’s student, a young Bob Krieger, in the same vein. The new images promoted clean, fun, sporty fashion—just the kind of look Aldo said he wanted back in the seventies. They had little to do with the sexy power look of Gucci promotions today.
The House of Gucci Page 13