The House of Gucci

by Sara G Forden

  “The fact that Gucci had taken the initiative to hire an American woman of her stature—that made heads turn,” said Gail Pisano, senior vice president and general merchandising manager of Saks Fifth Avenue.

  “She had a vision, a merchandising background, a passion for fashion, and she understood the New York customer. Because of her, top merchants such as Burt Tansky, Rose Marie Bravo, and Phillip Miller started paying attention. It became clear something was brewing,” Pisano said.

  Some thought Mello was crazy for leaving her prime spot in New York to join the crazy, unpredictable Gucci family.

  “She can never turn things around,” one unnamed New York retail executive told Time magazine. “The name is too far gone.”

  Mello’s move to Gucci marked the beginning of a wave in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as leading European fashion houses increasingly sought out American and English design talent. A young English design duo, Alan Cleaver and Keith Varty, was already turning out trendy, lighthearted styles at Byblos, the popular label owned by Italy’s Genny SpA group in Ancona on the Adriatic coast. Over the next decade, American designer Rebecca Moses was hired for the Genny signature label, while several years later British designer Richard Tyler would replace Cleaver and Varty at Byblos. The Gerani family of Cattolica, also on the Adriatic, contracted American designers Marc Jacobs and Anna Sui for their labels, while Ferragamo turned to Stephen Slowik to rev up its apparel line. Behind the scenes, Prada, Versace, Armani, and others recruited graduates from top U.S. and British design schools for their design teams, and budding talent from Belgian design schools was beginning to be recognized as well.

  At Gucci, Mello became the magnet that attracted other young talent. She hired Richard Lambertson, a young, New York-based designer from Geoffrey Beene with a background in buying and accessories who had also worked on product development for Barney’s. David Bamber, who is today creative services director at Gucci, recalled he was happily working for Calvin Klein when Mello called him.

  “I hadn’t thought of moving,” Bamber said. “But at my first meeting with Dawn she went through the whole process of what she was trying to do at Gucci. I was very impressed with her and thought to myself, this has to be something serious.” A few months later, he had moved to Milan to join the growing design team.

  Mello’s own arrival at Gucci was rocky, however. Maurizio—typically—hadn’t told most of the Gucci employees that Mello was coming. In particular, he hadn’t told Brenda Azario, who supervised the design staff for the apparel. When Maurizio fled to Switzerland, Azario took on the coordination of all of Gucci’s collections, approaching her new responsibility with courage and determination. When Mello arrived in the morning, Azario left that afternoon, in tears.

  “It wasn’t so much that Dawn Mello was American or that she didn’t speak the language,” said Rita Cimino, “it was the way Maurizio presented her, or rather didn’t present her. And if that wasn’t enough, Maurizio had already encouraged her to visit some of our suppliers, who immediately called us and asked us what was going on. It wasn’t pleasant.”

  Maurizio finally called all the workers in Florence together to present Dawn Mello to them. By that time, they were full of misgivings. Amid rumblings and grumblings and calls to keep quiet, one of them stood up: “I just want to know why we have to listen to you now,” the workman complained. “First it was the ‘schoolteacher,’” as the Florentine workers had nicknamed the court-appointed chairman Martellini, “and now an American signora from New York.” Before he could finish, he was shushed by his colleagues and told to sit down.

  Maurizio, enthusiastic about his coup in bringing Mello to Gucci, and anxious that she not lose heart, took very good care of her. He furnished a beautiful apartment for her in Milan’s chic Brera neighborhood that overlooked Giorgio Armani’s garden and took her to lunch regularly in the city’s top restaurants.

  Maurizio personally accompanied Mello on visits to many of Gucci’s longtime manufacturers and taught her about the leathers, the tanning, the way the bags were stitched together. She learned from him about Gucci’s traditions and roots. “Maurizio was always touching the hides and having me touch them and talking about mano, or hand—the feel of the leather,” Mello said.

  Having blazed her trail through the tough world of New York retailing, Mello tried not to let the reactions of Gucci’s staff discourage her. She had her mandate from Maurizio and confidence that his dream for Gucci was viable. She simply rolled up her sleeves and got to work.

  “The first thing I had to do was understand the company,” she recalled. “The family had taken away a lot of the historical value and promoted a lot of low-level people into important jobs.” Morale was a disaster, she said. “It took a long time to convince the workers in Florence about what we wanted to do. Once we did, though, they were great.”

  Maurizio was pleased with his new team. In addition to Dawn Mello, he had brought over Pilar Crespi, former public relations director for Italian label Krizia in New York, as his new communications director. Carlo Buora, who had been at the sportswear company Benetton, became Gucci’s new executive vice president for finance and administration. In 1990, Maurizio hired Andrea Morante—who had become his new star—as Gucci’s managing director. After leaving Morgan Stanley in 1989, Morante had moved to Investcorp at the invitation of Kirdar, who had been impressed with Morante’s campaign to buy out Maurizio’s relatives and hired him to oversee the new investment. He had another reason for bringing Morante over to Investcorp. Kirdar had already seen that the relationship between Paul Dimitruk and Maurizio Gucci had gone beyond an impartial business relationship, and he felt that Dimitruk was smitten with Gucci, throwing into question his allegiance to Investcorp. When a photo of Paul Dimitruk appeared in the Financial Times in 1989 alongside the news that the Investcorp executive had been nominated vice chairman of Gucci, Kirdar took the Investcorp executive off the Gucci account—despite the protests of both Dimitruk and Maurizio—and put Morante in his place. Dimitruk, who disagreed with Kirdar’s decision, resigned in September 1990.

  “Nemir wanted someone who knew the Gucci story intimately, but was less ‘in love,’” recalled Morante. “I was ready for a change and very glad to come over.”

  Investcorp had made Morante an offer too good to refuse: a position on the senior management committee and a mandate to work side by side with Maurizio. “It was an exception because Investcorp never allowed its management to get involved in the business,” Morante said. He went to Milan to help Maurizio hire his new team and restructure the commercial and administrative aspects of the business. He also opened talks to reacquire Gucci’s franchise in Japan and started streamlining commercial and logistical systems. A strong working relationship grew between the two men, and inevitably, Morante too became impassioned by Maurizio’s dream. It didn’t take long for Nemir Kirdar to question his loyalty to Investcorp.

  “It became clear that I too had fallen ‘in love’ with Gucci, not with Investcorp, and Nemir was convinced that I was too much on Maurizio Gucci’s side,” recalled Morante.

  At the next annual management committee meeting in Bahrain in January 1990, Kirdar called Morante into his office. He offered him an exciting new position within Investcorp—to move to New York and work on the acquisition of Saks Fifth Avenue. The catch? Kirdar wanted Morante to start the new job the next day.

  Morante raised his eyes to look out of the picture window behind Kirdar’s desk, which framed both the ocean and the desert in one stunningly beautiful scene. “I was torn,” Morante said. “I had all these people who were looking to me as a reference point: Dawn Mello, Carlo Buora, and all the others we had spoken to or whom we had asked to join Maurizio’s team.” He explained the situation and asked Kirdar to give him sixty days to tie things up.

  Kirdar, his green eyes severe, looked at Morante. “You don’t understand, Andrea, I am giving you twenty-four hours. This is the only way you can prove to me where your loyalty lies,�
� Kirdar said. “You have to show me that you are an Investcorp soldier.”

  “I can’t do it in twenty-four hours,” Morante said flatly.

  Kirdar looked at him silently, got up from behind his desk, and came toward Morante, opening his arms and wrapping them around him in a passionless bear hug.

  “It was his way of saying goodbye,” Morante said.

  When Morante called Maurizio in Milan to give him the news, Maurizio hired him on the spot. He glowed with enthusiasm about his new team, which he called “i miei moschiettieri,” or “my musketeers.”

  11

  A DAY IN COURT

  The morning of December 6, 1989, Maurizio, two lawyers at his side, walked up the concrete steps leading into the cavernous, echoing halls of the Milan courthouse. The three men took their places in the front row before Judge Luigi Maria Guicciardi of Milan’s Court of Appeals. To Maurizio’s right sat Vittorio D’Aiello, one of the city’s top criminal lawyers and almost a fixture in the Milan Tribunale with his mop of white hair and the sweeping black robes of his profession. To his left sat Giovanni Panzarini, Maurizio’s civil lawyer, eyes half closed in concentration. Maurizio sat silently in his gray double-breasted suit, hands crossed tensely in front of him. The men stiffened slightly and stood as a buzzer sounded, announcing Guicciardi’s arrival. After taking his place at the judge’s bench, Guicciardi announced his decision: “In the name of the Italian people, the Court of Appeals of Milan…”

  Maurizio nervously pushed his glasses up more firmly on his nose and clenched his teeth—the next words Judge Guicciardi would pronounce would either wipe the slate clean of all his judicial troubles, or leave him with an indelible mark on his reputation and a hefty tax bill. Although he had emerged relatively unscathed after his conviction little more than a year before for falsifying his father’s signature—with a suspended sentence and no criminal record—the sentence of the Court of Appeals was his last chance to clear his name of the charges. Maurizio held his breath and watched the tassels on the judge’s robe.

  “…in reform of the sentence issued by the lower court, absolves Maurizio Gucci of all the charges against him.”

  The words shot through Maurizio’s mind like rays of sun after a thunderstorm. He had won! Not only had he survived all the legal attacks from his relatives, now two and a half years after he had been forced to flee Milan on his red Kawasaki, he had cleared his name. Maurizio threw his arms around D’Aiello and wept. Maurizio’s Investcorp partners were pleased and comforted by the decision—and didn’t really want to know the details. Miraculously, it seemed, Maurizio’s promises that he would overcome the accusations against him had proved true. Several Investcorp executives recalled that Maurizio had seemed extremely confident about the outcome even several weeks earlier.

  Others were stunned by the verdict. The case against Maurizio had seemed airtight. Two eyewitnesses had testified against Maurizio. Roberta Cassol, Rodolfo’s former secretary, had described in detail how the signatures had been forged by her then-assistant, Liliana Colombo. Giorgio Cantini, a custodian in Gucci’s Scandicci offices, had testified that the share certificates had been locked in his safe on November 5, 1982—the day Rodolfo had supposedly signed them over to Maurizio. Cantini said the shares had stayed in the safe until after Rodolfo’s death in May 1983, when he handed them over to Maurizio. Furthermore, during the course of both the trial and the appeal, four separate court-ordered handwriting analyses had determined that the signatures did not remotely resemble Rodolfo’s script—but were similar to Colombo’s. Finally, the prosecutor had even analyzed the date of the fiscal stamps affixed to the share certificates at the moment of the alleged transfer—the stamps had been issued by the government printing office three days after Rodolfo’s death! Despite all the evidence against Maurizio, he had won, his lawyers arguing valiantly that Maurizio’s warring Florentine family had plotted against him. They cast doubt on the handwriting analyses; they debunked Cassol’s testimony, saying she sought revenge after Maurizio had fired her; and they raised the possibility that Rodolfo had another key to the company safe in Cantini’s care. They even suggested that the government printing office had inadvertently released the stamps, which were commonly preprinted, before the stated date. Had their reasoning been enough to convince the judge? In his verdict, Guicciardi said it was impossible to prove beyond doubt that the signatures had been falsified. Maurizio was absolved for lack of sufficient evidence.

  “It was the worst decision I had ever seen in my entire life,” said a government lawyer, Domenico Salvemini, who fought the decision fiercely, taking it all the way to Italy’s highest court, La Corte di Cassazione, where he was turned down. “I have my ideas about what happened, but it isn’t correct for me to say,” said Salvemini, whose friends recall he became so bitter over the decision he nearly abandoned his career. With time, he became more philosophical. “Sometimes you get ruled against—that’s life,” Salvemini said years later.

  Maurizio—ecstatic about his victory—resumed his duties at Gucci with a renewed spirit while Mello and her assistant, Richard Lambertson, began to learn the ups and downs of Italian manufacturing. Maurizio liked Lambertson and took him under his wing, too, introducing him to the Florentine factory workers and showing him about the leathers.

  “He took me into the factory in Florence and said, ‘Richard is OK,’ so we’d go back and forth together. Once we spent an entire week just doing the luggage collection,” Lambertson recalled. “Maurizio was fanatical. Everything had to be perfect, down to the last detail. We cleaned up all the hardware and even developed a GG initial that went on the screws for the handbags.”

  Mello and Lambertson visited Gucci’s manufacturers around Florence, who began to confide in them and teach them their business. Many of Gucci’s products were unevenly priced, they learned. The silk scarves, for example, cost more than the elaborately stitched handbags! They later discovered one of the reasons for the erratic pricing was a system of payoffs to Gucci employees who brought profitable business to regional suppliers—and expected a kickback for it.

  Mello, mystified in many ways by the new world she had found herself in, started receiving anonymous phone calls at night. “Signora, sono stanco di pagare il signor Palulla,” an anxious voice said night after night. “I am tired of paying Mr. Palulla.”

  “I knew nothing about all this, but it wasn’t long before I figured out the decisions that needed to be made,” Mello said. She went to Maurizio and told him what she had learned. He agreed to make changes, though he didn’t always move as quickly as he should have.

  Mello soon realized that Gucci to the Florentine manufacturers was something like the queen bee to her swarm—they coddled her, served her, acquiesced to her often-unreasonable requests—and benefited from her. It was widely known in the artisan community that from time to time the suppliers of Gucci bags would slip a handbag or two out the back door and pocket the sale, one of the invisible perks of the trade.

  “Gucci is an icon to Florentines,” Mello said. “It is a brand they covet, not just another client. The power that goes along with the possession of that icon is not easily understood.”

  To help catalog what had been lost, Mello wanted to create an archive, something sequential and organized beyond the few old random photographs and samples she had found. She had already collected a few items culled from London flea markets, a rich source for retro fashion; young English girls were scouring the flea markets for men’s Gucci loafers to wear themselves.

  “These girls were buying the men’s loafers for themselves,” Mello recalled. She and Lambertson picked up the cue and redid the women’s loafer, making it sportier and more hip. “We changed the women’s last to the men’s last, made the vamp higher, and we did it in suede in sixteen different colors,” Mello said.

  One day, Mello and Lambertson drove up into the hills around Florence looking for a jewelry manufacturer who had worked for Gucci in the 1960s. When Mello and Lambertson pu
lled up in front of the place they had been told about, they discovered a wrinkled old man stoking a coal-burning stove in a small silver jewelry workshop. His eyes lit up as they explained their mission. He went over to a little safe and began to take out drawers full of Gucci jewelry he had made over the years.

  “We sat on the floor in awe and went through drawer after drawer,” said Mello. “It was wonderful. He could easily have sold everything for five times over what it cost him, but he knew someday someone would want to restore the brand—he had saved it all for that day,” said Mello, who hired the little old man to start manufacturing for Gucci once again. “That was when we began to realize what we had,” she said.

  Then they turned to the bamboo-handle bag, the famed Model 0063. Enlarging it slightly to make it more practical, they also added a detachable leather shoulder strap and produced it in calfskin leather (for $895) and crocodile (for $8,000). For fall, they shrank it, manufacturing “baby” bamboo bags in satin, kidskin, and suede in a rainbow of colors from bubble gum pink, canary yellow, and purple to red, navy, and basic black.

  Mello was also the first person at Gucci to take the Prada phenomenon seriously. Prada had begun to gather momentum in the mid-eighties when it began to attract a small following of Milan fashion insiders. In 1978, Miuccia Prada had invented an innovative nylon bag made from parachute material that had proved a simple, yet revolutionary concept at a time when most handbags were stiff, boxy, and made of leather. In 1986, a young woman who worked in Gucci’s design office under the supervision of Giorgio and his wife, Maria Pia (who had assumed a larger role in product development after Paolo’s departure), brought a sampling of the nylon Prada handbags to a design meeting in Scandicci.

  “Prada was beginning to become a name among Milan’s fashion elite,” recalled Claudio Degl’Innocenti, whom Maurizio had recently hired to develop a new range of gift items and coordinate production. The soft nylon bags were scornfully disregarded as the insignificant products of a Milan merchant—they had nothing to do with the refined, highly constructed leather bags Gucci produced.