“Maurizio had a very strong viewpoint about what everything should look like,” recalled Ford. “Gucci was round and brown and curved and soft for a woman to touch. I kept wanting to do black!
“Everybody I had talked to said, ‘Get out!’” Ford said.
On a trip to New York he even had his chart done by a fashionable astrologer who catered to several other designers. “Leave Gucci, there is nothing there for you!” she told Ford.
As the classic vs. fashion debate raged, De Sole and Ford quietly agreed to take the fashion route.
“It was a calculated risk, but the only way to go,” said De Sole. “Nobody needs a new blue blazer.”
Ford realized that for the first time in his life, he had total design freedom over all the products of an important—if tarnished—luxury name.
“Nobody was worried about what the product was going to be—the business was in such bad shape that nobody really gave the merchandise a thought. I was left with a completely open door,” Ford said later.
He still cringes when he thinks about his first solo collection in October 1994, saying that it took him a season to shake off Mello’s and Maurizio’s influence and call up his own design aesthetic. The show, held once again in the Milan Fiera, featured feminine circle skirts with flowerpot motifs and tiny mohair sweaters, a sweet take on Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday—but a far cry from the hard-edged look of Gucci today.
“It was pretty awful,” he admitted later.
And then, suddenly, in the midst of it all, the wind changed. Gucci store managers around the world noticed it immediately.
“Less than six months after Maurizio had packed his bags, the Japanese arrived,” said Carlo Magello formerly of Gucci U.K. “They had revised their thinking on Gucci. Whereas for a year and a half before they had been buying Louis Vuitton, all of a sudden they started buying Gucci!”
“Demand bounced,” agreed Johannes Huth, a young Investcorp executive who had recently joined the Gucci team. “All of a sudden they couldn’t keep the bags on the shelves.” Maurizio’s conviction had proven true. The production logjam became dramatic.
De Sole, who had been bumping along dusty back roads outside Florence and climbing the Tuscan hills seeking out new and old suppliers for Gucci, knew he had to move fast. He persuaded disillusioned manufacturers who had dropped Gucci to come back and brought in new ones. He offered them incentives for quality, productivity, and exclusivity. He recast production and technical procedures to get the system running again through some simple planning, ordering ahead for some of Gucci’s traditionally popular products that he knew would sell. In the meantime, Ford had given a new twist to some of Gucci’s classic items. He shrank the backpack designed by Richard Lambertson, which was a roomy bag with backstraps, a bamboo carrying handle, and external pockets with bamboo closings. The new mini version was a smashing success. When De Sole received a phone call from Gucci’s store in Hawaii saying that the new minibackpack was selling like hotcakes, he called Degl’Innocenti.
“Claudio, this is Domenico. I want to make a stock order. I want three thousand black minibackpacks!” When Degl’Innocenti protested, De Sole said, “Never mind, I am ordering them for myself. Do it!”
As bamboo supplies ran short for the signature handles, Gucci sought out new suppliers in addition to their traditional sources. The bamboo was still bent by hand into handles by artisans working downstairs in Scandicci with a blowtorch, holding the stick of bamboo over a hot flame and gradually shaping it into a graceful curve. At one point, an entire lot of bamboo handles sprang straight again—prompting a flood of complaints from customers and stores. The artisans fixed the bags, Gucci found better suppliers, and shortly afterward Gucci was producing minibackpacks at the rate of 25,000 a week.
“We were sending out a truckload of minibackpacks a day,” recalled Claudio Degl’Innocenti. “We managed to do it, with the people that were there and a good mix of American method and Italian creativity and vice versa.” He chuckled. “We hadn’t become geniuses overnight, but perhaps we were a little less stupid than everybody thought we were!”
Since 1987, Investcorp had invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Gucci and hadn’t yet delivered a return to its investors. What Investcorp had envisioned as its entrée into high-level European deal making had begun to feel like a seven-year curse! Feeling pressure to make a profit for its Gucci investors, Investcorp looked for ways to unload the business. Pressed to explore all solutions for a quick exit, in early 1994 Investcorp seriously considered merging Gucci with the watchmaking operations of the inimitable Severin Wunderman—but ultimately the two parties disagreed about the value of the companies and Wunderman’s role, and a deal never came through. In the fall of 1994, Investcorp presented Gucci to two potential luxury goods buyers: Bernard Arnault’s LVMH and the Rupert family’s Compagnie Financière Richemont, which controlled the Vendôme Luxury Group, owner of Cartier, Alfred Dunhill, Piaget, and Baume & Mercier, among other labels. But despite forecasts of better sales—for the first time in three years, Gucci broke into the black by $380 thousand in 1994—the presentations to luxury goods firms did not attract sufficiently high offers. Investcorp wanted no less than $500 million for Gucci, but the offers came in much lower, between $300 million and $400 million.
“Then the prevailing psychology was, ‘There might be some juice left in Gucci, but how hard do you have to squeeze to get it out?’” recalled Toker.
Kirdar even seriously thought of asking the Sultan of Brunei—who had bought the twenty-seven sets of matching luggage—if he wanted to buy the entire company, lock, stock, and barrel.
While Investcorp pondered Gucci’s future, Tom Ford hit his stride as a designer and churned out some eye-catching designs. In addition to the fast-selling minibackpack, his Gucci clog captured attention and sold well. In October 1994, what Harper’s Bazaar called his “toweringly wicked” stiletto generated waiting lists all over the world as customers clamored for the shoe.
“Tom knew how to keep a few hot things running,” observed his former assistant, Junichi Hakamaki. “Every season he came up with two great shoes and two great bags. His antenna was always out, he always looked for the next thing,” he said, recalling how Ford constantly fed his small design team with old movies, tear sheets from magazines, and objects from flea markets, showing colors, styles, and images he felt were right for Gucci. Ford would walk in and drop the clips onto their design tables with a flourish, saying, “Here! This is what we need for Gucci!”
“There were some flops,” Junichi admitted. “He did the clog in fur and it looked like a hairy slipper—we all laughed so hard!
“He was extremely ambitious,” Junichi continued. “You could just see he wanted to succeed. When we would have meetings, it would be as though he were on television—he would wear a suit, his voice was louder, you could tell he was promoting his image. When he is in front of people, he is on!”
Ford began to develop his own style, opening it up from the few hot items that had sparkled each season to an overall approach that could shape a complete collection across all product categories. He used films to inspire him and to communicate his ideas to his design assistants, sometimes watching the same film over and over again to immerse himself in the mood it projected. He began to ask himself and his design team the following questions: “Who is the girl wearing this outfit? What does she do? Where is she going? What does her house look like? What kind of car does she drive? What kind of dog does she have?” This approach helped him create an entire world and make the hundreds of thousands of decisions he needed to make in order to shape Gucci’s new image, a process he would find alternately exhilarating and exhausting.
Ford also traveled constantly, always on the lookout in every city he visited for the next new trend. He sent his staff to comb flea markets and directional shops in cities around the world. He would come home in the evenings to the Paris apartment on the Left Bank, where he and Richard Buckley had moved
from Milan. Buckley, who continued working as a journalist in the fashion sector, provided Ford with a wealth of information and helped give Ford perspective on where the rest of the fashion houses were going. Buckley also clocked the celebrities and what they wore and spent hours at the FNAC listening posts on the Champs-Elysées, scouting great music for Ford’s fashion shows.
“What happens next is here now,” said Ford. “You have to be a part of your time and make it your job to sense it and then turn it into a thing!”
He rolled out his first solo men’s collection during the seasonal Pitti Uomo menswear trade fair in Florence at a small, intimate fashion show in Gucci’s historic Via delle Caldaie offices. As journalists sat in folding chairs under the frescoed ceilings in the upstairs room where Gucci artisans once stitched their bags, Ford sent muscular male models in skintight, brightly colored velvet suits down the carpeted runway, their metallic patent leather moccasins flashing in the lights. He knew he was onto something.
“I will never forget the look on Domenico’s face when the man in the pink suit walked out on the runway,” Ford said later. “He was shocked! The model wore a pink mohair sweater, really tight, and velvet pants and the metallic shoes. Domenico’s mouth fell open. He was stunned.”
As the press applauded enthusiastically, Ford saw his moment. For the first time in the four years he had been at Gucci, he walked out onto the runway and took a bow, a pert little smile on his face as though he had just thought of a joke to tell someone.
“I had so much pent-up energy,” Ford recalled. “I had never been allowed to walk out on the runway when Maurizio and Dawn were still there—I just decided, this is my chance! I didn’t ask anyone’s permission, I had done the show, designed the clothes that I felt were right, and I just walked right out there. Sometimes in life you have to take things if you want to move forward!”
What shocked De Sole thrilled the fashion press. The next day De Sole, his wife, and his two daughters pored excitedly over the rave reviews as they traveled to Cortina D’Ampezzo in Italy’s Dolomite mountains for a skiing holiday.
The momentum around Ford and what he was doing with Gucci began to build. When the press and buyers took their seats for Gucci’s women’s shows in March, they chatted and gossiped in excited expectation under the sparkling chandeliers of the Società dei Giardini, a Milan garden club, instead of within the gaping hall of the Fiera. The Società dei Giardini usually opened its doors to Milan’s upper-crust social set, rather than the international fashion crowd. Twenty-three years earlier, tutto Milano had celebrated Maurizio’s wedding to Patrizia in those very rooms. That evening, tension buzzed inside the tall French doors leading into the show hall. Everybody was curious to see what Ford would do. Ford had signed up fashion’s most sought-after producer, Kevin Krier, and hired top models for the first time.
“Then, it was a big deal for us to be having a show, to have top models, to have a professional producer,” Ford recalled.
As the room plunged into blackness, percussive, driving music beat out through the loudspeakers and a bold white spotlight focused on the runway. In that instant, model Amber Valletta stalked out. The audience gasped. She was a smashing young Julie Christie! Valletta wore a lime green satin shirt unbuttoned nearly to her navel and a pair of low-slung, skintight blue velvet jeans, with a lime green mohair coat. Her strutting feet wore the new cranberry patent leather pump with a stacked heel. Her tousled hair hung over her eyes, and her lips, slightly parted, gleamed pale pink.
“Ohhh, this is going to be fun,” thought Gail Pisano, senior vice president and merchandise manager of Saks Fifth Avenue. The audience oohed and aahed as their chairs vibrated with the music and the girls stalked the runway under the glaring spotlight, each one more beautiful than the next.
“It was hot! It was sex!” said Joan Kaner, senior vice president and fashion director for Neiman Marcus. “The girls looked like they had just stepped off someone’s private jet. You just knew that wearing those clothes would make you look like you were living on the edge—doing it and having it all!”
The sultry, wet-lipped look, velvet hip huggers, satin shirts, and mohair jackets charged onto the covers and inside spreads of fashion magazines around the world. “The effortless sexuality of it all had a chill factor that just froze the audience to their seats,” Harper’s Bazaar wrote, and The New York Times’s fashion critic Amy Spindler dubbed Ford “the new Karl Lagerfeld,” referring to the German-born design director hired in 1983 to revamp Chanel.
“I knew the collection would be a hit from the moment I started working on it,” said Ford later. “I put all my energy into it and I just knew that I had figured it out. It changed my career.” But it wasn’t until Ford went into the showroom the next day that he realized just how successful the show had been.
“You couldn’t get through the door!” he said. “The showroom was mobbed. It was complete and total hysteria. Buyers were coming out of the woodwork, with no appointments; some of them hadn’t even seen the show, but they had heard about it and wanted to come.”
The jet set quickly wriggled into Gucci clothes—Elizabeth Hurley stepped out in Gucci’s black patent leather boots and “bad girl” faux fur; in November 1995, Madonna wore Ford’s silk-blouse-and-low-slung-pants ensemble to receive her MTV music video award; Gwyneth Paltrow made her fans swoon in his sleek red velvet pants suit. Pretty soon, Jennifer Tilly, Kate Winslet, and Julianne Moore were just some of the stars being spotted around town in head-to-toe Gucci. Even the top models were clamoring for Gucci off the set. Tom Ford had reached his target.
“Gucci’s history is flashy,” he said. “Film stars, jet-setters—I wanted to take that image and make a 1990s version.”
After his first blockbuster collection, Ford ran through a heady round of press interviews and dinners, and went back home to Paris. He went immediately to bed.
“I came down with a fever and a sore throat, as I usually do after a show, and I lay in bed for a few days,” Ford said. Then he called Domenico De Sole.
“Domenico? This is Tom. I need to talk to you. I need you to come to Paris.” De Sole, worried, agreed.
Ford asked his secretary to book them a good table at an upscale, but not too trendy, restaurant—a place that would be appropriate for an important business conversation. He dragged himself out of bed and dressed formally—shirt, pants, jacket, even a tie—and went to meet De Sole at Le Bristol, the restaurant of the Bristol Hotel.
When De Sole arrived, Ford was already waiting for him at a table in the back of the formal restaurant located on the ground floor of the hotel. It wasn’t the sort of place Ford usually patronized. “There was nobody else in the dining room,” Ford recalled. “Fancy waiters were standing all around and there was candlelight, music playing, and flowers.”
De Sole walked the length of the blue and red floral carpet, past rows of linen-covered tables, to the back of the dining room, where Ford rose to greet him. They chatted awkwardly at first. Ford, noticing De Sole’s discomfort, smiled his pouting smile and said dramatically, “Well, Domenico, I guess you are wondering why I called you here tonight?”
“Yes, Tom, I am,” De Sole replied, twisting his head to stretch the tension out of his neck with a nervous motion Ford would come to know well.
Ford mischievously reached over and put his hand on De Sole’s.
“Domenico, will you marry me?”
De Sole stared back at him, speechless.
“He was shocked!” Ford recalled with a delighted chuckle. “He didn’t really know my sense of humor yet, we had just started working together and he had no idea what I was up to.”
Ford asked De Sole for a new contract and more money.
“I hit him up,” Ford admitted. “I said, ‘Look, things have changed, and I really want to stay here but this is what I need.’” Ford has not revealed the specifics, other than saying “it was a real change professionally in my relationship with the company.”
JUST A
FEW WEEKS LATER, Maurizio Gucci was shot. Rick Swanson learned the news from an Investcorp secretary as he walked into the office that morning.
“I was so stunned, I stopped in my tracks,” Swanson said. It was tragic, as though a young boy had been killed in the prime of his life. To me, Maurizio was always that little kid on the way to the candy store.”
When the news broke, Tom Ford sat in Florence, working on the spring ’96 collection in his new design studio above the Gucci store in Via Tornabuoni. Bill Flanz and Domenico De Sole were working in their offices in Scandicci. Dawn Mello was sleeping in her penthouse apartment back in New York until a friend woke her up to tell her. Andrea Morante had just flown back to London from Milan, where he had been working on a new acquisition. Nemir Kirdar was at home in his London town house, getting ready to go to the office. Around the world, those who had known Maurizio were saddened and perplexed; the man who had given them the chance to shine had met a mysterious and violent death.
Gucci’s public relations office struggled to distance the company from the news, explaining tirelessly to reporters that Maurizio hadn’t been involved in the company for nearly two years, although Milan prosecutor Carlo Nocerino became a regular visitor to Gucci’s Scandicci factory. Day after day, Gucci secretaries ushered him into the old “Sala Dynasty”—which was later dismantled—where he pored through files looking for answers to Maurizio’s mysterious death—answers he never found there.
Investcorp hesitated, wondering if fallout from Maurizio’s murder would scramble their plans to take the company public by selling shares on the stock market. But the furor over his death gradually subsided and Investcorp forged ahead with the listing.
Investcorp realized that if Gucci was going public, it needed its own chief executive officer. In 1994, Kirdar had initiated and then abandoned an executive search for an experienced luxury goods manager from outside. Not only had the right candidate been difficult to find—those who spoke Italian didn’t have the breadth of skills he wanted—but he realized no right-minded executive would join a company that was up for sale. Kirdar started looking inside Gucci. At the recommendation of several Investcorp executives, who liked De Sole’s hands-on, can-do attitude, his eyes settled on Domenico De Sole.
The House of Gucci Page 35