The owner was Gucci. The headline was always going to be Gucci, just as the Ever Given was destined to dominate the news cycle when the massive ship, one of the largest container ships ever built, got stuck in the Suez Canal back in 2021.
Gucci is, in some ways, the Ever Given of the personal luxury goods trade. With more than 500 stores worldwide and an estimated 2022 market value of $35.3 billion, it's that skyscraper-sized tanker stuck on its side. The entire fashion business took a hit during the pandemic and then recovered, or seemed to, with surprising resilience. Then he encountered something that in its own way was as unexpected as the running aground of a nautical giant blown off course by chance.
In the case of Gucci it was the fickleness of changing taste. When Alessandro Michele, former creative director of the brand, founded in Florence in 1921 as a manufacturer of leather goods for a sophisticated carriage trade and now owned by luxury goods giant Kering, said in an interview with this journalist in 2020 that “ Maybe one day it won’t be relevant anymore,” he was sending a signal to both his bosses and the culture at large.
Michele was a creative savant and was lucky, as he put it, to have survived a quarter of a century in the business by largely following his instincts (or his “stomach,” as he put it). He knew it. The instincts that helped him go from journeyman accessory designer to star were already giving him the desire to keep going. This was largely because society was about to do the same.
The gender game that Michele pioneered (pussy bows, rhinestones, tiger prints and babydoll dresses for men) and that for a brief, dizzying, obscenely profitable moment took Gucci's valuation to great heights, was absorbed for culture with alacrity. Harry Styles in a dress on the November 2020 Vogue cover looked innovative for about a minute. Harry Styles in a dress now would hardly deserve a second glance.
And the not-so-dirty secret of every luxury goods house is that overall sales are not driven by clothing at all, but by leather goods, and not even expensive handbags. People would be surprised how much profit is made on a logo keychain.
Gucci had to right the ship and bring it back to the mainstream. To try, he hired Sabato De Sarno as his new creative director, a man so pragmatic by nature that interviewing him is less like consulting an ancient Greek sibyl, as was the case with Michele, than talking to the engineering director in a shipyard. .
“I love fashion, but I don't love the idea of fashion,” De Sarno said one afternoon before her Thursday show. “I want to make things to wear and wear, and not just things for shows, red carpets or editorials.”
Seen through that lens, he is as much a man of his moment as Michele was of his. Virtually every fashion house that showed in Milan this week made it clear that they understand that consumers, particularly young ones, are no longer as enthusiastic. Pragmatism was the subtext of the best collections, provided by brands as diverse as Prada, Tod's, Neil Barrett and Brunello Cucinelli. In each of these houses there was an emphasis on craftsmanship, which is nowhere as refined as in Italy.
The Little Italy t-shirt cliché turns out to be true: Italians do it better. Yes, there was the Renaissance. But for today's purposes it is the combination of craftsmanship, industrial design and high aesthetic values, which began here at the beginning of the 20th century, when the novel idea of providing luxury goods for the masses arose.
Those early designers, and eventually many others, put centuries-old artistic traditions to industrial use. It is premature to associate what De Sarno is doing with the work of giants like architect and designer Gio Ponti. Still, the momentum is there, and the collection De Sarno presented (a follow-up to a much-criticized preview he presented during the women's wear shows in September) made the case for him as a plausible successor to the narrative-refuting industrial innovators, and focused instead on materiality and craftsmanship.
The criticism of the De Sarno Gucci show was that it was commercial, as if there was something wrong with delving into the Gucci archives and trying out what you discovered. There were versions of the original snaffle moccasin, variously interpreted as soft, lugged soles or as studded brothel vines; enlarged versions of the famous Jackie bag that Samuel Beckett, precisely, once slung over his shoulder; versions of the stylish outerwear Gucci was famous for, albeit presented in “Through the Looking Glass” volumes.
There were also versions of monogrammed GG suits in which the logo receded to become a kind of human gift wrapping, and faux fur coats from earlier designers that referenced de Sarno's love of cozy, protective clothing. (She said she has 240 coats in her personal collection; the coats are her security blanket.)
“I opened the show with the same coat, the same silhouette, the same bag” that she showed during women's wear, De Sarno told Vogue.com, as if she were turning the tables on her critics.
“I don't care about the Instagram moment,” he added in conversation with this journalist, using more spicy language. The Instagram moment, as we all know, cannot be avoided. But that's not what floats Sabato De Sarno's boat.
