“SEX is so 1990s,” Frida Giannini declared as she walked off the Milan
catwalk last month and into her plain-white design studio, where magazine
editors and buyers from Harrods, Selfridges and Saks Fifth Avenue pored over
her latest menswear collection.
“I’m interested in the brain, not the body,” Gucci’s chief designer said.
The brain is one of the few organs that fashion designers tend to ignore,
especially at Gucci.
In recent years the label has embraced a libidinous aesthetic with the
desperation of a sex addict, prompting critics to accuse the firm of “porno
chic”. One advertisement featured the label’s “G” logo shaved into a female
model’s pubic hair.
But Giannini is a new designer and this is a new Gucci. After what she and new
chief executive Mark Lee concede have been a “messy” few years in which a
star designer and chief executive have been let go and replaced with a
series of designers and managers who themselves were fired after only a few
months in the job, the best-known label in Italian fashion is back with a
more youthful, playful look, but a seriously grown-up business plan.
“This is a new era,” said Giannini, 34, as she ran her hands along racks of
her latest 1950s-style bold-check suits. “We’re going back to our Italian
roots. It’s about humour, eccentricity, irony, nonchalance. We’re not so
Paris Hilton any more.”
The Hilton reference is a dig at her predecessor, Tom Ford, the charismatic
Texan who used a “splash ‘n’ spend” mix of sex and celebrity to rescue Gucci
from near-bankruptcy in the 1990s. Ford’s razzle-dazzle revival was so
dramatic that even after he refused to renew his contract following a
squabble about money and creative control, senior Gucci executives continued
to laud him as an alchemist who turned the base metal of a horse-bit loafer
into fashion gold.
The truth was his departure plunged the company into such a crisis that
executives had little choice but to revere him – and probably secretly wish
they’d kept him on.
A new chief executive, Gia-como Santucci, was appointed and he hired Briton
John Ray and Italians Alessandra Facchinetti and Giannini to design
menswear, womenswear and accessories respectively.
Santucci soon left and Facchinetti and Ray followed after their first
collections were greeted by some of the worst reviews the label has received.
Last year, two years after Ford left, Giannini was the only woman left
standing.
What a difference a year makes. Now that Giannini is design chief for the
entire label, she and Lee are writing a new – and even more profitable –
chapter in the history of the brand.
Sales were up 16% in 2006 and now exceed £1.5 billion for the first time.
Leather goods sales rose 19% last year, shoes by 21% and ready-to-wear
clothing by 19%. Growth was strongest in the US – up 20% in the final
quarter – and in Asia, excluding Japan, up 16% . European sales rose by 12%.
It is a sign of their confidence that Giannini and Lee are, for the first
time, prepared to criticise Ford. In an interview with The Sunday Times,
Giannini dismissed Ford’s dark, aggressively sexual chic as as too shallow
and too American for a brand that is the essence of rich, Italian glamour.
“Showing off the skin at any cost – the woman with the high heels, half-naked,
stepping out of a limousine with black glasses – is over,” she said.
Ford’s own look, with his stubble, sun-bed skin and tailored jacket-with-jeans
“uniform”, was “too perfect, too much of a total look” for a brand that sums
up effortless glamour.
She poked fun at Ford’s partying and obsession with celebrity, which ended up
with him guest-editing an issue of Vanity Fair and casting himself as a
cover star, appearing alongside Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley –
both naked, of course.
“Tom is a party guy. He was the PR of himself and also of the company. I am
not a party girl, not the PR of myself and I don’t care about it,” she said.
Lee described Ford’s vision as “the dark days” when the Gucci man and Gucci
woman swapped their natural home – the streets of Rome and the beaches of
Capri – for the nightclubs of New York and LA. “We need to let the light and
warmth back into the brand,” he said.
Now that she has swapped Ford’s brothel-creepers for strappy sandals, Giannini
is relishing rediscovering la dolce vita. “I’m changing from sexy to
sensual,” she said. “I can be more sensual moving my hands in my very
Italian way or talking in a particular voice than I can by wearing a dress
that is slashed to the waist or a shirt that is undone to the waist.”
She is introducing more casual clothing and sportswear and developing “the
more optimistic, more eccentric attitude of the brand that is a key part of
our history but which was not developed enough in the past”.
She points to the bold-check suits and Andy Capp-style flat caps that she sent
down the catwalk in Milan last week. “It’s more rock ‘n’ roll, less
nightclub.”
Her next women’s collection will feature jaunty, fish-print patterned dresses
and silver stars. “There will be more prints and colours,” she said. “There
will be flowers on evening gowns or fishes or coloured stripes. It’s very
funny and very joyful. I’m introducing this attitude of joy.”
Giannini is also revamping jewellery and luggage. “I want to expand luggage,”
she said. “Men, in particular, need new bags – for sports, for laptops, for
cameras.”
While ruling out copying Gucci’s competitors and expanding into hotels – “too
dangerous” – and mobile phones – “too mass market”, she plans to push the
brand into new areas, such as furniture.
Gucci ads no longer offer a hedonistic, sex-fuelled fantasy, but instead show
a more relaxed style, with soft-focus images of models, haloed in sunlight.
The new carefree, less self-consciously cool look is something Giannini
embraces. She proudly sports wonky, stained teeth and ties back her hair
roughly after her morning swim.
While Ford worked large and lived large, scarcely sleeping as he raced from
Milan to Madison Avenue to Beverly Hills and back again, Giannini insists on
seven hours’ sleep a night and says her idea of fun is cooking pasta at home
for her husband and friends.
The new Gucci aesthetic may reflect her own style, but isn’t she worried that
the dramatic move away from sex and more sex risks confusing customers who
have come to love Gucci’s flesh-is-more style?
“Gucci man and Gucci woman have grown up,” she said. “They have relaxed a bit.
I want to show less effort.”
But surely sensuality is more boring than sexiness?
“Not at all. People who can say something with their brain are never boring.”
Nor, it seems, are they short of money. Giannini’s new look is selling.
Operating profits last year exceeded £400m.
The firm’s newly established e-commerce division is particularly strong,
recording revenue growth of 65% last year, albeit from a low base.
By the end of this year Gucci will have 226 directly operated stores – 70% of
its revenues come from wholly-owned boutiques – including 16 in China – and
6,000 employees, with 1,000 in the Tuscan region where the company is based.
A recent Millward Brown Optimor BrandZ survey ran-kedGuccithe fifth most
valuable luxury brand in the world, the most valuable Italian luxury brand,
and the 89th most valuable brand in any category after such behemoths as
Coca-Cola, GE and Sony.
At current growth rates, Lee predicts that sales will top £2 billion by 2010
or 2011 at the latest. Small wonder The Wall Street Journal recently named
the “little known” Giannini as one of its 50 “Women to Watch”.
She may want a break with the past but, for Giannini, there is one area where
she would like to copy her predecessor.
“I would love to create a new era like Tom did.
“When he arrived in the 1990s, he was unknown. Nobody knew this guy from
Texas. Then he became a star.”
BURBERRY LOOKS TO LUXURY
THE luxury-goods industry is booming.
Armani’s operating profits rose by almost one-fifth last year; the
privately owned Versace says it has been hitting its targets earlier than it
had expected; Prada’s sales were up 7.5% in 2006; and Britain’s Burberry is
trying to cash in on the boom. In the words of chief executive Angela
Ahrendts, the company is ‘turning up the luxury’.
Burberry’s beginnings could scarcely be further removed from the glamorous,
glitzy world of posh handbags and patent leather belts. It made trench coats
for the British Army in the first world war, and for decades was seen as
being decidedly dowdy.
But for the past decade, Burberry has been aiming at far younger customers –
and at those who are happy to splash out big sums to be seen wearing the
right label.
Part of the strategy has involved the building of Burberry’s Prorsum brand – a
name that can win a place on the fashion-show catwalks even if it doesn’t
actually account for many sales. Prorsum accounts for less than 2% of
Burberry’s total revenues, but it gives the company a profile that can be
used to jack up prices and sales lower down the range.
A second strand of the Burberry approach is to increase the proportion of its
sales accounted for by accessories: margins on things such as sunglasses and
umbrellas are higher than on clothes. For Burberry, accessories account for
little more than a quarter of revenues; at Gucci, the share is nearer 80%.
And third, Burberry wants to double the number of outlets it has in the US
within the next four or five years. At the moment, it has fewer than 50
shops of its own and a similar number of outlets in other people’s stores.
