Gucci is at a crossroads. It was always the sun in the Gucci Group constellation, infinitely more profitable than Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney, YSL and Balenciaga combined and making more money than ever. Sales leapt by 19 per cent in the past year, though not in ready-to-wear. But perception is all. A fashion brand, like a pharmaceutical one, must keep innovating even to stay still. The glamorous, mediasavvy ghost of Tom Ford still looms over the label which, two years after he departed, suffers from a personality vacuum.
Also hovering are the spectres of overexposure and the unceremonious dismissal, earlier this year, of Ford’s immediate successor, Alessandra Facchinetti, a smoky-eyed, rake-thin 32-year-old Ford protégée and Gucci embodiment. How much longer can Gucci, whose shows used to set the fashion agenda each season, keep firing blanks?
Into this maelstrom pitches Frida Giannini, a diminutive almost-33-year-old accessories designer who joined Gucci from Fendi a year before Ford’s exit. It was Giannini who came up with the wildly successful Flora printed range last summer, an unexpected hit inspired by a sweet archive print that Gucci had originally introduced as a scarf for Princess Grace and which was as far from the brand’s usual brash thrust as Kate Greenaway is from Ann Summers. :image:
This much and no more the industry knew about her, although it also couldn’t help noticing that her scrubbed freckles and shiny, conker-coloured hair didn’t look like the average Gucci accoutrements. For a brand that had been defined by its previous creator’s knack for appearing to live the Gulfstream-jet-and-nightclub lifestyle to which its millions of customers aspired, this seemed especially significant.
On the day we meet she has succumbed to post-show flu and, cocooned in acres of camel cashmere swaddling, while not exactly Kate Greenaway, does not look like the kind of woman who would — as Ford once described his Gucci customer, “pour hot wax over her lover before straddling him”.
She laughs hollowly when I point this out: “You should have seen me when I arrived at Gucci. I had black hair and I was wearing jeans and something beige, with gold sandals. I was the most colourful person in the studio.”
Gucci’s collections will never be her biography, she maintains. Yet she knows that the brand badly needs a new point of view. “And it will get one. There’s a part of me in all my designs . . . I think I represent a new Gucci girl; one who works as well as parties. The new view is probably more European than LA in sensibility, with a different take on sensuality. It’s less out there.”
Giannini, with a 40-strong team, also oversees sunglasses, scarves, luggage and watches as well as the brand’s global advertising (now commissioned out to Craig McDean rather than Mario Testino) and the revamp of the stores, which will edge out the dark, nightclubby atmosphere that Ford introduced and replace it with softer materials (Ford’s dark grey metals are being replaced with Gucci’s traditional brass finishes). Given such influence, it’s a fair assumption that the makeover, while gradual, will be profound.
It’s a high-wire act. Ford’s original blueprint — erotic and decadent — now looks dated, but there are certain immutable facets of the Gucci code, such as black, leather, heels and out-there sexiness, that Giannini can’t ignore, even while she attempts to create a palpable new heat for the brand. This she hopes to do with intrinsically desirable products such as last season’s Flora line and this autumn’s crocodile “Treasure” bag, of which 500 were produced and all had been sold by the end of September.
But even the most covetable items need a narrative thread if they are to weave the magic spell that transforms desirable into must-have.
Giannini’s first ready-to-wear collection for summer 2006 suggested that she may well possess the intelligence to evolve the brand while building on its existing strengths. Not everyone was convinced, but the consensus among the mavens seemed to be with the International Herald Tribune’s Suzy Menkes, who called it “a powerful and accomplished debut that bodes well for Gucci”.
Bursting with prints (a personal Giannini favourite), sweetly feminine and short 1970s-meets-1940s tea dresses, rugby shirts and boyishly narrow suits with puffed shoulders, it certainly drew a line under Gucci’s hackneyed decadence, with the emphasis on flirtation rather than visual rape — cheekily bared backs and legs rather than desperately exposed cleavage and pelvises. Even the shoes — flat boots of cute, clumpy patent and suede platform peep-toes — suggested that Gucci’s sexuality would henceforth be more rooted in reality and wearability.
“After Tom left, everyone’s gut reaction was to keep things the same,” notes Giannini, who lived in Notting Hill during the year that she worked for Ford. “He was an amazing mentor with a perfect vision for the brand as it was then. But a lot of the things that Gucci stood for, such as 9.5cm stilettos, are ten years old.
“What people don’t acknowledge is that ready-to-wear sales were slipping quite a lot even while Tom was still at Gucci, so you have to think, maybe you can look sexy just by baring your shoulders rather than exposing the whole lot. Maybe it’s not about the red carpet but about having a good time with your friends. Maybe the time for wearing shoes that make you feel destroyed after a few hours has passed. And while I’m not anti-celebrity, I’m not a Hollywood girl — and maybe it’s not the moment for just being a celebrity brand.”
You don’t need to spend long with Giannini to conclude that while she may not have Ford’s gift for a provocative aphorism — yet — she has equally pointed views: “To be honest, what Gucci had become . . . well, the footballer’s wife is not the customer of my dreams.”
Of that infamous moment, not long before Ford’s departure, when Gucci looked as though it might teeter over the edge into shock territory, she says: “Those adverts we did with the G logo shaved into the model’s pubic hair — I didn’t really like them. Ultimately, I don’t think it was as right for Gucci as those earlier images that Tom did of Georgina Grenville in a white Gucci cut-out dress.”
If anything, her rise has been even more meteoric than his. Born in Rome to creative, intellectual parents — her father is an architect, her mother teaches history of art — Giannini has fashion embedded in her DNA. Her grandmother owned a boutique and she spent many afternoons after school styling the mannequins. She was encouraged to express her creativity early on by painting flowers all over her bedroom walls, which were whitewashed regularly so that she could reinvent her designs.
Nevertheless, her parents initially thought that their daughter’s fashion ambitions were meretricious. After she got a job as an intern at Saga Furs in Denmark, then moved to Switzerland to design jeans for Swish, they were won over — as she has won the Gucci Group round to transferring its creative base from London, where Ford had installed it, back to Florence, where she lives with her husband of four months, a web designer with whom she shares a 13th-century building: “I’m surrounded by medieval plasterwork and 21st-century plasma screens and computers.”
The Gianninis are an emotional bunch, she says. “And they’re really critical of me. My parents saw the show and my father said that the boyish trouser suits made the models look like lesbians.” She shrugs happily. “Me? I loved the dresses. I feel there’s really something to build on now.”
