Nearly Dead, Twice

Guccio Gucci worked in London hotels and watched what wealthy guests travelled with. Then he went home to Florence and, in 1921, started making it.

That is the third origin story in this subject that begins with somebody doing an unglamorous job and paying attention. A packer folding other people's dresses. A boy sweeping a shoe shop. A porter noticing luggage.

By the 1980s the house was close to worthless, and it had done it to itself.

The family were at war, publicly and legally and eventually criminally. And the name had been licensed onto hundreds of unrelated products, because licensing is the fastest way to turn a reputation into cash. Every deal made money. Collectively they destroyed the thing that made the products worth buying.

This is worth stating as a rule, because it keeps happening. Over-licensing converts reputation into revenue at the cost of the reputation. Each cheap object carrying the name is a small lesson to customers that the name means less than they thought, and those lessons accumulate invisibly until one day the brand cannot charge what it used to and nobody can say exactly when that changed.

Then Tom Ford arrived in the nineties, and the interesting question is what he actually changed.

Not the factories. Not the leather. Not the archive. What changed was that the clothes, the advertising, the stores and the casting all started arguing for the same specific idea at the same time, after years of arguing for nothing in particular. The idea was sex and confidence, and you could have disliked it, and you could not have failed to notice it.

Coherence across every surface is what people experience as a brand being alive. Its absence is what they experience as a brand being tired, and no amount of quality manufacturing substitutes for it.

Two decades later Alessandro Michele did it again in the opposite direction: maximalism, vintage romance, pattern on pattern, a complete rejection of the sleekness that had rescued the house the first time. And it worked, again, enormously, for years.

Which tells you something about why houses swing between extremes. A new creative director is hired, implicitly, to be different from the last one. So success in one direction produces a hard turn in the other when the numbers cool. It explains a rhythm that looks like taste and is really organisational: maximalism follows minimalism follows maximalism, at intervals that match the tenure of a creative director rather than any change in what people want.

The conclusion is uncomfortable and, I think, correct. A brand is not an asset. Assets do not stop working when nobody has anything to say.

Gucci has been near-worthless twice and among the most valuable companies in fashion twice, with the same name, the same Florentine workshops and the same archive throughout. The variable each time was whether somebody in charge had an opinion worth hearing.

Which is either alarming or encouraging depending on where you are standing. If you own a great heritage name, it is alarming. If you are starting with six hundred euros, it is the best news in this subject.