Gucci

Gucci was founded in Florence in 1921 by Guccio Gucci, who began his career as a luggage porter at London's Savoy Hotel and translated what he learned about discerning travellers into a Florentine leather workshop on Via della Vigna Nuova. The original product was equestrian-inflected luggage and small leather goods for an aristocratic Italian clientele — riding crops, the bamboo-handled bag (1947), the horsebit loafer (1953), all rendered with the unmistakable Florentine craft DNA. The house went through five decades of family ownership and turmoil before Tom Ford's tenure (1994–2004) reset Gucci as the global emblem of sex-positive 1990s glamour. Frida Giannini sustained that vocabulary into the 2010s; Alessandro Michele's 2015 arrival rebuilt it again — maximalist, eclectic, vintage-rich, GG-monogrammed, bringing the brand to its highest revenue in history. Sabato De Sarno took over in 2023 and has been pulling Gucci toward a quieter, more wearable register. Gucci's current owner is Kering, the French luxury group; revenue routinely sits in the €9–11B range, making it the largest house in Kering's portfolio. Despite the corporate scale, the workshops in Scandicci outside Florence still operate at couture-tier craft, and the GG monogram remains one of fashion's most universally recognised logos. Few houses have reinvented themselves so many times without ever losing the architectural language Guccio Gucci built a century ago.