SOME years ago, in the grasping 1980s, there was a famous Gucci board meeting at which blood was spilt. Literally. The Guccis are an Italian family but this saga of fraternal in-fighting was Greek in its dramatic quality.
Wits said that at Gucci you did not wear a suit, you filed it - preferably against your closest relative. Maurizio Gucci was the heir to Guccio Gucci, the company founder, but that did not prevent him being the subject of legal action regarding his inheritance. Aldo Gucci pleaded guilty to federal income tax evasion in the United States, and the Italian courts took control of the company for a time.
Meanwhile, the counterfeiters were busily debasing the Gucci name and logo. In 60 years, the company had gone from a high-class leather goods shop and saddlery in Florence, to Bangkok back streets in which tackiness, not tack, was the style prerequisite. Frankly, if you fancied yourself as a style guru, you did not want to be saddled with any Gucci product.
The fall of the House of Gucci seemed imminent. And yet . . . the fickle gods of fortune decided to play a different game with new players. The bickering cousins had their share of the company bought up by Investcorp, a Bahrain-based investment bank which realised, very wisely, that the name of Gucci, tarnished though it was, still meant something on the fashion scene; an Investcorp handbag was unlikely to have the same cachet. The name was retained, therefore, and so, after the inevitable suit, was Maurizio Gucci. Appointed chairman, he he began to restructure his tottering house.
The first thing he did was the most vital act of all: he appointed Dawn Mello, from the New York department store Bergdorf Goodman, as the company's creative director. Mello - and even the name sounds suitably like the heroine of an exhausting blockbuster who overcomes all difficulties to triumph in the end - did an extraordinary thing: she made Gucci desirable again.
She consigned the vinyl luggage range and the famous red and green stripes to oblivion; she cut the number of items produced from 20,000 to 4,000. She realised that, on the whole, customers who purchased coffee mugs because of a Gucci logo emblazoned on the side were customers the company could, and should, do without.