In Fond Memoriam of Frida Giannini’s Gucci

“Who is Sabato De Sarno?”

It seems like a rather rude question to ask in a piece dedicated to Madame Frida Giannini, the predecessor of de Sarno’s predecessor, Alessandro Michele.

But I do have a point to make. Because you see, within the curious cornucopia that happens to be creative directorships within the current luxury conglomerate-verse, there’s something to be said of the rise of fashion’s right-hand men. Or, as few and far between as they may be, women.

Think about it, Daniel Lee and Mathieu Blazy were both protégés of the Céline doyenne Phoebe Philo, who, in turn, served as the second-in-command to Stella McCartney during her raucous tenure at Chloé. Pieter Mulier, similarly, worked with Blazy under Raf Simons before making his way onto the top of the Alaïa ladder now.

Before Sabato de Sarno was appointed Gucci’s creative director, he was Pierpaolo Piccioli’s right-hand man for 14 years at Valentino! It’s simply nature’s way of preserving the fashion food chain.

But “Who is Sabato De Sarno?” wasn’t just a meditation on the hitherto unheard-of name. It’s also a 20-minute featurette narrated by Paul Mescal and directed by Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost that hoped to fast-forward the natural maturation process of a newly minted creative masthead into a household name along the lines of predecessor Alessandro Michele.

Hopes that turned to dust as de Sarno departed the label earlier this month.

Being the right-hand man, therefore, also comes attached with its uniquely exasperating set of challenges and one that I’d argue madame Frida Giannini executed with particular panache, paving the way for Gucci as we know it now.

So today, it is the Frida Giannini years of Gucci we look back to, and maybe, just maybe, it may hold surprising answers for its way forward!

An Astute Authority in Accessories

Designing a collection, in many ways, is akin to the act of giving birth. There’s agony, and there’s an affliction, there’s aching for the past and anticipation for the future, and there’s always the risk of the untold horrors one dares not name.

There’s perhaps no one who knows this better than Gianni, who gave birth to her daughter Greta shortly after the unveiling of her Spring/Summer 2014 lineup for the label. And true to form, the collection featured nothing of the frilly, froufrou variety one expects of maternity-inspired garbs.

Instead, audiences were startled by severe lines and cinched corsets, upon first glance a nod to fetishistic gear, but really an ode to the fantasies of a woman and her body subjugated to the ceaseless cravings of a life growing inside. Fashion, after all, is all about desire.

And it is desire that Giannini was able to harness, sometimes to her own detriment. As Sarah Mower of Vogue declares, “Frida is from a different generation than Milan’s other female designers, and she sees fashion from a more pragmatic standpoint. Gucci now is a clearly segmented, businesslike collection with no pretense of being anything other than hip, immediately understandable clothes for a young global audience.”

In other words, clothes that sell, even if it weren’t the critics that were buying them. Mower scathingly adds, “The time for runway fantasia has passed here.”

Because having studied at the Fashion Academy of Rome and then worked at the Fendi design studio in 1997 (that too with the likes of Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri), right at the cusp of when the Baguette had taken the world by storm, Giannini was well-versed in the cultural language of commerce.’

And by 2002, struck by the virality of the viral little bag, Tom Ford himself had handpicked her to be Gucci’s Head Designer for Leather Goods!

Specters of the Past, Spirits of the Future

“Sex slithered down a spotlit runway until one last model stood at its foot in a white jersey evening gown, the garment’s liquid folds undulating over the curves of her body,” writes Robin Givhan of Tom Ford’s final collection for Gucci, pieces from the era still languishing across the eccentric little corners of resale for price-tags well in excess of the five figures.

And indeed, when Giannini took over the position first as Head of Accessories and then as the heads of both men’s-and-womenswear following Ford’s departure (and the ill-fated interregnum of John Ray and Alessandra Facchinetti who graced the roles respectively), the specter of Tom Ford’s sleekly sensual sex appeal still hung heavy over the label.

Gucci, as it stood, was all sensationalism and little sensibility, and Gianni immediately sought to remedy, rather than repudiate, Ford’s legacy.

So, where Ford was the jet-setting high-flyer, Giannini was the quiet control freak, leaving an almost disciple-like following in her wake (Michele, then her accessories designer, insists, “Frida has no doubts.”) with nods to the brand’s almost century-long archives, bringing back the Grace Kelly-beloved Flora print, the Jackie Kennedy-endorsed Jackie bag (yet again), the Horsebit and the Bamboo-motifs on everything from footwear to fragrances, and amping up the logomania factor with her Guccissima (literally translating to “the most Gucci”).

But where Ford’s vision of Gucci was sexed-up and masculine, Giannini’s was, well, kind of hard to pin down. As Nicole Phelps wrote at the time, “The problem with Giannini’s style was the unpredictability of her collections – 1920s’ art deco one season, followed by Arthur Rimbaud-influenced decadence the next, and after that Marella Agnelli’s 1960s’ chic. As Giannini moved from one influence to another, it got harder to decipher what Gucci stood for on the runway.”

And it is all of her disparate little references – pussy-bow blouses here, lacy separates there, geeky spectacles and kangaroo fur-trimmed mules elsewhere – that formed the foundation of Alessandro Michele’s debut Fall 2015 menswear lineup when Giannini’s exit was announced mere days before the big show!

The Oddity of Novelty

True to her origins, Giannini’s biggest success was accessories. Sales of leather goods rose 20.2% during her tenure, and footwear revenues rose 21.2%.

But when it came to ready-to-wear, which was almost always commercial (“If commercial means that you can save jobs, I am more than happy to be commercial,” she retorts), there was such a thing as being too referential, too reliant on the past in an industry that constantly looked to the future.

Yet, isn’t that exactly where we stand now with fashion in its entirety: running on fumes, rummaging through the clearance bins of archival history, and remixing what we find? Giannini’s creations, while ultimately not so novel, were still palate cleansers – “a soupçon of lemon sorbet,” Vanessa Friedman writes.

At the end of the day, when the industry swings so dramatically between its extremities – minimalism one day, maximalism the next, and then back again – it’s the other extreme that feels “fresh” by comparison, not because of its inherent “newness.”

I’d argue it is exactly another Frida Giannini, with her strong accessories game and commercial acumen, that we need at Gucci now—given its slipping spiral of sales following the de Sarno seasons—to get the label, and with that, Kering as a whole, back on its feet.

Because fashion now is as much about business as it is about fantasy (if not actually more so), gone are the days when supermodels would be outfitted to match the six different colors of the new Nokia. The industry’s needs have changed, and with that, so have the designers.