Longtime collaborator Andrea Morante sheds some light on the events that preceded the murder of Maurizio Gucci.
MILAN — “I want to give credit to Maurizio Gucci, he deserves it,” said Andrea Morante, chairman of independent asset management company QuattroR, which in 2019 took a majority stake in Trussardi.
Morante believes Maurizio Gucci was the first to realize the potential of the Gucci brand at a moment when the luxury industry was nascent. In the late ‘80s, “Maurizio understood ahead of time that the luxury industry was about to embark on and experience a global renaissance. Not everybody was convinced at that stage.” It was a moment of “epochal changes,” Morante said, a time that would see the luxury goods sector make a quantitative leap.
On behalf of Investcorp, Morgan Stanley purchased 50 percent of Gucci’s shares from Maurizio Gucci’s uncle Aldo’s side of the family “in a dramatic and complex M&A series of transactions” that lasted more than a year. “The last one to give up his shares was Aldo Gucci, who felt that he was selling his soul and not his equity stake. He died soon thereafter,” said Morante, who, moving to Investcorp, became a Gucci executive board member and de facto chief operating officer.
At Gucci, this included a total management reshuffle; a clear and international new creative direction; a painful but necessary product repositioning; the purchase of the Gucci Japan license, which was absolutely strategic, and the total revision of the Gucci look, feeding upon its incredible heritage and archives, he explained.
In 1989, Maurizio Gucci succeeded in attracting Dawn Mello, who was then president of Bergdorf Goodman, because “she fell in love with the project he presented her and she left the U.S. and her home for this challenge,” and she in turn hand-picked Richard Lambertson, who was head of Bergdorf’s accessories department, to be design director, and Tom Ford, who was hired to oversee women’s ready-to-wear, seeing his potential — “a young incredible talent.
Mello also kicked off an ad campaign that would inspire both Gucci and its competitors for years to come. “She was looking at the hands of the artisan that was making the moccasins, wrinkled after years of working the leather, and those hands fronted the new campaign. Maurizio made an exceptional choice in identifying Dawn Mello, who with Tom Ford, really turned the brand around.”
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