26 Facts Every Fashionista Needs to Know About Gucci

With Gucci officially arriving in Clearfork, the Fort needs to ready itself for a major boost to its options for extravagant and highly fashionable handbags and footwear.

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It’s time for Fort Worth to trade in its leather boots and satchels for honeycomb-patterned handbags and stilettos. That’s right, the House of Gucci has officially crashed the Cowtown fashion scene. The global luxury brand renowned for its signature blend of Italian craft quality and eclectic style opened its doors in the Shops at Clearfork retail center at the end of September. Sumptuously appointed in red velvet and gold-gilded accents, the 4,500-square-foot space hosts a decadent collection of men’s and women’s shoes, luggage, eyewear, watches, jewelry, small leather goods, and, of course, a swoon-inducing selection of handbags. But Gucci’s much more than just merchandise — it’s a heritage brand that boasts a 101-year history of visionary design, business acumen, and charitable giving.

  1. The iconic Gucci double G logo isn’t just Gucci twice as nice — the logo represents the initials of Guccio Gucci, the visionary who launched the label in Florence, Italy, in 1921.Gucci was a family business for 72 years.
  2. In 1998, Gucci debuted the “Genius Jean,” a pair of denim pants that set the Guinness-certified record as the most expensive pair of jeans in the world. The price? $3,134. Alas, the honor didn’t last — seven years later, an anonymous Japanese collector paid $60,000 for a pair of vintage Levi’s.
  3. Through its longtime partnership with UNICEF, Gucci has donated more than $20 million to further the global nonprofit’s initiatives to educate children in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia and gender-empowerment programs.During the pandemic, Gucci worked with UNICEF to help ensure equitable vaccine distribution, in part through its funding of 200,000 COVID-19 vaccine kits.
  4. Gucci clearly belongs to the Bey Hive: Its charitable involvements have included Beyonce’s charitable initiative, BeyGoodForBurundi, which works to improve access to safe water, hygiene, and sanitation in the east African nation.
  5. When Alessandro Michele was named creative director of the brand in 2015, he was an internal hire — he had already spent 12 years designing for Gucci, including several years as the director of leather goods
  6. Kering, Gucci’s parent company, began doubling down on sustainability in 2013. Since then, it’s been named a top sustainable corporation by the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices’ Corporate Knights Global 100 index of the world’s most sustainable companies, and it’s also a signatory to the Fashion Pact, an initiative signed by 32 fashion firms committed to taking concrete measures to reduce their impact on the environment. Gucci’s Fort Worth store continues the brand’s environmental commitment via energy-efficient LED lighting throughout the boutique.
  7. Gucci’s use of the bumble bee symbol has created quite a buzz since creative director Alessandro Michele’s introduced it in his first women’s collection, Fall/Winter 2015. But bees aren’t actually a new design development: Gucci’s use of bee imagery dates back to the 1970s.
  8. It’s a similar story with the butterfly, another symbol re-imagined and re-introduced by creative director Alessandro Michele. The butterfly first appeared in the brand’s original “Flora” print, introduced through a silk scarf designed by Guccio Gucci’s son, Rodolfo, especially for Princess Grace of Monaco.
  9. Grammy-nominated Atlanta musician Radric Delantic Davis, better known as Gucci Mane, says his stage name wasn’t actually inspired by the Gucci brand. Rather, Gucci Mane was the nickname given to his dad by his grandmother, whom Davis says didn’t know anything about the brand when she coined the moniker. But Davis sure knows his way around a Gucci fit. He’s often photographed rocking the double Gs and was even the face of the 2020 Cruise collection.
  10. Although Gucci is a thoroughly Italian brand, it does owe a significant debt to Texas. In the 1980s, Gucci was on the brink of bankruptcy until a talented young Austin-born designer named Tom Ford joined the company. In 1994, he took over as creative director, and his sexy, decadent designs for stars like Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Lopez, and Madonna earned Gucci both critical acclaim and record profits.
  11. Described by Bloomberg as the “Anti-UGG,” the Princetown mule has become a fashion classic. But when the style debuted on the runway during the Fall/Winter 2015 collection, the fur trim fluffing forth from the soles came from wild kangaroo. The material was soon switched out for dyed shearling, and sales soared.
  12. In September of 2017, Gucci entered the home zone with the introduction of Gucci Décor, a collection that includes furniture, accents like pillows and candles, and tabletop objets like small porcelain trays, all infused with an aesthetic Architectural Digest once described as “Elton John meets Italian Renaissance.”
  13. When Guccio Gucci began the business in 1906, it was a high-end saddlery. When Italians began trading horses for cars, he decided to transition to artisanal leather goods. The rest, as they say, is history.
  14. The opening of the Fort Worth Gucci boutique marks the brand’s seventh boutique in Texas.
  15. While boutiques offer the opportunity for a 360-degree, floor-to-ceiling Gucci experience, it’s nothing compared to stepping inside the Gucci-verse, aka the Gucci Garden Galleria in Florence, Italy. Housed inside the historic Palazzo della Mercanzia, it includes a boutique brimming with one-of-a-kind creations and exclusives, a museum that includes both artifacts and art installations, and a restaurant run by three-Michelin-star chef Massimo Bottura.
  16. When former Olympic snowboarder Trouble Andrew segued to art, he developed a playful style that blended graffiti with the logo of his favorite brand, Gucci. He even developed a cartoon-style symbol that became his nom de guerre, GucciGhost. Andrew’s friends warned him that if Gucci discovered his work, he could get sued. But the opposite happened. When Gucci found out about GucciGhost, creative director Alessandro Michele invited the artist to collaborate on a full men’s and women’s ready-to-wear collection including clothes, shoes, handbags, and jewelry that incorporated the artist’s quirky aesthetic and his signature slogan, “Life is Gucci.”
  17. When former TCU quarterback Trevone Boykin was arrested in 2017 following an alleged drunk driving accident, police also found marijuana — tucked into his clothing-filled Gucci bag.
  18. In the 1980s, Harlem fashion icon Dapper Dan dressed many of hip-hop’s biggest stars, draping them in head-to-toe Gucci logos — all completely unauthorized by Gucci. Fast-forward some 40 years, and the tables turned when creative director Alessandro Michele incurred the internet’s wrath when he sent a logo-covered jacket down the runway that harked back to a well-documented Dapper Dan original. Rather than ignore the situation, Michele reached out to Dap, and the result was a 2018 collaborative collection. The partnership continues to this day through the Dapper Dan Atelier Studio in Harlem, where Dapper Dan creates his signature custom pieces for private clients, now with Gucci’s complete authorization — and encouragement.
  19. Looking for vintage Gucci? There’s no need to seek out a vintage store or reseller thanks to Gucci’s online concept store, Gucci Vault. Launched in 2021, the site features archival pieces from past collections dating back to the 1960s, many of them re-imagined with added details like hand-painted elements, making them both vintage and one of a kind.
  20. This summer, Gucci established a new brick-and-mortar boutique — sort of. Called Gucci Town, it’s a single-story piazza with expansive front windows that hosts a shop and an exhibition space for artwork. But it doesn’t exist in the physical world but rather in the metaverse, inside a platform called Roblox.
  21. Gucci joined forces this year with SUPERPLASTIC to roll out SUPERGUCCI, a collection of NFTs sold on the Gucci Vault site. This is Gucci’s second NFT collection; last year’s Aria NFT collection was auctioned off last year. With prices beginning at $20,000, these NFTs were among Gucci’s most expensive ever sold, but it was all for a good cause — proceeds were donated to UNICEF.
  22. In 2000, longtime Women’s Wear Daily fashion writer Sara Gay Forden published The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed. The bestseller details of how the Gucci family lost control of the Gucci company and reveals the shocking story behind the murder of the company’s former CEO, Maurizio Gucci, by a hitman hired by his ex-wife, Patrizia Reggiani.
  23. In 2021, director Ridley Scott released a feature film adaptation of Sara Gay Forden’s bestselling book, The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed. The movie starring Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Salma Hayek, and Al Pacino was a box-office success, earning $156.8 million. But it wasn’t a hit with the Gucci family. After the film’s release, they issued a statement calling the movie “an insult” to their legacy. Tom Ford also was not thrilled. In an essay he wrote for Air Mail, he questioned the film’s accuracy and said that after watching the film, he felt like he had “lived through a hurricane.”
  24. At one point in the 1980s, the floor of Congress was called “Gucci Gulch” because so many lobbyists wore Gucci loafers.
  25. In the biography, In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr., author Wil Haygood reveals that the Rat Pack legend so loved the black leather sofa in the Gucci boutique in Beverly Hills that he had the manager call Emilio Gucci in Italy to ask to buy the couch. Gucci agreed to sell it, but Davis didn’t just want the black couch, he wanted a white one, too. Gucci filled his request, and Davis stationed the sofas in his sunken living room. Whenever a guest commented on them, Haygood writes, “Sammy would grin: ‘Gucci, baby. Gucci.’”
  26. According to Vogue.com, the No. 1 most iconic Gucci bag of all time is the suitcase bag. It was inspired by a set of suitcases designed by Guccio Gucci in the 1930s. The cases were groundbreaking for the time because they featured cotton canvas instead of leather, a necessary switch because of World War II sanctions that affected leather supply. Also making the list: the Soho Disco and the Dionysus.