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When De Sole got to Florence, there was only one key person left on the design team after the Investcorp revolution: Tom Ford, born in Texas, raised in Santa Fe. What Ford did in the next six years — moving the image of Gucci from rather sad and out-of-date to dead sexy and of-the-moment — was a revolution too. De Sole's role in design: to stand back and let Ford go. Famous in Gucci lore is the story of how, during their first month working together, Ford threw De Sole out of a handbag meeting. De Sole got the message.
"Our ideology is that design is very important to our company," says De Sole. "That's how Tom and I have approached it." Design is so important that Ford has 4 million stock options while De Sole has just 1.25 million.
What makes Ford more valued than the ceo? His absolute control over the Gucci image. Here's an example. Each season, when fashion editors arrive in Milan for the new collections, Ford sends flowers to welcome them. This February the flowers were white roses arranged in straight rows in rectangular vases. At the Paris Gucci store the next month there were rectangular vases with rows of white roses. And last week at the Basel trade fair, the Gucci booth had rectangular vases with rows of white roses. That's control.
The Gucci image is based on Ford himself. "People are buying into your dream," Ford explains. "I mean, a pair of black pants is a pair of black pants. If you go to the Gucci world you're buying into a different world from the Versace world. To create that world sucks the soul and personality out of a designer. The Gucci stores look like my house. My sofas are in all the Gucci stores all over the world." And the reason Gucci is sexy is that Ford is sexy. At the recent opening party for the Gucci-sponsored Les Années Pop exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris, the exhibition itself was fairly empty. But in the restaurant where Ford was — gridlock.
Now the success of Gucci depends on Ford's ability to reinvent Yves Saint Laurent. "Our primary goal is to make Yves Saint Laurent as profitable as Gucci," says De Sole. "We're obsessed with it." If they fail, De Sole will be little more than what he considers Arnault to be: a one-brand man.
The big question for industry watchers: Is there enough of Tom Ford to go around? Ford's first collection was only somewhat reassuring. He chose to play it safe — with sexy versions of Saint Laurent's famous Le Smoking jacket and minidresses with body-wrapping straps. Reactions ranged from polite (the Americans) to downright hostile (the French). "I've had a little French resistance," Ford says. "I knew it was going to be tough. They're big shoes to fill, but the thing is I'm not trying to fill the shoes. I'm not trying to be Yves."
In addition to doubling his workload Ford, who designs Gucci from London, had to learn how to work in France. The atelier, the production system, the government's 35-hour limit on the workweek all presented new challenges. "It was a true struggle to actually get that first collection produced," Ford says.
Off the runway, things moved faster. To give them more control, the De Sole-Ford team terminated deals with more than 100 licensees and bought back key licenses for shoes, ready-to-wear production and distribution, and jewelery and watches. Ford designed a new format for the YSL stores; the first prototype is in the Bellagio Mall in Las Vegas, the second opened last month in Costa Mesa, California. This fall, New York's Yves Saint Laurent outlet will be the first store to feature the fully redesigned look. Other key locations, including London and Milan, will follow soon after. New stores are nice, but without the right products they may as well be museums. Fortunately, when the new stores open this fall they will be filled with pieces from one of the best collections shown in Paris. Ford's fall offerings featured ruched silk blouses, fringed skirts and off-the-shoulder peasant dresses. And everyone loved it. Almost.