The House That Memory Built

There is something almost willfully anachronistic about the scene at the Chiostri di San Simpliciano this April — twelve tapestries arranged beneath the vaulted arcades of a fifteenth-century cloister in Milan's Brera neighbourhood, each one a chapter in the long, improbable saga of a Florentine leather-goods house that became, over a century, one of the most legible symbols in global fashion.

The story begins in service. Guccio Gucci arrived at the Savoy Hotel in London in the late eighteen-hundreds as a bellboy, and what he observed there — the trunks and cases that moneyed travellers dragged across grand-hotel lobbies — planted a seed. He returned to Florence, and in 1921 opened a leather goods store and workshop on Via della Vigna Nuova. The tapestries take it from there.

What follows, rendered with the gravity of Renaissance allegory, is a procession of the house's defining moments: the Bamboo 1947, the Jackie 1961 — originally the Fifties Constance, before Jackie Kennedy Onassis made it entirely her own. The tenures of Tom Ford, Frida Giannini, and Sabato De Sarno each receive their chapter. But Demna punctuates the historical pageant with sly intrusions of the contemporary: in one panel, a leather gaming chair lurks behind a tableau of the designer himself — baseball cap, biker jacket — refining a red coat from his S/S 2026 debut.