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The Globalisation of
Luxury Fashion: The
Case of Gucci
John Armitage and Joanne Roberts
Winchester School of Art, University of
Southampton, UK
ABSTRACT This article offers the reader an
encounter with crucial writings on the globalisation of
luxury fashion. In so doing, it introduces an original
conceptualisation of luxury fashion. The historical
meaning of the globalisation of luxury fashion from
Roman times up until the present period is examined.
The globalisation of Gucci, the Italian luxury fashion
brand specialising in leather goods, is then analysed.
Through this case study the complexity of the global-
isation of luxury fashion is revealed. The Italian luxury
fashion brand has from its inception in 1921 drawn on
and absorbed a range of cultures from across the
globe. Globalisation of national luxury fashion brands
is, therefore, far from unidirectional. Rather, such
processes involve a multidirectional flow of luxury cul-
tural influences. Indeed, it is concluded that luxury
fashion itself is a globalising medium of luxury culture.
KEYWORDS: globalisation, Gucci, Italian luxury, luxury cul-
ture, luxury fashion
John Armitage is Professor of Media
Arts and co-Director of the
Winchester Luxury Research Group at
Winchester School of Art, University
of Southampton, UK. John is the
author of Luxury and Visual Culture
(Bloomsbury 2020) and the co-editor,
with Joanne Roberts, of The Third
Realm of Luxury: Connecting Real
Places and Imaginary Spaces
(Bloomsbury 2020) and Critical Luxury
Studies: Art, Design, Media
(Edinburgh University Press 2016).
j.armitage@soton.ac.uk
Joanne Roberts is Professor in Arts
and Cultural Management and
Director of the Winchester Luxury
Research Group at Winchester School
of Art at the University of
Southampton, UK. She is co-editor
with John Armitage of The Third
Realm of Luxury: Connecting Real
Places and Imaginary Spaces
(Bloomsbury, 2020) and Critical Luxury
Studies: Art, Design, Media
(Edinburgh University Press, 2016).
j.roberts@soton.ac.uk
Luxury DOI: 10.1080/20511817.2021.18972681
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Introduction
Luxury is a central concept in the study of fashion, both as an indica-
tor of sumptuousness and as a guide to comfortable living or sur-
roundings. This article offers readers an encounter with crucial
writings on luxury and on one of the most important fashion debates
of the twenty-first century, namely, the globalisation of luxury fashion,
or, the world-wide development and meaning of luxury culture and
the art and craft of fashion, particularly since the nineteenth century.
In exploring those influential ideas associated with luxury and their
impact upon fashion, we trace their entanglement with globalisation
through a case study of Gucci, the Italian luxury brand of fashion and
leather goods, and other key events such as Gucci’s foundation, its
revenues, global branding, sales, and the appointment of Alessandro
Michele as creative director. We conclude with an assessment of the
main changes in luxury fashion and offer an original understanding of
the globalisation of luxury fashion to critically and theoretically aware
readers concerned with contemporary luxury fashion brands such as
Gucci. But let us begin with a definition of luxury fashion.
Luxury Fashion
What is the meaning of the term luxury fashion?
1
Is it an economic
term concerned with luxury goods wherein demand increases more
than proportionately as income rises, so that outlays on luxury goods
become a larger proportion of people’s general spending? Is it an
aesthetic term concerned with the luxurious expression at a time,
place, and in a specific context, particularly in making luxury clothing,
luxury footwear, luxury lifestyles, luxury accessories, luxury makeup,
luxury hairstyles, and the luxury fashioning of body proportions?
Certainly, luxury fashion, conceived in terms of luxury goods, can not
only be juxtaposed with necessity goods, where, once basic needs
are met, demand increases proportionally less than income, but also
with luxury trends, which suggest a unique aesthetic expression that
frequently lasts less than a season. Hence, luxury fashion can be
defined as luxury or superior fashion goods that are distinctive and
industry-supported expressions traditionally tied to the fashion sea-
sons and collections.
Yet luxury fashion has taken on three leading contemporary
senses. First, usually and impartially, luxury fashion means a luxurious
style, an expression that continues over numerous seasons and is
repeatedly linked to cultural movements and social indicators, sym-
bols, inscriptions, class, art, and history where it refers to a distinct-
ive, familiar pattern or a form, normally meaning just the visual
appearance of worked luxury fashion materials, or a way of doing
luxury fashion. However, a second leading contemporary meaning of
luxury fashion has assumed, habitually with a negative insinuation, as
not so much to mean popular, superficial, or trivial, but to mean what
Quentin Bell calls ‘conspicuous outrage’:
2
here near-nakedness,
J. Armitage and J. Roberts
Luxury2
shock, and outrage emerge because of individual luxury fashion
designers who sprint ahead of the luxury fashion of the day, joyfully
present themselves and their clothes as recipients for criticism by
detractors and consumers, and courageously challenge would-be
censors and extant proprieties. Thus we find Alexander McQueen’s
first autumn/winter 1995 presentation, entitled ‘Highland Rape’,
referencing England’s violation of Scotland; McQueen’s models later
teetering around a rubbish pile at the centre of the runway during his
‘Horn of Plenty’autumn/winter 2009 show, which McQueen dedi-
cated to his late mother; and, finally, McQueen’s spring/summer
2010 and last collection that was not only the birthplace of his reptil-
ian armadillo shoes, later favoured by the American singer-songwriter
Lady Gaga, but also the first time a luxury brand live-streamed its
runway show (‘Plato’s Atlantis’) online.
3
It is the tone of disobedience
which differentiates McQueen’s socio-cultural approach (and that of
other luxury fashion designers, such as France’s‘enfant terrible’,
Jean Paul Gaultier,
4
known for his unconventional designs employing
corsets, conical brassieres and gender defying ensembles). This
insistent non-conformity results in a sort of contemporary luxury fash-
ion which, in the case of McQueen, takes it to logical conclusions
which, initially at least, many people found intolerable. The term lux-
ury fashion, however, has a third specific and recognisable use within
visual culture,
5
defined as the interrelated systems of knowledge and
pictorial representation advanced since the Florentine renaissance;
socio-cultural systems influenced by new visual abilities and methods
entailing measurement and ordering conventions used in art and lux-
ury, fashion and business. Moreover, the term visual culture has typ-
ically been used in modern and contemporary advanced societies
since the nineteenth century. And, in its inclusiveness of objects of
study extending beyond the variety of items generally incorporated
within the customary classifications of art, luxury, or fashion, the con-
cept of visual culture denotes a modified explanation of the concepts
and methods required to comprehend these societies and the status
of culture –and the actions and identities of their consumers within
them. Nevertheless, luxury fashion not only has a certain and recog-
nisable usage within visual culture but also as the wide-ranging sub-
ject of twentieth-century and contemporary material-visual practices
that also includes the applied arts and decoration, design, product
manufacture, and print and communication graphics.
Similarly, the production of luxury clothing and fashion accesso-
ries, like any other form of human labour, necessitates the use and
transformation of an assortment of material and intellectual resour-
ces. To illustrate this meaning of the production of luxury fashion
requiring work process (incentive, materials, and talents) and final
product, consider French haute couture (‘high sewing’or ‘high
dressmaking’), which is the manufacture of high-class custom-fitted
clothing.
6
Haute couture is luxury fashion that is made by hand,
The Globalisation of Luxury Fashion
Luxury3
created from high-grade, costly, frequently rare and or strange fabric
and sewn with attention to detail and finished by knowledgeable and
accomplished sewers—often using laborious, hand-finished needle-
work methods. An haute couture garment is always made for an indi-
vidual client and tailored explicitly for the wearer’s measurements
and body posture. In view of the quantity of time, money, and skilful-
ness assigned to each finished piece, haute couture garments are
also described as clothes that have no price tag because the budget
for them is immaterial. In contemporary France, haute couture is a
protected name that may not be used except by individuals and
companies that meet the precise standards of the Chambre
Syndicale de la Haute such as Adeline Andr
e, Alexis Mabille, Dior,
and Givenchy.
Given these three meanings, with the negative senses of popu-
lism, superficiality, triviality, and conspicuous outrage often waiting in
the wings, the term luxury fashion functions in a continually unstable
manner, meaning that luxury fashion’s way of doing things or its style
is sometimes used derogatively to refer to a luxury fashion garment
that too-obviously accentuates a certain formal trait or element, per-
haps borrowed from an earlier luxury fashion designer, luxury fashion
garment, or luxury fashion style.
This last is important since the way luxury fashion is articulated by
one person may be different from the way it is interpreted or used by
another. Within luxury fashion, for instance, interpretation can mean
a luxury ‘fashion statement’. Here, the significance or meaning of
some luxury garment that people own or wear, often something that
is considered new or different, is not only founded upon fashion
materials of numerous sorts, but also put into a form that is intended
to make other people notice. Interpretation can also be used to
explain how luxury fashion designers come to make their luxury fash-
ion designs: they may be said, for example, to interpret a luxury fash-
ion brand in a specific way. In the 1980s, for instance, the late
German luxury fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld was hired by the lux-
ury fashion brand Chanel, which was considered a near-lifeless
brand at the time following the death of the brand’s founder, Coco
Chanel.
7
Nonetheless, Lagerfeld brought the brand back to life, mak-
ing it a success by re-interpreting Coco Chanel’s ready-to-wear fash-
ion line and integrating her ‘CC’monograph into the promotional
language of Chanel. Contemporary luxury fashion design is then
about interpretation in the sense of being about the self-expression
of luxury fashion designers, who use their medium of luxurious mate-
rials to communicate their feelings and attitudes concerning, in the
case of Lagerfeld at Chanel, tweeds, gold accents, and chains.
Consequently, the luxury fashion designer as interpreter translates
one luxury fashion good into another (in Lagerfeld’s case, a near-
dead luxury fashion brand into a thriving ready-to-wear fashion line).
Furthermore, although one may say that the two luxury fashion
goods enter a kind of equivalence, they remain different luxury
J. Armitage and J. Roberts
Luxury4
fashion goods. Luxury fashion designers (and their designs) can thus
be thought of as vessels, channels, or even media through which
other luxury fashion goods speak: the ghostly genius of deceased
luxury fashion designers and designs, or the sensibility and purposes
of those living. Still, luxury fashion design, not to mention luxury fash-
ion history and criticism, whatever their assertions of objectivity or
authority in interpretation, remain speculative and questionable prac-
tices. For whilst it is true that specific interpretations or principles
have not hardened into settled truths within luxury fashion historical
and critical discourse, it is also the case that their truth status is a
matter of on-going agreement or custom rather than of conclusive
scientific proof.
Luxury fashion, as a result, has less to do with the meaning of the
popular, the superficial, the trivial, and the conspicuously outrageous
and more to do with the principles and truths of luxury fashion’s his-
torical, contemporary, and less than critical relationship with mass
culture: the visual-cultural products and forms of production founded
on industrial, reproductive technologies that are consumed in an
equally collective way.
8
For whilst we can consider luxury fashion as
part of the discourse of mass culture, the true status of luxury fashion
is just as ambiguous and open to different meanings and interpreta-
tions as TV programmes and Hollywood movies. Additionally, luxury
fashion often finds itself part of the dispute over the value of mass
culture, of the meaning and importance ascribed to luxury fashion
designers and their designs.
9
This active process of evaluation signi-
fies that the value of a specific discourse concerning luxury fashion
within mass culture or belonging to luxury fashion goods that are dis-
puted is not, and can never be, inherent: value is always bestowed
by someone and frequently through a process involving the power of
companies like Herm
es. On the other hand, luxury fashion designs,
customarily of a traditional and conventional type, that have reached
iconic status regularly appear to hold and radiate their own value as
if it were an inherent property. Herm
es’Birkin tote bag, for example,
handmade in leather and named after the English actress and singer
Jane Birkin (who, in dispute with Herm
es, asked the company to
stop using her name for the crocodile version due to her ethical con-
cerns), emits an aura of wealth, exclusivity, and ultimate luxury fash-
ion brand value that appears obvious (high price), irrefutable (a long
waiting list), and permanent (collectable and rare). This case confirms
the power luxury fashion companies such as Herm
es have in influ-
encing and orchestrating the value assigned to specific goods as
seemingly ordinary as a woman’s tote bag. Thus, in securing this
value over extended periods of time, and promoting such historical
value as the inoffensive sounding ‘heritage’, companies like Herm
es
play a crucial role in the socio-cultural reproduction of luxury fashion.
However, luxury fashion designers and luxury fashion companies
also occasionally generate new evaluations, enshrining and elevating
luxury fashion goods with hitherto unheard of, insecure, or directly-
The Globalisation of Luxury Fashion
Luxury5
denied luxury fashion status. French luxury fashion designer Yves
Saint Laurent’s 1965 ‘Mondrian Collection’, though a homage to the
work of several modern artists, including the paintings of Piet
Mondrian, is an illustration of this production of value through the
novel convergence of modern luxury fashion and modern art.
10
The
value of luxury fashion, it should be noted, is usually a relative con-
cept within examinations of dress, design, and the visual language of
style and its luxurious historical meaning summarised here demon-
strates that a gage or measure of values exists, and that any one lux-
ury fashion good ordinarily finds its status within this scale. Since the
development of the socio-cultural histories of luxury fashion,
expressly since the 1960s, value, meaning, and importance referring
to aesthetic and human qualities or worth have been exposed to cri-
tique from various perspectives. For instance, in 2015, feminists and
other critics in the United Kingdom (UK) successfully campaigned to
persuade the Advertising Standards Authority to ban advertisements
for the Yves Saint Laurent (YSL) company in Elle magazine because
they featured models who were unhealthily underweight, drawing
attention to their visible rib cages, and very thin thighs, knees,
and legs.
Luxury fashion, therefore, must operate today in a sometimes
uneasy relationship with its critics and in a close relationship with
advertising: advertising sells specific luxury fashion goods such as
YSL tank tops as individualistic, often through luxury fashion maga-
zines, for example, Harper’s Bazaar. But, unquestionably, such lux-
ury fashion regimes are all a part of the contemporary globalisation of
capitalism, its marketing strategies, and its consumption patterns
produced by global luxury fashion multinational corporations such as
Switzerland’s Richemont group. Let us turn, then, to the question of
the globalisation of luxury fashion.
The Globalisation of Luxury Fashion
Like the term luxury fashion, the meaning of the globalisation of lux-
ury fashion is at once economic (luxury goods) and aesthetic (luxuri-
ous countenances, clothing, existences, accoutrements, and
bodies). Although initially a concept devised within sociology and pol-
itical history, globalisation has become a significant and powerful
way of thinking about the development of luxury fashion goods, the
meaning of luxury, and the aesthetics of fashionable appearance,
particularly since the nineteenth century.
11
However, vital differences,
along with resemblances, should be recognised between the con-
cept of the globalisation of luxury fashion and several other (more
well-known and traditional) connected ideas, including colonial luxury
fashion goods, imperial luxury fashion services, and the international
history of the luxury fashion industry, its seasons, and collections.
The globalisation of luxury fashion might be thought of as one of a
constellation of terms through which we might try to theorise a sense
of luxurious style, and historically show, in recognisable form, the
J. Armitage and J. Roberts
Luxury6
interconnectedness of the world of luxury fashion and all its pro-
ducers, distributors, and consumers.
12
In general terms the global-
isation of luxury fashion concerns the influence that various parts of
the world of luxury fashion have had on other, sometimes popular,
sometimes conspicuously outrageous, areas of luxury fashion design
and the activities of specific luxury fashion designers. As such, the
globalisation of luxury fashion is not a process that began one, two,
three, or even five hundred years ago. Separate clothing regions in
the world of luxury fashion developed specific socio-cultural systems
and luxurious consumption proprieties thousands of years ago.
Moreover, through such systems, proprieties, and processes, includ-
ing trading luxury goods, the exploration of ‘exotic’fashions, royal
and aristocratic intermarriage, and military victory (recall Alexander
McQueen’s allusion to England’s defilement of Scotland), began the
intermingling of often geographically neighbouring luxurious societies
and fashion cultures and their reciprocal impact upon one another.
Consider the intermixing and mutual influence of ancient luxury fash-
ion in Rome and Gaul (present day France). Rome dressed in brown,
Gaul preferred red. Here, Gaul not only set its luxury fashion against
Rome but also, as the poet Horace put it, thought it most useful to
appraise women’s bodies through their dresses of wild silk and for
them to wear costly Tyrian purple, a reddish-purple natural dye
extracted from the secretions produced by predatory sea snails.
13
The growth of the modern European nation-states, accompanied
by the disciplines of history and the field of luxury fashion history, did
not occur until the nineteenth century.
14
Luxury fashion history, as
the designation given to the historical study of luxury fashion, for
example, does not simply entail considerations of models and run-
ways, collections, and technologies but also such practices as luxury
fashion curation and research, teaching, and the planning for publi-
cation of articles on luxury fashion attitudes, books on luxury fashion
design, and catalogues focused on nationally specific luxury fashion
designers (e.g. France’s Hubert de Givenchy, Italy’s Gianni Versace,
and Great Britain’s Vivienne Westwood).
15
This work is carried out
not by luxury fashion designers themselves but by those working in
scholarly or higher education institutional settings, for instance uni-
versities (e.g. Parsons School of Design, New York) and, increasingly,
luxury fashion history museums, such as The Palais Galliera, also
known as the Mus
ee de la Mode de la Ville de Paris (City of Paris
Fashion Museum). Since the twentieth century, though principally
after the Second World War, luxury fashion history in this sense
became not so much a formal academic discipline as an informal
academic field. Equipped with a non-established curriculum and
non-standard aims and objectives concerning, for example, textile
design, luxury fashion history is today taught at undergraduate and
postgraduate levels. The field thus produces specialists in luxury and
experts in fashion employed in various locations including teaching
fashion design in prestigious fashion schools (e.g. the Istituto
The Globalisation of Luxury Fashion
Luxury7
Marangoni, Milan) and universities (e.g. Central Saint Martins,
University of the Arts, London). Additionally, the field of luxury fashion
history entails the buying and selling of luxury fashion in auction
houses, curation, and conservation in cultural museums (e.g. the
Victoria and Albert Museum, London), and, of late, broadcasting
knowledge about, and pictorial representations of, luxury fashion on
radio, television, the Internet, and social media: FashionTV, for
instance, is an international luxury fashion and lifestyle broadcasting
television channel based in Paris with over 400 million viewers
around the world.
16
Luxury fashion history’s status as an informal
field consists, too, in sets of concepts related to socio-cultural sys-
tems and principles concerning visual skills and techniques, objects
and methods of study involving measurement and the luxury fashion
business, together with some semi-foundational arguments and val-
ues declared to underpin and direct the over-all investigation, such
as the visual culture of luxury fashion.
17
Since the early days of the
field’s development in universities in Europe in the twentieth century,
though, these rudimentary components have advanced and
increased into the arenas of fine art, visual consumption, and the cul-
ture of design and thus far beyond any narrow definition of luxury
fashion.
18
Consequently, given that luxury fashion is now such a
broad field encompassing materials, the applied arts, decoration,
design, product manufacture, and print and communication graph-
ics, it is unlikely that any agreement exists over the main concerns of
the field of study.
Hence, the twin developments of the rise of the modern European
nation-states and the field of luxury fashion history transformed how
the production of the past was seen and assessed: luxury fashion
history became, fundamentally, not a history of people producing lux-
ury fashion but a history of luxury fashion within particular ‘nations’,
while many of the nation states that comprise Europe today did not
exist in official or political terms until the nineteenth century.
Contemplate Italy, founded in 1860, and the idea of the production
of luxury fashion in the Italian renaissance.
19
Signifying the ‘rebirth’or
revitalisation of ancient classical materials, ideas, and values in the
fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, the idea of the production of
luxury fashion in the Italian renaissance arguably remains a dominant
conceptual keystone within any western fashion history centred on,
for example, haute couture. During the Italian renaissance, for
instance, fashion for both men and women was extravagant and
expensive, crafted from velvet, ribbons, and jewels. Popular and
influential across Europe, Italian renaissance luxury fashion was influ-
enced by the art of Michelangelo, Leonard da Vinci, and Raphael: for
women, this meant full, gathered, and pleated skirts, custom-fitted
busts and waists, and, for men, large custom-fitted waistcoats
underneath hand pleated overcoats with wide, puffed, sleeves made
from high-quality brocade.
20
Luxury fashion in the Italian renaissance
thus shaped the field of luxury fashion history and its essential
J. Armitage and J. Roberts
Luxury8
meanings concerning fabrics and assessments of luxury sewing and
fashioned details and finishing before and after its alleged occurrence
in Italy (and in the rest of southern and then northern Europe). It is
essential to state ‘alleged’since the expression Italian renaissance,
unlike the term luxury fashion, only appeared in the English language
from the French in the nineteenth century. Accordingly, people living
in what is now Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries did
not themselves have the term renaissance or its modern senses.
21
Indeed, the original historical meaning of the Italian renaissance is
associated with the nineteenth-century writings of the German aca-
demic Jakob Burckhardt on The Civilisation of the Renaissance in
Italy.
22
Burckhardt’s purpose was to offer a pre-history to an explan-
ation of Germany’s cultural and political pre-eminence which
denoted, he argued, the modern flowering of the roots of European
civilisation seeded in its previous Italian ‘rebirth’. The idea and pro-
duction of the Italian renaissance, therefore, is not only a self-con-
scious and retrospective concept, choosing and highlighting
constituents that play a part in an already established narrative of
events, developments, and meanings, but also, in this, and in the
sense of luxury fashion, a fabrication invented in the nineteenth cen-
tury. Globalising interactions, particularly those built around the com-
missioning of luxury fashion sewers and needle-workers in ‘Italy’
between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, were typically
organised between cities, not nation-states.
23
The centres of rival
luxury garments, fashion and dressmaking, skills and design, and
particularly elite urban activity (e.g. The House of Medici, the banking
family and political dynasty of Cosimo de’Medici in the Republic of
Florence) during the Italian renaissance, for example, were the cities
of Venice and Milan, Florence, Naples, and Rome, which produced
luxurious textiles and fashion designs featuring sumptuous silks and
furs, satin, taffeta, ostrich plumes, and peacock feathers.
The globalisation of luxury fashion remains a chief constituent of
the meaning of postmodern discourse in the present period. This is
because postmodern discourse can be used as a term to denote
developments in the manner of luxury culture and the style of fashion
since the 1960s, though some critics and theorists have maintained
that the geneses of postmodern luxury fashion can be found earlier
in the twentieth century. Postmodern luxury fashion, not unlike some
other interrelated terms (for instance, modern luxury fashion) implies,
occasionally bewilderingly, both to interpretations, or theories of
clothing, and to the clothing itself. For example, one theorist of post-
modernism who considers luxury fashion, Malcolm Barnard, states
that the new fashion collections he considers endeavour to represent
the elements of crisis associated with contemporary identity, mean-
ing, and communication (e.g.: Hussein Chalayan’s‘Afterwords’fash-
ion collection, shown in the Sadler’s Wells theatre in London, which
focused on the involuntary and dramatic impact of mobility and
forced migration (2000)).
24
This critical approach towards previous
The Globalisation of Luxury Fashion
Luxury9
representations of the clothed body is a principal trait of postmodern
thinking which inherently sees its theoretical and critical precursors
retrospectively: in a completed past where luxury fashion once liter-
ally stood for people’s socio-cultural identities. Barnard, explaining
the postmodern theory of luxury fashion, is critical of, for instance,
claims that Chalayan (contemporary luxury fashion designer and
brand) holds that the design and appearance of new fashion collec-
tions could and should just ‘create’their own unmediated reality. In
contrast, Barnard stresses the political and humanitarian effects of
Chalayan’s fashion collections which Barnard calls a postmodern
form of self-expression. A sense of historical, critical, and creative
‘afterness’, consequently, typifies much postmodern luxury fashion
and theorising, as Chalayan’s‘Afterwords’fashion collection and the
prefix ‘post-’implies, and hinting, perhaps, that such fashion collec-
tions uncover the voices, senses, and meanings of luxury fashion
that people are unfamiliar with.
However, the globalisation of luxury fashion is also a significant
constituent of postmodern and contemporary discourses concerning
the endeavour to theorise the repercussions of the diffusion around
the world of numerous technologies for visual representation, such
as TV, film, video, the internet, and social media.
25
Are these global-
ised forms, luxurious conventions, and technical means of fashion, in
the company of their predominantly European multinational corporate
producers, generating a homogenising discourse of value and a sin-
gle mass or world technoculture?
26
Is the globalisation of luxury fash-
ion a process which, though disseminating a homogeneous visual
culture of representation, at the same time, is confirming and
entrenching (through, for example, Facebook, WhatsApp, and
Twitter), the power of specific nation-states and corporations, par-
ticularly those of Europe? Consider that four of the top five global lux-
ury fashion goods multinational corporate producers by sales are
European. France’s LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessey), for
instance, owns the following luxury fashion brands: Louis Vuitton,
Fendi, Bulgari, Loro Piana, Emilio Pucci, Acqua di Parma, Loewe,
Marc Jacobs, TAG Heuer, and Benefit Cosmetics.
27
What has
become obvious is that the history of modern luxury fashion (e.g.
Louis Vuitton travel trunks) has had significant transnational aspects
which never were and never could be limited to an invented ideal of
undisputed national heritage, growth, and communication. Modern
French luxury fashion designers such as Yves Saint Laurent (himself
born in Algeria), for example, sought out times and places of inspir-
ation beyond Europe such as Morocco, an Arab country in Africa
colonised by France in the twentieth century. Designing a luxurious
life and a fashion world not wholly tainted by Europe, Saint Laurent
created and advertised his first ‘Safari Jacket’(which borrowed male
codes of dress to revolutionise women’s fashion) in 1967–68.
28
The
philosophical denial is evident: it was the already existing French
colonial empire uniforms and outfits worn by occidental men in Africa
J. Armitage and J. Roberts
Luxury10
that supplied the condition and opportunity for Saint Laurent to
romanticise a mythical time and place (‘the safari’) as somewhere
seemingly beyond the known and increasingly globalised world of
luxury fashion governed by the European nation-states.
The Case of Gucci
Gucci is an Italian luxury fashion brand specialising in leather goods.
But what is the meaning of the globalisation of luxury fashion for this
brand founded by Guccio Gucci (1881–1953) in Florence, Tuscany,
in 1921?
29
Undoubtedly, there is the economic dimension, given that
Gucci luxury fashion goods regularly generate yearly revenues glo-
bally in the billions of United States (US) dollars (Deloitte 2020). There
is also the aesthetic dimension: for instance, Gucci is not only fre-
quently ranked in the top five luxury brands, but its luxurious expres-
sions, clothing, lifestyles, and accessories are so popular with
customers that it remains the highest selling Italian luxury fashion
brand. Furthermore, as a luxury fashion brand with a long social his-
tory, Gucci is at the forefront of the globalisation of luxury fashion.
Owning and controlling 487 directly operated stores globally, Gucci
is an important and influential player in the global growth of luxury
fashion goods, inclusive of wholesaling its products through franch-
ises and luxury department stores.
30
Today, therefore, the meaning
of Gucci as a luxury fashion brand is valued in billions of dollars
through its aesthetics of stylish expression that generate sales on a
global scale. How has this Italian luxury fashion brand and purveyor
of leather goods born in the early twentieth century become such a
global economic and creative industry leader?
The globalisation of Gucci as a luxury fashion brand is not some-
thing that we can easily theorise but we can point to Guccio Gucci’s
sense of fine leather goods with classic styling, and historically dem-
onstrate, in familiar form, the interconnectedness of Guccio Gucci’s
world of luxury fashion: an Italian immigrant hotel worker in Paris and
London, Gucci noted the luxurious luggage guests brought to the
Savoy Hotel, visited British luggage manufacturers, and established a
shop in his birthplace of Florence in 1921.
31
Employing skilled arti-
sans combined with industrial methods of production and traditional
fabrication, the growing global distribution and consumption of Gucci
luxury goods impacted the world of luxury fashion in numerous
ways: during the 1950s and 1960s, for example, fashionable celebri-
ties such as Jackie Kennedy and conspicuously outrageous film
stars like Peter Sellers turned Gucci’s luxury fashion designs into glo-
bal status symbols. Consequently, such activities as movie stars pos-
ing in individually fashioned Gucci clothing, designer accessories,
and footwear for lifestyle magazines around the world contributed to
Gucci’s developing reputation. As such, the globalisation of Gucci as
a luxury fashion brand is a process that commenced in the mid-
twentieth century. Yet Florence remains a distinct clothing city-region
distinguished for high quality materials in the world of luxury fashion
The Globalisation of Luxury Fashion
Luxury11
where it has established specific production and retail, organisational,
and industrial systems and luxurious consumption and style, craft,
finishing, and stitching proprieties since the fourteenth century.
Furthermore, through such systems, proprieties, and processes,
including the expansion of Gucci to include stores in Milan and
Rome, the brand’s exploration of finely crafted leather accessories
such as handbags, luxury brand collaborations (e.g. the Gucci Rolls
Royce luggage set was introduced as early as 1970), and acquiring
other luxury brands (e.g. Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche in 1997),
instigated the melding of increasingly geographically distant luxury
fashion brand operations and their joint effect upon one another and
their societies and cultures. Consider, for instance, the blending and
shared influence of Gucci’s luxury fashion operations in Italy and the
US in the 1950s. Gucci’s Italian stores featured such excellently con-
structed leather goods as the brand’s iconic ornamented loafers,
whilst, in the US, Gucci initially expanded its luxury fashion horizons
by establishing its first US administrative offices in New York City in
1953.
32
At that time, Gucci’s US office did not so much set itself
counter to its Italian headquarters but began assessing the power of
celebrity bodies and film stars’dressing in silks and wearing expen-
sive knitwear adorned with Gucci’s signature double-G symbol com-
bined with prominent red and green bands.
The rise of the modern European nation-states such as Italy in the
nineteenth century predates the history of Gucci as a luxury fashion
brand. However, this does not mean that Gucci as a luxury fashion
brand has no history or that we cannot study it. For example, Gucci
is not simply involved in the production of runway collections but
also such practices as curating and researching its own luxury fash-
ion history, in teaching about, and publishing on, its own luxury fash-
ion outlook, design, and designers (e.g. Dawn Mello, Tom Ford, and
Steinunn Sigurðard
ottir in the 1980s and 1990s). This effort at Gucci
is performed by scholars of Gucci fashion design and history at the
Gucci Museo in Florence. Since 2011, Gucci’s own fashion history
has thus become an informal academic sub-field located within the
Gucci Museo at the fourteenth century Palazzo della Mercanzia in
Florence’s Piazza della Signoria.
33
Furnished with archives and cul-
tural experiences relating to, for instance, print and suitcase design,
Gucci’s fashion history is nowadays teaching all who visit it about
Gucci craftsmanship. The informal academic sub-field of Gucci fash-
ion history is, therefore, presently producing authorities in luxury wall-
paper and professionals in everything from fashionable travel trunks
and jewelry to watches, not to mention further educating fashion
school and university teachers of design in Italy and elsewhere.
Moreover, the informal academic sub-field of Gucci fashion history
has involved the founding, in Florence in 2018, of the Gucci ArtLab,
a school for luxury fashion crafts and cultural technologies.
34
More
recently, Gucci has become concerned with disseminating its know-
ledge about innovation and creativity in luxury fashion under the
J. Armitage and J. Roberts
Luxury12
direction of Gucci’s Creative Director, Alessandro Michele. Designed
to seed Gucci with a young, visually literate, social media savvy, and
dynamic attitude, classes of young workers fashion leather and velvet
for a global luxury lifestyle founded on Michele’s signature neo-
Romantic hippiedom and shaman-esque tapestries, wild-flower pat-
terns, rainbows, and birds.
35
Gucci’s fashion history and luxury
standing at present consists in the re-conceptualisation of the brand
through a new educational system and company principles regarding
fashion abilities and factory procedures, objects and methods of
study entailing the shaping of bamboo bag handles and the luxurious
colouring of leather, along with some creative arguments and factory
values claimed to reinforce and guide the learning and communica-
tion, teaching, and experience, such as the idea of bringing Gucci’s
culture of luxury fashion creation under one roof. It is still the first
phase for Gucci’s growth of its ArtLab in Florence, and, no doubt, in
the future, these basic elements will evolve and multiply into other
areas of luxury fashion, such as challenging Italy’s culture of patri-
archal fashion processes traditionally based on small groups of geo-
graphically isolated workers. Far outside any restricted
characterisation of luxury fashion work, Gucci’s wide-ranging arena
today includes materials and values; the applied arts and diversity;
decoration and inclusivity; product and culture; manufacture and cof-
fee bars; and print and art. In short, the old consensus has been
replaced by a newly emergent one less concerned with patriarchy
and homespun feelings and more with high-tech innovation,
empowerment, and accelerated craft processes.
For this reason, the informal academic sub-field of Gucci fashion
history is altering how the production of the brand’s history is seen
and evaluated: Gucci’s fashion history is becoming, in large part, not
merely a history of people such as Alessandro Michele creating
Gucci fashion but a history of Gucci fashion beyond the growth of
the modern European nation-states. No longer constrained by the
nation-states that constitute Europe currently, the global ‘world’of
Gucci does not exist in formal or geographical terms. Consider the
world of Gucci in the twenty-first century, and the idea of the produc-
tion of Gucci fashion in the world brought about by Michele. We
might, for example, refer to the reawakening or revival of Gucci
through Michele’s love of natural motifs and spiritual notions. Or we
might consider Michele’s values concerning the production of Gucci
fashion in this world as debatably the central theoretical lynchpin
within its contemporary fashion history. Side-stepping nineteenth-
century haute couture on the one hand, Michele’s creative direction
and exceptionally potent aesthetic nevertheless returns to the nine-
teenth century through his conjuring up of the world of Roman anti-
quarian and apothecary shops, their hidden jewels, and objects of
curiosity. In Michele’s world, for instance, Gucci fashion for both men
and women is exaggerated yet eclectic, high-priced yet retro, crafted
from flock-velvet and faux-fur.
A la mode and prominent across the
The Globalisation of Luxury Fashion
Luxury13
world, Michele’s world of Gucci fashion is inspired by, among other
things, the art of the Belle Epoque, twentieth century American and
European cinema, and 1940s zoot suit tailoring: for contemporary
gender-neutral bodies, this implies 1950s sunglasses and 1960s
visored helmet hats, masks, antique rings, eyebrows dyed lemon yel-
low, silicon teardrops, and spiked leather collars. Gucci fashion
within the world built by Michele is accordingly remaking the informal
academic sub-field of Gucci fashion history and its core meanings
relating to cloth such as wool and evaluations of luxury tailoring and
shaped details and finishing. But we should remember that Michele’s
contemporary world of Gucci, the world that is in fact the renais-
sance of the brand, only entered the language of Gucci and, conse-
quently, luxury fashion, in 2015 when he was appointed creative
director. Therefore, people residing in what is today Michele’s world
of Gucci in the twenty-first century may not themselves have the
term renaissance or its contemporary senses in mind when they
think of Gucci. Yet, the accumulated historical meaning of the world
of Gucci is bound up with more than its contemporary renaissance.
Dawn Mellor and Tom Ford, Steinunn Sigurðard
ottir, and Frida
Giannini, to name only four former Gucci creative directors, have all
contributed to the historical meaning and renaissance of the brand.
In the 1990s, for instance, Tom Ford, to take only the most famous
of Gucci’s creative directors before Michele, introduced Halston-style
hipsters, skinny stain shirts, and car-finish metallic patent boots,
which were visually represented by the then contemporary French
stylist Carine Roitfeld and photographer Mario Testino.
36
Michele’s
world and rebirthing of Gucci is, therefore, in part, the contemporary
culmination of the work of earlier European and American Gucci cre-
ative directors. The idea and production of the world of Gucci and its
contemporary renaissance, then, can only be a self-aware and nos-
talgic notion, with Michele selecting and emphasising elements that
fit into a previously instituted account of Gucci events, developments,
and meanings. It is not that Michele’s world and renaissance of
Gucci fashion in the twenty-first century is a fiction. Rather, it is that
the globalisation of Gucci fashion today is no longer about ‘Italy’but
about the assembling of alternative worlds that are organised neither
between cities nor between nation-states but between global luxury
brands. The amorphous ‘centres’of competing luxury branded
clothes, fashion and tailoring, talents and design, and specifically elite
global activity (e.g. Franc¸ois Pinault, the French billionaire business-
man and founder of the luxury group Kering, which owns Gucci)
within the world that is the rejuvenated Gucci, for example, are the
global luxury brands of Bottega Veneta and Fendi, Cartier, Ray Ban,
and Omega, which produce luxurious leather goods and fashion
designs showcasing polished jewelry, urbane sunglasses, and
sophisticated watches.
37
Does the globalisation of the Gucci fashion brand have anything
important to tell us about the meaning of postmodern discourse
J. Armitage and J. Roberts
Luxury14
today? Certainly, Michele’s luxury fashion discourse draws on the
world of postmodern culture, yet his wild style at Gucci is not a crit-
ical interpretation of romanticism or a grand theory of flowers, birds,
or animals. Instead, to locate the origins of Michele’s Gucci fashion,
we must look earlier, to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, well
before the zenith of postmodernism in the 1980s. Indeed, Michele’s
Gucci fashion, unlike postmodern luxury fashion, refers not only to
the modernity of hippiedom, to paisley patterns and long hair, pre-
Raphaelite paintings, romantic legends, and the bohemian life of
artists, but also to deeper understandings, such as shamanism and
quasi-religious practices, to interactions with the spirit world through
altered states of consciousness and to theories less about clothing
as such and more about clothing oneself for entry into a psychedelic
daydream. For Michele, fashion theory at Gucci also draws on nine-
teenth century pre-modern antiquarianism. Yet Michele makes no
claims that his is a wholly new form of fashion, given that his collec-
tions rely on wide-ranging turn of the nineteenth century sketches,
drawings, and lists in notebooks, and on twentieth century visual
representations, stories, experiences, music, and atmospherics. The
constituents at work here have little to do with any postmodern crisis
of the simulated image and more to do with contemporary high-con-
cept ideas about the history of identity, the meaning of social
change, and communicating these through a new language of luxury
fashion. Wary of the language of fashion marketing, of branding, and
of sales, Michele looks to the visual language of the fresco, of the
mural painting that is at once ‘fresh’but is also a technique that has
been employed since antiquity and is closely connected with Italian
Renaissance painting. Michele’s new language of luxury fashion, as
all his collections demonstrate, is the language of eclecticism, of mul-
tiple theories, styles, or ideas that give him complementary insights
into his subject matter. Assembling a transhistorical theatre troupe of
designers, assistants, muses, and models that stage his garments,
Michele’s dramatic art is played out in a space that is a kaleidoscope
of fourteenth century carnival masks, 1950s TV, and 1960s fashion
futurism. Michele’s impact and eclectic attitude, debuted in his fall
2015 Gucci menswear collection, a collection that reset Gucci’s pre-
vious representations of the clothed male body, such as those of
Tom Ford, evinced what we might call ‘amodern’thinking,
‘atheoretical’quirkiness, and ‘acritical’vintage references: these
were not the retrospective accoutrements of a concluded past where
Gucci fashion once accurately signified people’s socio-cultural identi-
ties but the contemporary accessories of an inconclusive yet simul-
taneous past, present, and future where Gucci antique rings, for
example, now metaphorically represent people’s socio-cultural desire
for creativity and change. Michele, exploring his amodern and some-
times confusing ‘theory’of Gucci fashion, is apparently less critical of
other contemporary luxury fashion designers and brands and more
positively interested in taking his inspiration from twentieth century
The Globalisation of Luxury Fashion
Luxury15
luxury fashion design legends such as Piero Tosi, whose designs
were responsible for the appearance of Luchino Visconti’s movies
such as Death in Venice (1971). Michele’s current fashion collections
are, consequently, not simply displays on a runway but also master-
classes in how to produce one’s own media reality through cinematic
imagery. Correspondingly, in emphasising the different design effects
of hairdressing, Michele’s fashion collections simultaneously channel
the modernism of writer Virginia Woolf’s messy chignon and the
embryonic 1970s postmodernism of rock star David Bowie’s tidy
mullet. Thus, Michele’s contemporary style of creativity draws on a
sensibility that can, for instance, be simultaneously literary and
musical whilst also creating an ambiance that is less historical, crit-
ical, or imbued with a postmodern sense of creative afterness and
more one that is eerie, unnerving, and, at times, undeniably spooky.
Avoiding fashion theorising, Michele’s new language of luxury fashion
is therefore intentionally ‘wrong’, with his collections in some way
‘contaminated’, as if he is trying to uncover a sense of imperfection
wherein the meaning of Gucci fashion for consumers is that it is
‘wrong’but in the ‘right’way.
Nonetheless, what is obvious is that Michele’s role in the global-
isation of Gucci fashion is important not because of his tenuous
associations with postmodern discourses but because his contem-
porary look involves an attempt to incorporate ‘old’information from
film, TV and video into new technologies where his fashion design
projects and runway shows become visual representations seen with
different eyes. Certainly, one of the most striking elements of
Michele’s visual representations and fashion design is the near
absence of references to the internet and social media in an era
when, for young Gucci consumers, globalised forms of luxury fashion
are the norm. This is not to suggest that Gucci the company is indif-
ferent to internet and social media based digital initiatives. In fact,
since 2016, Gucci has not only collaborated with Instagram and
Snapchat artists but also launched ‘do-it-yourself’consumer serv-
ices.
38
Such services allow Gucci consumers to personalise selected
products whilst Gucci’s data science team has improved these serv-
ices by assessing in real-time a 360-degree view of its consumers.
39
Yet, unlike Gucci’s French multinational corporate owner, Kering,
which is presently concerned with issues of sustainability and value,
with production systems, shareholders, suppliers, and the consum-
ers of its luxury products,
40
Michele, as Gucci’s creative director, is
understandably more exercised, and on his own admission, by the
world of Peter Pan where free-spirited mischievousness and youth
combine with adventures on mythical islands abounding with fairies,
pirates, and mermaids.
41
Michele’s personal discourse, unlike the
homogenising discourse of globalisation, then, counters the homoge-
nised masses of world technoculture with global chic, with luxurious
retro jewellery, and a form of glamour that spreads a heterogeneous
visual culture of representation founded less on the established
J. Armitage and J. Roberts
Luxury16
power of Facebook and more on the diminished power of American
movie corporations. European cinema, too, and especially Rome’s
Cinecitt
a (where Michele’s mother worked), is also a key constituent
of Michele’s global vision. Thus, although Gucci fashion goods may
well be multinational corporate products where sales matter, what
matters for Michele is American and European film. ‘Italy’s’Gucci,
therefore, is increasingly less like a Florentine luxury fashion brand
and more like a transnational casting agent that, in its contemporary
advertising campaigns, features pan-generational American film
actresses such as Faye Dunaway. What is now clear is that the mod-
ern history of Gucci fashion, of 1950s Cinecitt
a allure and 1960s
Italian elegance, has always had important transnational dimensions
which never were and never could be restricted to an imaginary
model of undoubted Italian heritage, growth, and interaction. Modern
Italian Gucci fashion designers such as Guccio, Aldo, and Rodolfo
Gucci (all born in Italy), as we saw above, looked for times and loca-
tions of creativeness beyond Italy such as the US, an expanding
country in the post Second World War era, and one whose luxury
fashion was shaped in part by Gucci in the 1950s and 1960s.
Inventing a lavish life and a fashion world not entirely shaped by Italy,
the Gucci’s established and promoted their clothing, accessories,
and footwear (which featured in movies and lifestyle magazines in the
1950s with straplines such as: ‘Quality is remembered long after
price is forgotten’). Michele’s conceptual continuations at Gucci are
manifest: it is the already prevailing Italian shaping of Hollywood in its
glory years through Gucci handbags and butterfly pattern silk fou-
lards worn by American movie stars that today provides the settings
and possibilities for Michele to idealise such legendary eras and
scenes as depicted in 1950s Hollywood musicals as somewhere
ostensibly outside of the recognised and progressively globalised
world of luxury fashion dominated by the European luxury brands.
Conclusion
In this article we have seen how we can respond to the key concept
of luxury by focusing critical attention on the study of fashion, par-
ticularly luxury fashion as it is defined in relation to lavishness and
affluent living or settings. Unlike others concerned with the idea of
luxury fashion, we have viewed luxury fashion itself as a twenty-first
century globalising medium and thus something which can commu-
nicate the social meaning of luxury culture. However, we remain con-
scious of the way art, craft, and even history can be and are
absorbed by luxury fashion. Our argument concerning the globalisa-
tion of luxury fashion, therefore, eventuated in a case study of Gucci
which, among other things, problematised the contemporary
‘Italianness’of this luxury brand. The current condition of Gucci’s his-
tory and profits, global branding and sales under Alessandro
Michele’s creative direction is, for us, something which strives for an
authentic luxury fashion while knowing that both luxury and fashion,
The Globalisation of Luxury Fashion
Luxury17
like many other concepts and practices, tend to be indiscriminatingly
and atheoretically assimilated by and into the contemporary global-
isation of everything.
Notes
1. Cox, Luxury Fashion
2. Bell, On Human Finery, 44.
3. Watt, Alexander McQueen.
4. Asome, Vogue on Jean-Paul Gaultier.
5. Armitage, Luxury and Visual Culture.
6. Zazzo and Saillard, Paris Haute Couture.
7. Mauri
es, Chanel: The Karl Lagerfeld Campaigns.
8. Adorno, The Culture Industry.
9. Hecter, Nedel, and Michod, The Origin of Values.
10. Menkes, Yves Saint Laurent.
11. de Zwart and Luiten, The Origins of Globalization; Ilmakunnas and Stobart,
A Taste for Luxury in Early Modern Europe.
12. Welters and Lillethun, Fashion History.
13. Dalby, Empire of Pleasures, 268–269.
14. Schwartzwald, The Rise of the Nation-State in Europe.
15. George, The Curator's Handbook.
16. Bartlett, Cole, and Rocamora, Fashion Media.
17. Armitage, Luxury and Visual Culture,37–66.
18. Geezy and Millner, Fashionable Art, 2015.
19. Burke, The Italian Renaissance, 2013.
20. Currie, A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Renaissance.
21. Duggan, A Concise History of Italy.
22. Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy.
23. Simmel, The Art of the City.
24. Barnard, Fashion Theory, 152–160.
25. Armitage, Luxury and Visual Culture.
26. Pieterse, Globalization and Culture, 2019.
27. Deloitte, Global Powers of Luxury Goods 2019.
28. Ormen, All About Yves.
29. Giannini, Gucci - The Making Of; Forden, House of Gucci.
30. Kering, “About Kering & Key Figures,”2020.
31. Forden, House of Gucci.
32. Ibid.
33. Holgate, “The Guccio Museo Opens in Florence,”1–5.
34. Menkes, “Gucci’s Secret Weapon,”1–4.
35. Bowles, “Inside the Wild World of Gucci’s Alessandro Michele,”1–7.
36. Ford, Tom Ford.
37. Deloitte, Global Powers of Luxury Goods 2019.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Armitage, Roberts, and Sekhon, “Luxury Products and Services and the
Sustainable Value Chain,”259–279.
41. Bowles, “Inside the Wild World of Gucci’s Alessandro Michele,”1–7.
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