Gucci: A Brand Heritage Report

I really enjoyed the opportunity presented by this brand heritage report, in the sense that it allowed me to look into the design history of a brand compared to focusing only on its business history, as I suppose ironically enough, design was never something I looked into when it came to fashion houses. Thinking about that now, that definitely seems quite off considering that’s where brands start off from, their designs.

During the session we looked at brand heritage, I looked into the brands of Hermes and Louis Vuitton, but ultimately found that neither of them particularly took my fancy, nor had a design history that I thought I could really delve into. I then began making a list of brands and fashion houses I would be interested in working for in the future, particularly focusing on brands that were cruelty free and working towards sustainability, as I feel many big brands lack that area of much needed focus. This led me to:

Giorgio Armani
Vivienne Westwood
Jean Paul Gautier
Gucci
Stella McCartney
Versace

After further doing a little research on each of these brands, I ultimately decided on Gucci, as I felt it had a rich history, vastly different looking collections and are working towards cruelty free and sustainable initiatives.

To create this report I used Photoshop, as I felt it was the platform that would allow me the most creative freedom when it came to creating a visually appealing layout. I initially struggled with the layout of my report and I think this was due to trying too hard to include too much, so I decided to take a step back and think about what I had learnt last term during our Adobe lessons. This led me to simplify my pages quite a bit, but I feel I remedied the boxiness of it by adding some accents of tape and the Gucci stripe within most of the pages to make it more crafty.

For the report itself, I decided to dedicate many of the pages to the key creative directors and designers of Gucci and how they changed the direction of the brand throughout the years. I also mentioned some key design aspects of the brand as a whole and noted the beginnings of the house through their founder Guccio Gucci. Through my research, I discovered Tom Ford and Alessandro Michele to be the most influential designers of Gucci as they both changed the direction of the brand and saw to its reinvention. I therefore, decided to dedicate two pages to each of them.

During this task, I definitely struggled with switching my research brain from focusing on the business aspects of the brand’s growth to its design direction. However, I feel by readjusting my train of thought, I was able to really learn a lot about the creative direction side of Gucci and how crucial certain design decisions can be to the success of a fashion house and how different people facilitate that in a response to the world around them and their creativity.

Looking into the next term, I hope to apply this same extensive approach of learning to other brands and further look at both the design and business sides of various luxury brands and mass market brands, as I feel this will help me discover where I would like to end up one day, career wise. Overall, I am quite happy with the outcome of my report and am particularly pleased with the amount of knowledge I’ve gained during this research process.