Frida Giannini to Leave Gucci After the Fall 2015 Show

After nine years in the saddle as creative director at Gucci, Frida Giannini will be leaving the company after she presents her final collection for fall 2015, in Milan. Exiting the company before her is CEO Patrizio di Marco, who, in one of fashion’s most high-profile office romances, became Giannini’s partner in life in 2009—a bond which produced their daughter, Greta, in 2013. Their departure signals another regime change for the company—not a drama on quite such a seismic scale as the fraught farewell show of Tom Ford for fall 2004—but it’s a shift that will cause yet another round of speculation and reshuffling in the halls of luxury goods labels the world over.

In her time with Gucci, Giannini cooled down the hot and sexy imagery which had set the brand alight in the nineties, taking a more practical approach, seen from the point of view of young women of her own generation. From her beginnings as an accessories designer, she stepped forward as the person tasked with steering Gucci through the difficult years of the financial crash, and then into the era of the Asian luxury boom. Stylistically, she’s leaving after two successive collections that have landed Gucci back in the reimagined seventies—all A-line skirts and coats—the decade which saw its first heyday, and which Ford reveled in for all its jet-set decadence (while adding plenty more nineties-noughties ideas of his own).

So: what lies ahead? As it happens, enough time has elapsed since the nineties for a whole new generation of designers to have arisen who idolize Ford’s Gucci years as a far-off period of glorious vintage design. Will Gucci’s parent company, Kering,  find a starry-eyed visionary within that twenty-something cohort, a young firebrand intent on bringing sexy back? Or is this going to be a job for a senior, seasoned pair of hands—a major transfer from another house? Whatever direction things are to go in won’t become clear until after Frida Giannini waves goodbye at the end of her show in February. And what then, for her? It’s hard to imagine one of fashion’s most hard-working and focused designers allowing herself much of a break, much as she might deserve it. Will we be seeing her go back to her roots with an accessories company of her own, perhaps? With all her experience, and di Marco at her side, that could be an interesting development.