Gucci: three creative directors in three years, and the cost of resetting a house

Alessandro Michele became Gucci’s creative director in January 2015, and over the next seven years, with chief executive Marco Bizzarri, he turned the house into the defining brand of a younger, maximalist luxury: sales grew from about 3.5 billion euros to about 10.5 billion in 2022. By then growth had slowed, the fourth quarter of 2022 was negative, and in November 2022 Kering announced that Michele was leaving. Sabato De Sarno took over in January 2023 and moved the house towards restraint. Sales kept falling, and in February 2025 Gucci announced his departure after two years.

On 13 March 2025 Kering named Demna, then at Balenciaga, as Gucci’s artistic director from July; Kering’s shares closed down about 10% that day. His first collection, La Famiglia, was shown as a lookbook and film in September 2025, with looks that openly referred to earlier Gucci eras. The numbers show the scale of the task: Gucci’s 2025 revenue fell 22% to just under 6 billion euros, about 19% on a comparable basis. In the second quarter of 2026 the decline narrowed to 2% on a comparable basis, better than analysts expected, while Kering, now run by Luca de Meo, returned to growth. The story is still moving.

What Michele got right

The Michele years are a textbook case of what we call the evolution of values. The house kept its core, creativity, Italian craft and a taste for boldness, and pointed it at a new audience. Two maneuvers ran at once: attribution, generating fresh value from inside the identity, and bandwagoning, riding the youth culture of the late 2010s. The audience aged downwards, and the older base read each move through its memory of the old Gucci, so the shift never felt like a betrayal.

The method’s rule for this kind of change is to move one thing at a time, with a reason the market can read. Michele changed the aesthetic and kept the house’s code and craft. Customers could follow.

Two resets in quick succession

Then the clock of fashion did its work. Any strong aesthetic reaches fatigue, and analysts were already describing Gucci’s that way in 2022. The response was a reset: a new designer and a deliberately quieter direction. In our reading, the problem with the reset was its size. It changed the aesthetic and the implied customer at the same time, at a moment when the market was moving towards quieter luxury anyway and many houses were competing for the same restraint. A value swap needs a reason customers can see, and a swap towards what everyone else is also doing gives them little reason to pick you.

Demna’s appointment, two years later, was the second reset, and his first collection looks like an attempt to make the change readable: archetypes drawn from the house’s own past, from Tom Ford’s glamour to Michele’s eclecticism, presented as a family. Whether that becomes a new direction or another turn of the wheel will only show over several seasons.

The cost of the creative director cycle

Luxury houses rotate designers to renew desire, and the rotation has become faster across the industry. Each new designer arrives with a mandate to make the house feel new, and the audience needs to recognise the house to keep buying it. When those two pull too far apart, customers who were loyal to the last aesthetic stop buying before new ones arrive, and the gap shows up in revenue for years.

The open question we had left on Gucci was whether evolution by trigger survives a change of creative leadership. The last four years suggest it is fragile. What carries a house across designers is the part of its value proposition that does not depend on one person’s taste: the code, the craft and the promise to its customer, written down clearly enough that each new director has to answer to it.

If your brand changes leaders more often than its customers change habits, train your team to write down which values the next leader inherits and which they are free to change.