The Gucci family saga that entered the global pop culture arena with Ridley Scott’s movie “House of Gucci” is set for another take — this time in the TV sphere, and with the real Gucci family on board as part of the production team.
Gaumont, the French film and television group behind “Narcos,” “Lupin” and upcoming fashion world series “Becoming Karl Lagerfeld,” has signed an agreement with producer Giorgio Gucci, who represents the Gucci family, to make a TV series about the rise of the iconic Gucci brand. The show will follow the company’s beginnings with founder Guccio Gucci and delve into the conflicts that ensued within the fashion family dynasty that led to the sale of their empire.
The still-untitled project is in the development stage with no director or cast attached, but is looking to shoot in Italy, the U.S., France and the U.K.
As the story goes, Guccio Gucci worked as a bellboy at the Savoy Hotel in London, where he became inspired by the luxury leather suitcases carried by British aristocrats. In 1921, Gucci opened his first retail location in Florence and his four sons — Aldo, Vasco, Rodolfo and Ugo (his adopted stepson) — were soon brought into the family business. Aldo, the eldest of the five brothers, opened the first Gucci boutique in Rome in the 1930s. His intuition and innovative use of quality materials turned Gucci into the iconic brand featuring the double G logo.
Long-simmering family feuds over the course of the following decades ultimately caused the family-controlled brand to be sold in the early 1990s to French conglomerate Kering.
“We are interested in telling the story of a family business, because that is what the Gucci saga is about,” said Giorgio Gucci, who was born after the brand’s sale. He runs the Rome-based Alcor Film shingle, which was among the producers of Alain Parroni’s youth drama “An Endless Sunday” that launched from the 2023 Venice Film Festival’s Horizons section where it scooped the Special Jury Prize.
“Gucci was certainly one of the first Italian brands to cross our borders and land in the United States, and from there to bounce around the rest of the world, becoming the absolute protagonist of the Dolce Vita here in Rome,” he added.
The producer points out that the Gucci family TV series project has been gestating since 2019, before “House of Gucci” hit the screens. That movie centered on how the murder of Maurizio Gucci was contracted by his ex-wife Patrizia Reggiani (portrayed in the film by Lady Gaga), and prompted the family to issue a fuming statementover what they claimed was an inaccurate portrayal.
However, the Gucci TV series being developed by Gaumont, Alcor and the Gucci family does not intend to whitewash the saga.
“One of the main reasons why we decided to board this adventure with Giorgio, Alcor and the Gucci family is because we immediately found their willingness to question themselves and therefore to not just tell the bright moments of this story,” said Marco Rosi, general manager of Gaumont Italy. “I’m very happy that we have the opportunity to really enter into the folds of a family story that doesn’t in the least want to be pure hagiography.”
“How the [Gucci] family destroyed itself for the sake of business is something that interests me a lot and it’s not scandalous,” Giorgio Gucci said. “In fact, it’s a very human matter, or even more to the point a psychological or anthropological matter … But it’s only by really getting to the bottom of these characters that we can fully understand them.”
Giorgio Gucci said the story is more suited to a TV series than a film “if we are interested in understanding how the brand was built and how everything inevitably collapsed.”
Rosi also said that the longform Gucci story they are developing “will certainly be a very glamorous series for which we will have access to the family archives.”
Giorgio Gucci underlined that the Gucci family chose Gaumont, which has almost 130 years of history, to team up on this project “because their journey is so similar to ours: a family business that chooses excellence on a daily basis in order to continue growing.”
