Italy Fashion Shopping 2025: Where to Buy Italian Fashion for Less and for Real

How Guccio Gucci invented the Italian fashion industry from a London hotel luggage room — and why the Florentine leather tradition is both genuine and myth

Guccio Gucci (1881-1953, born in Florence to a leather goods merchant family) worked as a luggage porter at the Savoy Hotel in London from approximately 1898 to 1902, where his specific observation — that the English and American aristocracy who stayed at the Savoy carried the finest luggage he had ever seen, and that the luggage was never Italian — provided the founding insight for the company he opened in Florence in 1921. The specific Gucci founding innovation: not the leather craftsmanship (which already existed in Florence) but the aspiration to create specifically Italian luxury goods that could compete with and eventually supersede the English and French luxury travel goods that defined the early 20th-century luxury market. The Florentine leather tradition that Gucci assembled his brand around was genuine (the Florentine vegetable-tanning tradition dates from medieval guild organization) but the specific association between "Italian luxury leather" and "Florence" is substantially a 20th-century Gucci construction — the marketing narrative that transformed a regional artisan tradition into a global luxury identity. The irony: the Gucci brand is now owned by the French luxury conglomerate Kering (since 1999) and produces a significant portion of its goods outside Florence, while simultaneously funding the educational programs at the Scuola del Cuoio that maintain the Florentine leather tradition the brand mythologized.