Luggage Is Identity
Gucci established the foundation of its brand name by producing luggage items. This category should be viewed as broadened out beyond merely suitcases to include any sort of storage accessory from purses to handbags to wallets. The point is that the items that people choose as external storage is a reflection of the items inside which can’t be seen and those items inside are essential elements in the construction of self-identity. Since other people cannot know what is hidden within luggage, identity must be manifested from the interior to the external—from self-identity to self-image—through the luggage which contains it. Thus, luggage becomes a means of transforming one’s own sense of identity into the public image they wish to convey. This realization is portrayed as the first real lesson in fashion and style that Gucci learned, becoming the foundation upon which the entirety of the brand image would be based.
Fashion Is Status
Anyone just slightly familiar with the name Gucci won’t need to ever actually see a Gucci suitcase to know the lesson learned about how luggage and identity are intertwined means that they don’t sell to those wishing to make the statement such items are meaningless to their own self-identity. Of course, the fact that people who don’t see their luggage as inextricably tied to their identity actually are demonstrating the fundamental truth of this thesis, but they are not Gucci’s target buyer. In order to make money by exploiting the tie between fashion and identity, fashion has to be transformed into status symbol.
To own a Gucci suitcase is a statement of self-identity only to those who accept that style and self-image are intertwined. Gucci’s road to iconic status was made possible not by producing the highest quality items, but by successfully branding their name into an equivalence with status that could not be attained by anyone lacking enough money to buy their products. Ultimately, Gucci became central to the revolution in fashion in which the product itself became secondary to the brand name emblazoned upon it.
Branding Is Marketing
Marketing at one time actually required—not just preferred but actually required—informing the customer of what a product did or why it was needed or, at least, why it was better than the competition. Over time, marketing became a process in which all that information became tangential; advertisement for products could actually feature nothing but an image of the product itself or, in more extreme cases, an image of merely the part of the product which featured the brand logo. Gucci became one of the first fashion companies to attain the highest possible status in which a customer could literally impress people by saying “I bought a Gucci” without actually describing the specifics of that purchase. It didn’t matter whether it was luggage or furniture or clothing; there mere fact that it featured the word “Gucci” on it is what gave it value.
This became the Holy Grail of marketing: the secret power of branding. And the power of branding is now today the single biggest driver of marketing even at the lowest level of business modeling: even YouTubers with less than a thousand subscribers may spend more time branding themselves than they spend actually creating content. It is the downside of branding as marketing—when the valuation of the brand is no longer what it used to be—that becomes the thematic foundation of the darker side of the collapse of Gucci which forms most of the narrative of the film adaptation of the book.
