A negative balance of 3.2 billion euros drags one of the symbolic names of Italian fashion to the bottom of the ranking of the main Italian companies on the balance sheets for 2025: Guccio Gucci Spa, a historic luxury fashion house founded in Florence in 1921, is positioned there, at the opposite end of the ranking led by the giants Enel, Eni and Poste Italiane. While they grind out profits, the company with the crossed Gs closes with a loss greater than its entire annual turnover, which – we read in the Mediobanca analysis – “is affected by the devaluation of the brand”.
The report comes a few days after the news that Gucci-branded objects, furniture and clothing on sale in a second-hand shop in Rome had passed from the family villa put on the market for 11.5 million euros to the shelves of a neighborhood store. Perfect timing, two photographs – one purely economic and one evocative of an ancient prestige that has never been so democratic – which, placed side by side, seem to complete the picture of the historical moment the maison has gone through, emptied of the charm that for decades was an unattainable desire.
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Net of regrets and nostalgia for their own sake, it is interesting to try to understand how we got here. Starting from the end, first of all, from the concept of “brand devaluation” which the Mediobanca report placed as a decisive detail for those heavy 3.2 billion euros. A voice which, behind the apparent accounting coldness, actually hides a much more concrete question: how much the desire to own something signed by Gucci is still worth today.
What the budget says
In three years, Gucci has lost 43% of its revenues, penalized by three changes of creative director, as many CEOs and by the decline in customers in China and Japan (which also recorded a -7% in the first nine months of 2026, to 4.05 billion). The 2025 budget of Guccio Gucci SpA, seen by Dossier The Vermilion, describes this slowdown well: revenues fell to 3 billion, eroded by the costs of raw materials and the salaries of 1,551 employees. But what emerges above all in the income statement is the maxi-devaluation of the brand, whose value was cut from 14 to 9.6 billion.
Two factors motivated the choice of the analysts called by the company to quantify the importance of the brand: the sales trend of Gucci products and the macroeconomic and geopolitical context. Net of the related tax benefit, that cut is worth a deficit of 2.86 billion which alone represents almost 90% of the overall hole of 3.2 billion (the rest comes from ordinary management costs and other operational items).
What does Gucci’s devaluation mean in practice
Let’s be clear: talking about “brand devaluation” does not mean that Gucci lost 3.2 billion liquid euros in daily management. In addition to shops, factories or warehouse stock, in fact, what also affects the balance sheet of a large company is the invisible value of the brand, i.e. how much prestige it has, how desirable its logo is, how much money it promises to earn in the future.
When a brand is going strong, you bet on its ability to sell and attract customers even in the long term. But when the accounts start to decline and that name no longer “pops” as before, we need to update that estimate downwards. In practice, translated from the language of finance, it means that Gucci had to admit in its accounts that its name today is worth much less than yesterday.
The Coviello Law Firm website explains the concept well: “The devaluation of the brand works in a similar way to the loss of value of a valuable asset after an event that permanently reduces its economic usefulness. A luxury car repaired after a serious accident can return to circulation, but its value is no longer the same. For the brand the reasoning is similar, except that the parameter is not the workshop. It is the ability of the asset to generate future economic benefits”. In short, a bit like discovering that the family home that was thought to be worth 10 million is now worth 6 million on the market: 4 million have not been lost, but the assets on paper have clearly decreased.
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But to really understand why this loss of value of the Gucci brand makes so much noise, we need to look at what this company has been for over a century: an empire born from a shop in Florence and raised in the stardom of the Dolce Vita and exploded into international fame; torn apart by internal feuds and then reborn several times under the guidance of ever-changing stylists. A colossus who for decades has dictated the rules of global desire, also thanks to his indoctrination in the prestige of the mythological “made in Italy”.
The iconic “Jackie”, the assassination of Maurizio Gucci, the financial war
The metal clamp, the green-red-green ribbon and the famous canvas are still today the distinctive signs of Gucci garments, designed and created in Florence in 1921 by Guccio Gucci who decided to open a small luggage and saddlery shop. The true myth, however, radiated between the 1950s and 1970s, with his son Aldo Gucci who landed in New York and ensured that those artisanal creations became a total emblem of the Dolce Vita, worn by stars of the caliber of Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor and above all Jackie Kennedy, so attached to one of the maison’s bag models that she gave it the name by which it is still known today: the legendary Jackie.
And the eighties arrive. And with them the first stages of decline which start from internal feuds within the family, continue with accusations of tax evasion and worsen with the granting of an inconsiderate number of licenses, causing the devaluation of the exclusivity of the logo. The epilogue of the dynasty took place in 1993, with Maurizio Gucci – the last heir at the helm of the fashion house who was killed two years later on the orders of his ex-wife Patrizia Reggiani – who sold his shares to the Bahraini fund Investcorp.
After a long financial war against Bernard Arnault’s LVMH giant, between 1999 and 2004 the maison definitively passed under the control of the French PPR, now the Kering group led by the Pinault family.
What doesn’t work anymore
The rest is the story that has passed before our eyes in recent years. Aesthetic and cultural revolutions that the many creative directors who followed one another – Tom Ford, Frida Giannini, Alessandro Michele, Sabato De Sarno – brought about perhaps too quickly, causing Gucci to lose that characteristic strength that should be typical of a certain type of maison (Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Giorgio Armani, for example).
Today the Kering group has entrusted the creative direction of Gucci to Demna Gvasalia and has called to the top a manager from outside the fashion world such as the former Renault number one Luca de Meo, committed to reducing the store network from 600 to 450 to rebuild a lost exclusivity. Because that, in the end, really seems to be the crux of the Gucci case: the loss of exclusivity as collateral damage of a continuing identity crisis. Which people have grasped, and indeed they have grasped it. Here, then, customers no longer recognize themselves in Gucci clothes and don’t even buy anymore, disoriented as they are by the constant changes in style and increasingly higher costs. Unless suitcases, bags and sweatshirts are found in a flea market… Just to take home the symbol of an era. The memory of a prestige that, for now, needs to be rebuilt.
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