#Gucci100: For People and The Planet

Incepted in the early 1920s, the Italian luxury house Gucci completed a glorious centennial year in 2021 and has come a long way in reinventing fashion and its vocabulary by navigating through roadblocks, mergers and varied visions of creative directors. While Tom Ford is known to etch the golden era of the brand by infusing a sex appeal that was missing from the runways of the time, Alessandro Michele’s vision imbibed eclecticism, and romance and married modernism with traditions. Today, Gucci’s products represent the pinnacle of Italian craftsmanship, unsurpassed quality and attention to detail. In addition to driving design excellence, the brand has come to solidify the ground driven by a comprehensive sustainability strategy with the environment, people and culture at the heart of it all. We highlight the game-changing innovations and initiatives to celebrate Gucci’s 100-year-old legacy.

1. Vault

Creative director Alessandro Michele continually draws inspiration from the past while being firmly rooted in the contemporary. At the Milan Fashion Week, he launched Vault: an online concept store as a testament to the belief that past, present and future can co-exist through the power of the imagination. It represents different things at once: a time machine, an archive, a library, a laboratory, and a meeting place. Vault’s virtual shelves open access to vintage, pre-owned pieces carefully curated by Alessandro and reconditioned to by the house’s expert archivists. It further takes the narrative beyond the traditional by collaborating with emerging talents from around the fashion world for a capsule collection featuring designers like Ahluwalia, Shanel Campbell, Stefan Cooke, Cormio, Charles de Vilmorin, among others.

2. Demetra: Vegan Leather Alternative

Leveraging their traditional skills and stepping up the impact innovation metrics, Gucci introduced Demetra, a new groundbreaking luxury material that combines quality, softness, durability, and scalability with an eco-friendly ethos. The vegan alternative is created using the same expertise and processes for tanning, thereby giving Demetra a distinctive, pliable and resilient performance, with a supple and luxurious finish. It is primarily made up of viscose from sustainably managed forest sources, wood pulp compounds and biobased polyurethane from renewable sources. The brand launched a range of sneakers to demonstrate the versatility of the material - Gucci Basket, Gucci New Ace and Gucci Rhyton.

3. Gucci Equilibrium Impact Report

Last year in June, the brand published its inaugural Impact Report on Equilibrium.Gucci.com which has been designed to summarize the house's commitments, progress, and actions to take a leap in future with people and the planet. The brand’s visionary measures took them four years ahead of time and surpassed the 2025 reduction target: -44% reduction of total environmental impacts and -47% decrease in greenhouse gas emissions (2015 baseline). The statistics further revealed a continued reduction pathway year-over-year starting from 2015. Gucci achieved a -17% decrease in greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 and a -9% reduction in its total footprint versus 2019.

4. Chime for Change Initiative

The global campaign “Chime for Change” was launched in 2013 by Gucci together with Co-Founders Salma Hayek Pinault and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter to envision a collective community uniting people and generations across borders in the fight for gender equality. Hundreds of projects were helmed globally to date raising nearly 17.5 million USD. 

5. “Now I Can” Artisan Training Program 

Under the "Chime for Change" initiative, Gucci collaborated with ‘I was a Sari’, a social enterprise founded in 2013 by Stefano Funari that sells contemporary garments and accessories through the creative reuse of pre-loved saris. A new professional embroidery training program, “Now I Can” committed to the issues of gender equality, diversity and women's empowerment, as well as the promotion of virtuous circular economy processes, has supported the initiative since 2018 through various forms of collaboration. For instance, with the support of four Gucci partners, the artisans of ‘I was a Sari’ received specific training on the main traditional embroidery techniques and from this experience a new line of luxury products stamped ‘I was a Sari’ was launched.