Last week, I was catching up with a designer who worked at Gucci in 2004, back when Tom Ford and Domenico De Sole famously and semi-acrimoniously left the group, which is now part of Kering. At the time, Gucci C.E.O. Giacomo Santucci put three people in charge to replace Ford: John Ray ran menswear, Alessandra Facchinetti designed women’s, and Frida Giannini looked after accessories. (There was also Karen Joyce, responsible for image and advertising.) Within two years, both Ray and Facchinetti were gone—Mark Lee, the former YSL C.E.O., was now in charge of Gucci, and did away with the complicated structure. Giannini had won, and would remain the creative director for nearly 10 years. By the time she got fired at the end of 2014, the brand message was severely watered down, allowing for one of her longtime, long-repressed deputies, Alessandro Michele, to step up and unleash his maximalist id. 

This former Gucci designer very incisively compared that experience with what is currently going down at Tom Ford, the brand, referring to the abrupt exit of creative director Peter Hawkings, the lackluster sales for both women’s and menswear, etcetera. All those years ago, this person told me, the designers put in charge had to adjust quickly to life after the wunderkind: smaller budgets, fewer extravagances, and less tolerated eccentricity. For instance, this person recalled the Spring 2005 men’s runway show, where butterflies from the famous taxidermy store in Paris, Deyrolle, were fastened to the lapels. “I just remember, at the end of the show, going backstage and seeing the butterflies scattered on the floor” as if they were cheap sequins falling off a dress, the former Gucci designer said. It was excessive, wasteful: the remnants of a time of incredible wealth creation for Ford, De Sole, and the Gucci Group.