A Sensational Story of Murder

Guccio Gucci founded his leather-goods workshop in Florence in 1921, stitching together a brand that would come to define luxury for generations. His sons and grandsons expanded the label across continents — boutiques from Milan to Manhattan, the interlocking G logo recognised from Singapore to Stockholm. Wealth accumulated. So did resentment. By the 1980s, the family boardroom had become a battlefield dressed in silk.

Maurizio Gucci, the reluctant heir with a poet's temperament and an accountant's inheritance, found himself pulled between duty and desire. His marriage to Patrizia Reggiani — a woman of fierce intelligence and even fiercer appetites — would prove both his greatest alliance and his undoing. Forden reconstructs their courtship, their corporate manoeuvres, and the slow-motion collapse of a partnership that once seemed unbreakable.

What separates House of Gucci from tabloid gossip is Forden's reporting discipline. A veteran journalist who covered European fashion and finance for Women's Wear Daily, the Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg News, she spent years interviewing insiders, reviewing court transcripts, and tracing money through Swiss accounts and Milanese law firms. The result reads like a thriller because the facts genuinely are — wire transfers at midnight, family members hiring private investigators, board votes cast with the weight of centuries-old pride.

On the morning of 27 March 1995, Maurizio Gucci was shot dead on the steps of his office at Via Palestro 20 in Milan. The killing was methodical and professional — and, for nearly two years, unsolved in the public imagination. When Patrizia Reggiani was convicted of arranging the murder in November 1998, Italy gasped. The woman who had once been the public face of Gucci glamour was sentenced to twenty-nine years in prison; an appeal later reduced the term to twenty-six. Forden does not sensationalise the verdict; she lets the evidence speak, and the evidence is devastating.