When Gucci Presented at the St Regis: Fashion, Hotels and the American Social Calendar

Gucci's American history is a history of hotels. Its first store outside Italy, opened in 1953, was in the Savoy-Plaza on East 58th Street. Its second New York address, seven years later, was inside the St Regis on Fifth Avenue. And in the 1970s the house used the St Regis as a place to present its clothes. For a house that had begun by making luggage for travellers, the choice of hotels was a natural one.

The St Regis

The St Regis was opened in 1904 by John Jacob Astor IV, son of Caroline Astor, the hostess whose guest lists had defined New York society in the late nineteenth century. Astor conceived the hotel as a residence for the wealthy as much as a place to stay, with modern conveniences such as a telephone in every room, and the New York Times called it the finest hotel in America. Astor died in the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, but the hotel remained one of the city's society addresses. In 1932 Maxfield Parrish's mural Old King Cole was installed in its bar, and in 1934, according to the hotel, its head bartender, Fernand Petiot, created the drink that became the Bloody Mary.

The St Regis was thus a place where New York society met on its own terms: at lunch, at the bar, at private dinners and balls. Its address, at Fifth Avenue and 55th Street, was at the centre of the city's luxury shopping.

A shop in the hotel

In 1960 Aldo Gucci, the founder's son, who directed the house's business in the United States, opened a Gucci shop inside the St Regis, on the 55th Street side of the building, with a further Fifth Avenue store adjacent to it. A third New York store, on Fifth Avenue at 54th Street, followed in 1973. By then Gucci occupied a significant stretch of the avenue, and the shops on Fifth Avenue, separately specialising in clothing and in shoes, bags and accessories, were among the most visible in the city.

The hotel shop placed Gucci in the daily path of the people it hoped to sell to. A guest at the St Regis, or a New Yorker lunching there, passed the house's windows on the way in and out.

The presentations

The house also used the hotel as a showroom. Photographs in the archive of Women's Wear Daily record Gucci's ready-to-wear collection for fall 1976 being presented at the St Regis. The photographs show a hotel presentation rather than a runway in a dedicated venue, which was common practice for fashion houses showing in New York at the time. Hotel ballrooms and salons offered space, catering and an address that buyers, editors and clients already knew.

Published sources do not describe these presentations in detail, and it would be wrong to invent the guest lists or the clothes. What the photographs establish is that the St Regis served Gucci both as a shop and, at least once, as a stage for its collections.

The American calendar

A hotel presentation fitted the rhythm of American society. Fashion houses showed their collections to buyers and the press at fixed points in the year, and the same hotels hosted charity balls, benefit dinners and private parties through the social season. A house that showed at the St Regis put its collections into the same rooms, and before many of the same people, as the city's social events.