After a year on Planet Chromatica, Lady Gaga has made a welcome return to earth. More specifically, she’s followed her Oscar-nominated turn in A Star Is Born with a role in House of Gucci, taking on the part of Italian socialite Patrizia Reggiani in Ridley Scott’s ’90s-set Lady Gucci biopic. As the talented polymath appears on the cover of British Vogue’s December 2021 issue, here’s everything that’s been revealed so far about the fashionable production.
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The trailers are packed with power suits and transformative performances
The first teaser, dropped in July and set to Blondie’s “Heart of Glass”, is a decadent paean to ’80s excess that gives a sense of the truly sensational wardrobe viewers can expect from the film. Also of note: the surreal transformation of Jared Leto into Paolo Gucci courtesy of a body suit and facial prosthetics.
A second trailer, released on 28 October, is considerably darker – depicting the power struggles between Patrizia and Maurizio Gucci that blighted their marriage from the start as well as Patrizia’s first meeting with a hitman after Maurizio left her. Her simple instructions as she hands him a pistol? “Don’t miss.” Also of note: the glimpse of Reeve Carney in character as Tom Ford shortly after the one-minute mark.
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The plot is based on an unbelievable true story
A quick fashion history recap. In 1972, Patrizia Reggiani, an Italian socialite, married Maurizio Gucci – the 20-something grandson of Gucci founder Guccio Gucci. Over the course of the next 15 years, the couple had two daughters; fought (and won) a high-profile battle for control of the Gucci brand; and became a fixture in the Italian tabloids, which ran an endless stream of pictures of Reggiani in dark sunglasses and gaudy jewellery, looking like a Milanese Elizabeth Taylor. Lady Gucci, as the press dubbed her, became famous for her extravagance – sailing between private Caribbean islands on her 200-foot yacht, the Creole, or decamping to her penthouse in Manhattan’s Olympic Tower whenever the mood struck. At her wealthiest, she reportedly spent £9,000 a month on orchids alone. Perhaps her most famous diktat? “It’s better to cry in a Rolls-Royce than be happy on a bicycle.”
Then, in the mid-’80s, Maurizio claimed he was going on a short business trip to Florence – only for Reggiani to find out that he had permanently abandoned the family for his younger lover. (She later claimed that the Guccis’ doctor had to break the news to her.) An even worse betrayal, in Reggiani’s eyes? A few years after the couple split, Maurizio sold the Gucci brand to Bahrain-based firm Investcorp for approximately £150 million – a move necessitated by his own failures at the helm of the company. “I still feel like a Gucci – in fact, the most Gucci of them all,” Reggiani told La Repubblica as recently as 2014, to give you a sense of how closely her identity is bound up with the house.