Gucci goes racing while Ferrari goes silent

For years, luxury brands and Formula 1 circled each other like two guests at the same Milan cocktail party: clearly interested, but never quite ready to commit.

Now Gucci has decided to stop flirting and get into the car.

The Florence-based fashion house announced that from the 2027 season it will become title partner of Alpine Formula One Team, which will be renamed Gucci Racing Alpine. The partnership puts Gucci’s interlocking G logo directly onto the Formula 1 grid, a place once dominated by oil companies, telecom firms and energy drinks rather than leather goods and runway shows.

It is an unusually aggressive move for a brand that, despite still being one of Italy’s most recognisable luxury names, has spent the past two years trying to regain momentum with younger consumers and recover from slowing sales.

And perhaps that is precisely the point.

Formula 1 is no longer just motorsport. It is fashion week with pit stops, a travelling entertainment industry where drivers arrive wearing custom tailoring and paddocks increasingly resemble luxury-brand activations with carbon-fibre décor.

Luca de Meo, now chief executive of Kering, Gucci’s parent company, described Formula 1 as one of the world’s most powerful premium content platforms, with a global audience of more than 1.5 billion people and a fan base that is younger and increasingly female.

In other words: exactly the people luxury brands want to sell handbags to.

The irony is that while Gucci is enthusiastically embracing the smell of tyres and racing fuel, Ferrari seems to be moving in the opposite emotional direction.

The Maranello carmaker recently unveiled the Ferrari Luce, its first fully electric production vehicle and also its first five-seat model. On paper, the numbers are classic Ferrari excess: more than 1,000 horsepower, 0 to 100 km/h in 2.5 seconds and a top speed above 310 km/h.

But among many Ferrari enthusiasts, the reaction has ranged from confusion to near-religious grief.

Part of the backlash concerns the design, which several commentators described as awkwardly positioned somewhere between a luxury saloon and a futuristic crossover. But the deeper discomfort is existential. Ferrari built its mythology on noise, vibration and mechanical drama, not silent acceleration and charging times.

The company tried to soften the transition by creating an amplified sound system based on the noises produced by the electric drivetrain rather than simulating a traditional combustion engine. That may be technically sophisticated, but for some longtime fans it still feels a bit like replacing an opera singer with a very expensive Bluetooth speaker.

Even financially, the reveal raised eyebrows. Ferrari shares dropped sharply after the presentation, amid broader investor uncertainty about whether ultra-luxury electric cars can generate the same emotional loyalty as the company’s traditional models.

This leaves Italy with a curious cultural crossover.

Gucci, the Florentine symbol of luxury craftsmanship, is suddenly embracing high-octane spectacle and speed. Ferrari, the company that practically industrialised Italian automotive passion, is instead speaking the language of batteries, software and sustainable mobility.

One brand is dressing up for the paddock. The other is quietly unplugging the V12.

Perhaps this is simply how Italian luxury survives in the 2020s: fashion brands behaving like sports franchises, and sports-car makers trying to convince their customers that silence can also be exciting.

Still, somewhere in Tuscany, there is probably a man wearing vintage Gucci loafers while mourning the death of the naturally aspirated Ferrari engine.

And for once, both industries would probably like to have him back.

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