Gucci Perfumes & Colognes

Fourteen bottles, ten of them women’s. A small range for a house this famous, but it includes one of the strangest bottles ever put on a shop shelf.

A porter who watched the luggage

Guccio Gucci worked as a porter at the Savoy Hotel in London before the First World War, carrying the bags of people wealthy enough to stay there. He paid attention to the luggage, went home to Florence, and in 1921 opened a shop selling leather goods to travellers.

That is the whole origin: a hotel worker who noticed what rich people carried. The horsebit, the equestrian stripe, the luggage-first thinking — all of it comes from watching arrivals at a door.

Rush, and the video cassette

The most interesting thing on this page is Rush, released in 1999, when Tom Ford was running Gucci’s design. The bottle is a flat red rectangle, unmistakably modelled on a VHS video cassette case — a deliberately unglamorous, mass-produced object rendered in glossy red plastic.

It was a strange decision then and it looks stranger now, which is exactly why it is still remembered. The scent inside is no more conventional: creamy, synthetic, and closer to a hairspray or a lipstick than to flowers. Rush 2 is the lighter follow-up. If you have any interest in fragrance beyond the obvious, smell Rush.

The same era produced Tom Ford’s own house a few years later, and the connection is audible in both.

Guilty, on both sides

Guilty is the modern anchor and runs to seven bottles between men’s and women’s: the Eau de Toilette on both sides, an Eau de Parfum and Parfum for men, and Black and Intense versions. It is the commercial centre of the range and the safest thing here.

The rest of the women’s side

Bloom is the most expensive bottle on this page and the most serious — a dense white floral, tuberose-heavy, with none of the sweetness the name suggests. Flora and Bamboo are the lighter, more everyday options, and Première is the formal evening one.

For designer fragrance from the same Italian generation, Dolce & Gabbana and Versace sit alongside it here, and the women’s ten are under .