As it goes in fashion, scandal and glamour is the iconic duo. The upcoming movie House of Gucci focuses on the murder of the founder’s grandson Maurizio Gucci who was at the time head of the fashion house, at the instruction of his wife. Lady Gaga is set to play Patrizia Reggiani, the mastermind behind the shooting of her ex-husband.

Among Milan’s fashion elite, the two met at a soiree where he asked a friend, “who is that beautiful girl dressed in red who looks like Elizabeth Taylor?”. Despite the disapproval of his father Rodolfo, the pair married in 1972 and later divorced in 1985. Reggiani later claimed that Gucci left for a short business trip to Florence and never returned, further explaining that he had changed after the passing of his father in 1983. He inherited a 50% stake in the company upon his death, and ten years later in 1993 sold this portion to Investcorp for between $150 million and $200 million which transferred its Italian ownership to French luxury powerhouse Kering.

Furious she received $1 million from the divorce settlement and that Gucci had moved on with a younger girlfriend Paola Franchi, a phone recording played to the court featuring Reggiani clearly heard her say “you’ve reached the extreme limit of making yourself despised by your daughters who no longer want to see you to forget the trauma. You are a deformed outgrowth, you are a painful appendix that all of us want to forget. For you, hell is yet to come.”

The anonymous call to Filippo Ninni came through to the Lombardia police department on the evening of January 8, 1997. Ninni was the leading detective in the murder of Gucci since he was assassinated on March 27, 1995, when he entered his workplace in Milan’s fashion district. But not much was revealed in the phone call, except “I’m going to say just one name, Gucci”.

The anonymous caller later met Ninni, disclosing that during his stay in 1 star hotel in Milan he overheard the porter brag about recruiting the killer of Gucci, unravelling the chain of events for authorities and eventually leading to Reggiani’s new nickname Lady Gucci. Bitter from the divorce and Gucci moving on with another woman, it was well known that she was in search of a hitman after consulting lawyers of the possible outcomes if she was to get rid of her ex-husband and had also asked her cleaner twice to assist her. In a later interview with Storie Maledette she confessed, “I have to admit that for a time, I truly wanted to get rid of him. I wanted to do it and so I was going around asking for people to do it. But my intentions ended there—a mere obsession, a mere desire”.

The courts were not convinced. They sentenced Reggiani to 29 years jail, with the alleged hitman and driver Orazio Cicala sentenced to 29 years. In a complicated web, the court heard that Reggiano had offered a female sorcerer Giuseppina (Pina) Auriemma roughly AUD$446k to hire a hitman, despite Reggiano claiming that it was Auriemma that blackmailed her into paying $365k as she had already found her a killer. It was not disputed however that Auriemma had contacted the hotel porter Ivani Savioni to hire a hitman to end Gucci’s life. Following the anonymous phone call to Italian police, Savioni had begun the process of looking for a hitman for a new job, and a police officer pretended to be interested in the job before the grand plan came undone once the officer had recorded the conversations leading to the arrests. From there, Auriemma received 25 years incarceration, with Savioni receiving 26 years.

From there, Reggiani was released in 2014 and placed on a work placement program which involved volunteer work following her suicide attempt in 2000. She decided she still had a flair for fashion, and took up a part-time position at jewellery shop Bozart. The firm faced intense backlash over her employment, and the drama continued once she faced financial claims made by the doorman injured during Gucci’s shooting, along with his ex-girlfriend Franchi.

In her closing statement on the Gucci drama, “I don’t think of myself as innocent, I think of myself as not guilty. But in the ‘not guilty’ I have to admit I have made too many mistakes”.

House of Gucci is expected to be released in cinemas November 25, 2021.