Patrizio di Marco wasn’t about to go out quietly.
In early December, Mr. di Marco was ousted as chief executive of Gucci, a position he had held for five years, in a move that, while long speculated, still came as something of a shock to the global fashion world. And Mr. di Marco wanted to make it clear to the Gucci staff that he had been fired; he had no intention of leaving without giving his side of the story.
On Dec. 18, Mr. di Marco delivered remarks to Gucci employees at a company cafeteria in Florence, Italy. Part of his speech was inspired from a memo that he sent out to employees that day, which was equal parts defiant and self-congratulatory. (At one point, he quoted Steve Jobs, saying, “The ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do.”) And above all, it was bitter, blaming his enemies at Gucci — he didn’t name names but instead referred to them as “nani,” or dwarfs — who he implied had plotted his downfall.
“Against my will, I leave my cathedral uncompleted,” he wrote in the nearly 3,000-word document, which was obtained by The New York Times and translated from Italian to English. He also said, “It’s a pity I won’t be able to see how this beautiful story would have continued.”
Mr. di Marco spoke not just as a spurned executive of one of the biggest fashion companies in the world, but also as one half of fashion’s most famous power couple, the partner of the Gucci designer Frida Giannini and the father of their nearly 2-year-old daughter, born just two weeks after Ms. Giannini had presented the fashion house’s fall 2013 collection on the Milan runway. She, too, had been ousted from the company in December in a parting that was anything but amicable and was about to get worse.
If the dual firings of Mr. di Marco and Ms. Giannini came as a surprise, that was nothing compared with the reaction to the person whom Kering, Gucci’s parent company, soon chose to install in Ms. Giannini’s place: Alessandro Michele.
Within hours of the news of Ms. Giannini’s firing, names surfaced in the news media about who would fill her post, suddenly the most coveted job in fashion. Would it be Riccardo Tisci, the star designer who took a drifting French label, Givenchy, and transformed it into the must-have uniform for rock stars and celebrities? Or the rising American designer Joseph Altuzarra? Or maybe Hedi Slimane, who had recently revived the fortunes of Saint Laurent, another Kering brand? Or could Kering even entice Tom Ford to go back to the company he had turned into the hottest fashion brand of the 1990s and whose work at Gucci is still cited by many designers today?
Instead, on Jan. 21, the company announced it had hired Mr. Michele, who had spent the last 12 years working in Gucci’s accessories department, the last three as the associate director to Ms. Giannini.
And the reaction of the fashion world could be summed up with one word: “Who?”
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In his farewell memo, Mr. di Marco said that he lost his job, in part, because unnamed people within the company, “including some of the people close to him,” had started to plot against him. (Mr. Pinault, the chief executive of Kering, is not mentioned in the memo.)
But he was also wistful.
“Gucci is the brand I’ve loved the most in my life, the brand I will always love, and it’s also the brand where I met the love of my life,” he wrote.
He said he wanted to honor many people at Gucci, but he singled out just one: Ms. Giannini.
“Not because she’s the best possible life partner or the best possible mother that a difficult and complicated person like me could have hoped to meet,” he wrote. “But because in the workplace — which we both put above everything, at great personal cost — she was the best possible partner that one could have wished for.”
Ms. Giannini’s story as creative director lasted eight years.
Mr. Michele’s begins on Wednesday.
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