Renaissance Man

Sabato De Sarno has emerged from behind the scenes to take Gucci into a whole new era. Jason Horowitz meets the designer in the spotlight. Portrait by Anton Corbijn.

- By Jason Horowitz. Portrait by Anton Corbijn

Sabato De Sarno does not love having people over to his home. “I never host anyone,” De Sarno, the creative director of Gucci, tells me as we are seated on his living room couch across from his snoozing dapple dachshund, Luce. Colleagues aren’t invited for dinner; his husband lives in Brussels—even his parents don’t get to spend the night. “It’s my place, where I relax,” says De Sarno, a baby-faced 40 with closely cropped hair and beard, as he fidgets with the strings of his vintage Jurassic Park sweatshirt. “Where I disconnect from work.”

The walls of the apartment, on a winding street in the Renaissance quarter of Rome, are decorated with contemporary works by Jannis Kounellis, a Greek artist who scrawled words over his lithographs, and Sidival Fila, a Franciscan friar who paints canvases of sewn fabrics. There are prints of Italian icons, including one of the writer and director Pier Paolo Pasolini. (De Sarno proudly tells me the value of the latter has skyrocketed since his predecessor at Gucci, Alessandro Michele, staged a show of the print ’s photographer, Paolo Di Paolo, at a Rome museum.) Beneath coffered ceilings and atop the room’s minimalist deco furniture rest fertility sculptures from Sardinia, one of which has the deep bordeaux color with which De Sarno is repainting Gucci’s bags and shoes and skirts and jackets. He gave the color, and his first runway collection last September, the name Ancora, which means “again”—in the insatiable sense, he tells me—“of when you kiss someone that you like and you don’t want to stop doing it.” That is his ambition for Gucci, too, he tells me: to imbue it with passion. “I want Gucci to touch people’s hearts,” he says.