Suits & Shirts · The Label Files 2026
Flavio Briatore Built Menswear's Strangest Empire. Now He's Selling Gucci to Formula One.
Before he discovered Alonso, fixed a race, and got banned for life, Briatore convinced wealthy men that fashion could be sized like a small economy. The Alpine rumour circling the paddock this summer is just his oldest trick, run one more time.
Fernando Alonso called it his probable last race at Barcelona, then immediately undercut the sentiment by telling reporters he remained "open to many different scenarios." Within days, multiple outlets were reporting the same scenario by name: a fourth stint at Alpine, the team where he won both his titles, brought back this time not by a contract negotiation but by the only man who has been present at every chapter of his career — Flavio Briatore.
It is tempting to read this purely as a driver-market story. It isn't. Briatore is simultaneously Alonso's manager, Alpine's executive advisor, and the man credited with closing one of the most ambitious sponsorship deals in the sport's history: Gucci as title sponsor from 2027, with the team renamed Gucci Racing Alpine. The same person sits on every side of the table. That has always been Briatore's actual talent, and menswear was where he first proved it.
The Principle: He Has Never Sold Clothes. He Sells Proximity.
Briatore is not a designer, a tailor, or even, by training, a fashion executive. He has spent four decades selling the same intangible thing across three industries — sweaters, race cars, couture — and that thing is proximity to status. Understanding that single mechanism explains everything else in this story: the Benetton stores, the Singapore scandal, the crocodile umbrellas, and the Gucci deal currently reshaping a Grand Prix team.
Before the suits, the skis
Briatore's pre-fashion résumé reads like a cautionary tale: ski instructor, insurance salesman, restaurant owner, and a Milan financial manager who became entangled in bankruptcy proceedings and a fraud conviction that sent him briefly to the US Virgin Islands to avoid extradition. The Benetton family hired him anyway. That decision changed three industries.
How a Bankrupt Ski Instructor Conquered American Retail
In the mid-1980s, Luciano Benetton handed Briatore the task of expanding the Italian knitwear brand across the United States through franchising. He did not simply succeed — he opened more than 800 stores, taking a personal percentage on every franchise agreement he closed. It was this American retail conquest, not any interest in racing, that put him in a paddock for the first time.
Benetton had bought the Toleman Formula 1 team in 1985 and renamed it. In 1988, Luciano invited Briatore to the Australian Grand Prix to run the team's commercial and merchandising operations — an extension, in his mind, of the same retail machine. Briatore moved from selling sweaters to selling sponsorship space within two years, and from there to team principal.
Champion, Then Banned
Under Briatore, Benetton signed a young Michael Schumacher in 1991 and won back-to-back titles in 1994 and 1995. He left in 1997, ran the engine supplier Supertec, then personally engineered Renault's purchase of the Benetton team in 2000 — earning himself the team principal's chair a second time. There, he discovered and managed a young Fernando Alonso, delivering both Drivers' and Constructors' titles in 2005 and 2006.
What Crashgate actually was
The 2008 Singapore Grand Prix ended Briatore's second F1 era. He instructed driver Nelson Piquet Jr. to crash deliberately, triggering a safety car that handed the win to teammate Alonso. The FIA issued Briatore a lifetime ban in 2009; a French court overturned it the following year. He stayed out of the sport's official structure for fifteen years.
Billionaire Couture: Haute Couture With No Restraint
It was during his first absence from F1, in 2005, that Briatore co-founded Billionaire Couture with designer Angelo Galasso, opening the first store in Porto Cervo, Sardinia. The pitch was specific: the menswear industry had haute couture houses for women and nothing equivalent for men with comparable spending power. Billionaire filled that gap by removing every restraint that usually governs taste.
The materials, on the record
Scabal Diamond Chip — a fabric woven with fragments of real diamond. Orchid wool, infused with floral essence so the garment carries scent. Exotic skins — crocodile, python, ostrich, ray — used for outerwear, belts, and a crocodile-leather umbrella priced at $50,000. Buttons in 18-karat gold or Australian mother-of-pearl, hand-sewn in the Neapolitan tradition. Galasso's own patent, the Watch Cuff shirt, was designed with an opening so a luxury watch sits visibly outside the sleeve rather than under it. Jeans shipped in cedar boxes, the way cigars do, to protect the fibre.
The brand expanded through a 2007 partnership with Percassi into Las Vegas, Dubai, Moscow, Rome, Saint-Tropez, and Harrods in London. In 2016, German designer Philipp Plein bought a 51% stake and took over as creative director, with Briatore and Percassi retaining the remainder — a transition Plein framed as combining his own operational infrastructure with Briatore's identity to build, in his words, the most exclusive Italian-made product in menswear.
The one rule the brand never broke
Most menswear chases youth. Billionaire did the opposite, casting fifty-plus models with grey hair as the house ideal — silvered, unhurried, and unmistakably solvent. The brand's central argument was that ageing, handled correctly, photographs as wealth rather than as decline. It is hard to separate that pitch from the man who built it.
The Verdict Off the Track
Briatore's personal life has supplied as many headlines as his business deals, and his four-year relationship with Heidi Klum is the one the tabloids never let go of: he is widely reported to have ended things shortly before she gave birth to their daughter in 2004. It sits oddly alongside the professional record — a man who, by most accounts, treats commitments to institutions with more discipline than commitments to people, and who has been judged for it accordingly.
The Gucci Deal: Briatore's Actual Specialty
Briatore returned to Alpine in June 2024 as executive advisor to Renault Group CEO Luca de Meo — his third stint at Enstone. Since then, Alpine has shifted to a customer Mercedes power unit, climbed back into podium contention with Pierre Gasly's Monaco finish, and closed the deal Briatore is most associated with this year: Gucci as title sponsor from the 2027 season, with the team renamed Gucci Racing Alpine Formula One Team.
Briatore has been explicit about why this differs from prior luxury-motorsport tie-ins. Other houses, in his framing, sponsor from outside the operation. Gucci, under this deal, is positioned inside it — building a platform called Gucci Racing around performance, precision, and discipline, rather than simply licensing a logo for the livery.
Closing the Circle
This is the context the Alonso rumour actually sits in. A Gucci-backed Alpine needs a name attached to it that the broader market — not just the F1 audience — already recognises, and Alonso's history with Briatore predates everything else in this story. PlanetF1 reported that "Flavio Briatore and Gucci are pushing hard" to get Alonso back for 2027, which would displace Franco Colapinto's seat and reunite a manager-driver-sponsor triangle that last worked perfectly in 2005.
Alonso, out of contract at Aston Martin at season's end, has said he will decide his future after the summer break. Whatever he chooses, the deal that matters more to menswear readers has already been signed: a fashion house is no longer paying to be near Formula 1. It is becoming part of the team. Briatore brokered that the same way he once turned sweaters into 800 American storefronts — by understanding, earlier than anyone else in the room, what proximity to a name is actually worth.
There is no version of this story where Briatore comes out looking restrained. He has been banned from his own sport, walked out of a major relationship at its most consequential moment, and built a clothing brand whose signature product was a diamond-threaded suit. None of that is in dispute.
What is also not in dispute is the through-line: every time Briatore has moved between fashion and motorsport, the deal that followed reshaped the industry he landed in. Schumacher's titles. Alonso's titles. A men's-only couture house with stores in five cities. Now a title sponsorship that has already drawn a billion site visits in three days.
If Alonso does return to Enstone in 2027, driving for a team called Gucci Racing, it will not be nostalgia. It will be Briatore closing the same kind of deal he has been closing since 1985 — selling proximity, one more time, to the people who can afford it.
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