Suits & Shirts · Fashion & Motorsport · 2026
Gucci enters Formula 1. Nobody got here by accident.
How three parallel careers — De Meo, Briatore, and Kering — converged to produce the first luxury fashion house title sponsorship in F1 history.
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| Photo by Kyl Illman |
When Alpine announced on May 27th that Gucci would become its title partner from the 2027 season, the news travelled through motorsport media at its usual speed. What didn’t travel quite as fast was the deeper analysis: this is not a sponsorship deal. It is the convergence of three personal careers that have been running in parallel for years.
The surface reading says a man who ran a car company now runs a fashion company and pulled a thread. The correct reading is that Luca de Meo never stopped thinking about Alpine. He structured the project. He brought Briatore back. And from Kering, he held exactly the tool Alpine needed to make the leap no other team had ever made.
The triangle that made it possible
Luca de Meo takes the helm of Renault Group in the midst of the post-Ghosn crisis. From day one, he understands that Alpine — the F1 project — needs more than sporting results: it needs brand positioning.
With the team propping up the constructors’ championship, De Meo calls Flavio Briatore. The account that circulated was almost literary: “He told me the team was in the sh*t.” Briatore returns — on a salary that reportedly exceeds the CEO’s own.
De Meo leaves Renault and becomes CEO of Kering, the group that controls Gucci, Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta and Balenciaga, among others. The board changes. The pieces do not.
The team debuts under the name Gucci Racing Alpine F1 Team — the first luxury fashion house title partnership in Formula 1 history.
Why F1 and why now
Gucci isn’t entering Formula 1 because F1 is fashionable — though it is. It’s entering because the numbers have shifted in a way that would have seemed unlikely a decade ago. More than 1.5 billion people follow the championship each season. The average fan age is now 32. And roughly half of new fans are women.
The bet in numbers
For a brand that has spent years working to reclaim cultural relevance after the Alessandro Michele era, that audience is precisely the territory it needs. F1 is not television. It is content, paddock, hospitality, continuous social coverage. It is one of the few global events where luxury can activate itself week after week for nine months a year.
Gucci’s internal analysis flagged another revealing data point: women account for 30–35% of new car purchases, but influence over 70% of buying decisions. In a sport that was once almost exclusively male, that demographic shift turns F1 into an exceptionally efficient communications channel for luxury.
Briatore has done this before. With Benetton.
There is something Flavio Briatore understands better than almost anyone in the paddock: that fashion and speed are the same business when you align them at the right moment. In the nineties, he turned Benetton into a championship-winning force in F1 — with Schumacher as world champion in 1994 and 1995 — while the Italian brand was conquering the streets with its colours and provocative visual language.
The parallel is not accidental. Briatore himself has pointed it out publicly: the Enstone team — same factory, same DNA throughout — “has shown before that fashion can finish first in F1.” This time the approach is more sophisticated. Gucci Racing is not just a logo on a wing. It is a standalone business platform with its own black-and-gold identity and an associated product line that will be sold globally.
What it means for Gucci
Gucci has been navigating a complex brand redefinition for several years. Alessandro Michele’s departure in 2022 left a creative void that Sabato De Sarno has been filling with a more sober, more classic proposal — oriented towards the consolidated-wealth client and less dependent on seasonal hype.
F1 fits perfectly with that repositioning. This is not streetwear. It is not a seasonal collab. It is a continuous, global presence associated with technical excellence and elite performance. Exactly the values Gucci wants to reinforce under De Meo and Bellettini’s leadership.
The livery change
Goodbye to BWT’s pink. The team’s 2027 palette will be dominated by Gucci’s colours — the iconic green-red stripe is expected to feature prominently alongside the black and gold of the Gucci Racing logo. Every race weekend, at every grand prix, that car will exist as a moving fashion object. Two hundred kilometres per hour of branding.
What it means for F1
The precedent is historic. For the first time, a luxury fashion house becomes a title partner of a Formula 1 team. Louis Vuitton, Tommy Hilfiger, Adidas, Hugo Boss and Puma have all been present in the paddock for years. But none had taken this step. Gucci does — and opens the door for other luxury brands to consider associations at this level.
For F1 as an institution, it is another argument for the narrative Liberty Media has been constructing since 2017: this is not the same sport you watched with your father. It is global entertainment of the highest order — pop culture and elite sport in the same package.
Formula 1 has shifted from a corporate sponsorship ecosystem — banks, airlines, tech firms — into a territory where luxury brands see a real opportunity to build desire. And that has direct implications for how the paddock is designed, how hospitality is managed, how content is generated, and how tickets are sold in Miami, Monaco or Monza.
This blog has followed the intersection of fashion and culture for nearly twenty years. And what is happening with Formula 1 is not a passing trend: it is a structural repositioning of the sport within the global fashion system.
Luxury needs aspirational contexts to activate itself. It needs powerful imagery, narratives of excellence, and audiences that combine purchasing power with cultural aspiration. F1, in its post-Drive to Survive incarnation, offers exactly that. And Gucci, with Luca de Meo moving the pieces from Kering and Flavio Briatore as the operational architect, was the first to understand it in its full dimension.
They didn’t get here by accident. They arrived with a plan.
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