These Gucci mules, unrelated to the brand’s well-documented equestrian antecedents, are a nod to the past but shaped for the future
Mules are quite a thing at Gucci. The first thing that signalled the turn around of the brand in the early 1990s, under a then-unknown Texan designer named Tom Ford, was a pair of clogs that, inexplicably, became the hottest item in fashion. Later, Carine Roitfeld, keynote stylist of Gucci under its subsequent heady explosion, spent a whole season in 1997 treading on the straps of her slingbacks. Ford focussed on that and translated them into a pair of slippery mules with squared toes that slid off models’ feet, but into everyone else’s wardrobes. These 2025 Gucci mules, however, are distinctly reminiscent of a very specific Ford collection – for Spring/Summer 2001, a somewhat legendarily maligned affair where Kate Moss made a rare runway appearance in curvaceous leather and mesh corseted dresses and Ford managed to persuade male models to have half their head shaved to better underline the sharp, 1980s New Wave aesthetic he was favouring. Indeed, everything was sharp – colour, shoulders, and of course shoes, the signature being a closed-toe cone-heel court with a vamp chiselled into a razor point. Those seem to be the inspiration for a new Gucci design, one that nods to a past but is shaped for the future.
The Gucci 97 heeled mule is available to buy in pastel green or violet patent leather now.
