Gucci’s Alpine F1 Deal Could Give Its Slump a Very Public Reset
The 2027 title partnership gives Gucci access to Formula 1’s younger, richer, more culturally alert audience, but Luca de Meo’s Renault history is the real hinge.
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Written by David Skilling
It was announced this week that Gucci will become Alpine’s Formula 1 title partner from the 2027 season, and for much of the coverage, the easy story is that another luxury brand has found the paddock.
That version isn’t wrong, but there’s more to it, because Gucci isn’t entering Formula 1 from a position of strength, and Alpine isn’t just offering visibility. The deal places a struggling luxury giant inside one of sport’s most-watched cultural rooms, at a time when Kering’s chief executive knows he needs Gucci to feel alive again.
From 2027, the team will race as Gucci Racing Alpine Formula One Team, marking the first time a high-fashion house has taken naming rights over an F1 team and moving Gucci beyond the familiar luxury playbook of hospitality, capsules and celebrity appearances.
Gucci’s parent company, Kering, has been dealing with the reality that the Gucci brand has been struggling of late. In 2025, Gucci revenue fell to €6 billion, down 22 per cent on a reported basis and 19 per cent on a comparable basis, while first-quarter 2026 revenue fell again to €1.347 billion, down 14 per cent reported and 8 per cent comparable.
Those numbers explain why the Alpine deal has to be read as more than a sponsorship announcement. Gucci doesn’t have an awareness problem, because few luxury brands are more recognisable, but recognition isn’t the same as momentum, and luxury becomes fragile when people still know the logo but stop connecting with the brand.
Formula 1 gives Gucci something traditional fashion marketing struggles to create at this scale, which is recurring attention around live events year-round, not just isolated fashion week seasons that occur twice per year. A runway show can dominate a fashion feed for a week or so, but a Grand Prix season keeps building week-by-week across the year, and that rhythm suits a brand trying to re-enter conversation.
The sport has also changed in ways that make this move more logical than it might’ve looked 15 years ago. Formula 1’s own 2025 season review said 57 per cent of new fans over the previous year were under 35, while 42 per cent of its fanbase was female, up from 37 per cent in 2018.
Luxury brands can read those numbers without needing to pretend the paddock suddenly became a fashion week substitute. The appeal is more practical than that, because F1 now gathers affluent travellers, young fans, celebrities, athletes, founders, broadcasters and global sponsors around the same weekends, and it does that across cities where luxury already fights for attention.
LVMH saw the same terrain first at group level, announcing a 10-year global partnership with Formula 1 from 2025, involving Louis Vuitton, Moët Hennessy and TAG Heuer. Gucci’s move is narrower but more visually exposed, because a title partnership puts the brand on the car, in the team name, across broadcasts, and inside every conversation about Alpine’s progress or problems.
Alpine makes the whole thing more complicated, and that complication may be useful. The team has carried plenty of internal turbulence, from management changes to competitive inconsistency, and nobody who follows F1 closely would describe it as a polished dynasty waiting for a luxury badge.
That’s also why the partnership could give Gucci more story than a safer team would. Ferrari would’ve made obvious aesthetic sense, Mercedes would’ve offered corporate certainty, and McLaren would’ve given Gucci a cleaner performance curve, but Alpine gives the brand a reset narrative that mirrors its own: heritage name, great recognition, uneven recent form, and a need to make people believe again.
Luca de Meo sits at the centre of that overlap. Kering appointed him chief executive and board member after he had led Renault Group, and his Kering biography also lists former roles including CEO of SEAT, president of the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, and CEO of Ampere.
His Renault record matters because Alpine’s current F1 identity is partly his work. In 2020, Renault announced that its Formula 1 team would switch to the Alpine name for 2021, after de Meo reorganised the group around a sharper brand focus, using F1 to raise the profile of a sports car brand that needed global relevance beyond enthusiasts.
That experience doesn’t guarantee anything for Gucci, and F1 has a way of punishing neat commercial ideas when the car is slow. Motorsport fans don’t care how elegant the livery is when strategy collapses, and fashion credibility won’t survive long if the team becomes a weekly joke rather than a credible sporting project.
Still, de Meo understands a point many luxury executives only approach from the outside. Formula 1 isn’t just a media buy, because the sport gives brands a stage where performance, engineering, travel, status and risk are already built into the product, and those codes sit close enough to luxury for the bridge to feel believable.
Gucci needs that bridge because its current reset is happening under pressure. Kering’s first-quarter 2026 update said North America delivered 8 per cent year-on-year growth for Gucci, offering early evidence of traction, but Asia-Pacific and Western Europe still lag, which leaves the brand needing sharper global signals without pretending the slump has already passed.
Francesca Bellettini, Gucci’s president and chief executive, is leading the house through that commercial repair, while Demna’s arrival as artistic director gives the brand a new creative chapter. An F1 partnership can’t fix product, pricing, retail discipline or merchandising, but it can give that internal reset a public arena where people can see Gucci behaving like a brand with direction again.
Gucci’s best version of this deal won’t be a logo exercise. It will use Alpine to build a world around racing, travel, tailoring, leather goods, teamwear, VIP clienteling and driver-led storytelling, while resisting the temptation to turn every Grand Prix into another luxury content shoot with nothing at stake.
Lots of fans will be cynical, and they’ve earned the right to be. F1 has become very good at dressing commercial deals in language about culture and innovation, and access-dependent coverage often repeats that language because the paddock is a small place, relationships matter, and criticism can cost invitations.
The sharper reading is that Gucci and Alpine both need the deal to do real work. Alpine gets a title partner with global recognition and luxury weight, while Gucci gets a live sporting platform at a moment when Kering needs its biggest house to stop looking like a problem child and start looking like a future-facing brand again.
By 2027, the judgment won’t rest on whether Gucci’s entry into Formula 1 looked impressive in a press release. It’ll rest on whether de Meo can turn a familiar paddock play into something Gucci badly needs, which is not more visibility, but visible momentum.
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