De Sole interceded, though he didn't know Ford. "I told Maurizio it didn't make any sense," he says. "Tom seemed like a good person, and besides, there was no one else on the design team left.

"Maurizio was a wonderful person but a terrible manager," De Sole continues, "By 1993, the company was basically broke. We lost about $30 million that year." Around that time, Arnault came close to buying the company but backed off at the last minute.

Investcorp was forced to buy out Maurizio Gucci's remaining 50 percent stake in a desperate effort to recoup its investment. De Sole took over as head of the company. Two years later, Maurizio Gucci was shot on a Milan street by a hired gunman working for his ex-wife.

At first, it was an awkward partnership for De Sole and Ford -- a man twenty years younger, who came out at Studio 54 and likes to tell reporters that he doesn't wear underwear. "At that point, everybody had left the company, and the only people around were myself and Mr. Ford," De Sole says. "A lot of people had told me that his style was out of control and not 'real Gucci.' I'm sure they told him horrible things about me too."

De Sole contemplated leaving himself, and even interviewed for a job working for Arnault at Dior. But driving together around Tuscany, wooing back local manufacturers whose bills the cash-starved company had stiffed, De Sole and Ford began to understand each other.

De Sole worked hard to cancel Gucci's myriad licensing agreements and position the double G's again as a symbol of big bucks. In the studio, Ford began studying Gucci's archive, drawing on its history to create a provocative new look. There were some false starts, like G-strings with Gucci's double-G logo. But in March 1995, the velvet hip-huggers Ford designed were the season's surprise upset: "Dangerous, sexy, modern, and slightly roughed up," wrote Katherine Betts in Vogue.

A few days after the show, De Sole met Ford for dinner at the Bristol hotel in Paris. "Domenico, I want you to marry me," Ford said.

"Tom, I am not sure what my wife, Eleanore, is going to say to this," De Sole answered. But he got the drift. He increased Ford's compensation. And to reinforce the bond, a significant chunk of Ford's paycheck came in Gucci stock options. Ford made his influence felt throughout the company, from the layout of Gucci stores to the look of its ad campaigns. Gucci's annual sales soared from $264 million in 1994 to more than $1 billion last year. Ford amassed a personal fortune worth more than $80 million, most of it tied up in Gucci stock, which had more than than doubled in price.

But last spring, the Asian economic crisis sent Gucci's shares tumbling from its high of about $80 a share to less than $35 a share, and the low price made the company vulnerable to a takeover. In June, its rival Prada disclosed that it had acquired a 9 percent stake on the open market, apparently contemplating a takeover.

De Sole and Ford were dismayed to realize that when Gucci had been incorporated in Amsterdam (to minimize its taxes), the company had neglected to include in its bylaws the Dutch version of a "poison pill." Earlier, De Sole had sought shareholder approval to install a new poison pill. But shareholders worried it might deter bids for their depressed stock, and it was voted down.

De Sole hastily assembled a team of investment bankers from Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and lawyers from the New York firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom who together contrived a make-shift takeover deterrent involving the issuance of special "ghost shares" to an employee trust that could block unwelcome suitors. De Sole warned Prada that Gucci could use the ghost shares to stop an unwanted advance, but they were never issued because Prada never moved ahead.