Gucci

Guccio Gucci, who had absorbed luxury's theatre working at the Savoy in London, opened his Florentine leather goods shop in 1921, selling equestrian-inflected luggage and saddlery whose hardware — the horsebit, the green-red-green web stripe — became the house vocabulary. Wartime material shortages produced the bamboo-handled bag of 1947, still in production. The family saga that followed was operatic enough for cinema, but the house's Florentine craft base endured through every act, and its creative directors — Tom Ford's 1990s glamour, Alessandro Michele's maximalist archive-mining — each revived it by returning to the codes. The horsebit loafer, added to MoMA's collection, may be the single most-copied shoe in menswear. Florence is the right city to buy: the house began here, and the loafer, the bamboo bag, and the web stripe all carry the origin visibly.

The Gucci Garden in Piazza della Signoria adds archive rooms and a Bottura restaurant to the Florentine pilgrimage — see it before buying at the flagship.