Flora, one of the most loved Gucci icons, was born as a special commission for Princess Grace of Monaco in 1966. The Gucci Bag princess had paid a visit to the Gucci store in Milan with Prince Ranier. Having bought a green 'bamboo bag' Rodolfo Gucci insisted she selected a gift. When she relented she asked for a scarf. Rodolfo was distressed: he felt Gucci Purses lacked one special enough for his distinguished guest. He immediately contacted the renowned illustrator Vittorio Accornero, to design the most beautiful floral scarf he could create. The next day Accornero returned with his painting: it was the 'Flora', a multicolored flowered template that was destined for an unimaginably extended future.

Flora kindled such long-lasting affection among European women that they passed it onto their daughters. One was Caroline of Monaco, who wore a blouse in her 'mother's' scarf-print as a teenager; another, the much younger Frida Giannini, whose own mother loved the print as a girl in Rome. Re-connecting with that feeling, Giannini's revived Flora on printed canvas bags for summer 2005, was met with overwhelming demand. Other Flora variations, re-scaled, re-colored and abstracted, made it onto Forties/Seventies inspired print dresses for summer 2006, into jewellery and on evening bags. They were all hits: living proof of the power of a Gucci icon 40 years after it was first imagined.

Guccio Gucci's initials were first used in the early Sixties _ as either single or double Gs _ as squared-off fastenings for bags which were developed and made in Gucci's own forge at the Via delle Caldaie in Florence. Transferred soon after into a diamond-shaped pattern woven into the best-selling cotton canvas luggage, the GG monogram transported the company's fame, quite literally, around the globe in the much-photographed company of movie-stars, aristocrats and socialites.

Reconfigured and deployed in innumerable designs and redesigns, the eternal GG has appeared and reappeared over time, merged into a circle, back-to-back, inverted, and abstracted. It's been done in silver and gold, burned into luxurious velvet, embossed into leather, stamped onto suede, printed on silks, woven into jacquards, patch worked together in luxurious crocodile and lizard. A status symbol that crosses cultures, it has acquired an elasticity of popular meaning that stretches its possibilities to include high glamour _ and, when the moment arises, a knowing sense of humor.

The horsebit was first written into the house vocabulary in the Fifties, used on heavy tan leather saddle-stitched handbags. Since then, the horse-bits have been both miniaturized and maximized as hardware; luxuriously schemed into embossed or burned-out surfaces on leather suede and velvet; turned into repeat patterns printed on silk and sculpted into the components of precious jewellery.

The horsebit played a crucial role in marking out the Gucci loafer as a time-traversing design classic. The snaffle was introduced as a decoration on the soft and comfortable brown or black leather Gucci men's moccasins in 1953. They graced the feet of Clark Gable, John Wayne and Fred Astaire, and when women's versions appeared in 1968, became the choice of sophisticated women looking for a luxurious kind of comfort. The shoes became favorite everyday wear for elegant women such as Lauren Bacall.

In new times, Frida Giannini looks at the horsebit with fresh eyes. She might take the prints of interlocking, squared-off bits, of the highly fashionable red and blue Gucci pattern used for shoulder bags, shoes and silk blouses in 1969-1970, transform them in and project them, in mini-form, onto flowing dresses or blown up to exaggerated scale on travel-totes. With new style, a new feminine touch, that counts as the current installment in the long-running serial of Gucci design.