Gucci Misery

A typhoon is passing through town, trees lie slain on the sidewalk, plastic signboard ripped to pieces. What are you going to think when you see a store window shattered to pieces? Smashed up by the typhoon, precisely. But in the case of the Gucci flagship store on Taipei's Chungshan North Road earlier this week, you would've been wrong. A gang of clever thieves used the cover of Typhoon Haitang to break into the store and make off with 2 million New Taiwan dollars' worth of goods. Security? The cameras didn't capture any footage of the thieves, and anyway, they're the type where the tapes have to be replaced manually. Alarm system? It worked, but the security guards back at HQ thought the typhoon did it. So they didn't bother to come and check up on the site until hours later. But lest there be any Schadenfreude from other luxury brands in Taipei, a jewelry store just blocks away was emptied the same way, at around the same time. The fashion course I'm taking at the Eslite bookstore was considering visiting Gucci as a practical field trip. I guess the brand is probably no longer too happy to see many outsiders coming in, but we'll see. By the way, the most recent class in that course also fell victim to the typhoon. But then I would have missed the class anyway because I was on my way back from Beijing. More about that in my next posting.