Europe's luxury retailers appear to be back with emphatic bang

London

ON London's Bond Street, home to some of the most expensive retail space in the world, only one store needs to instigate crowd control, the luxury brand of the moment: the Italian fashion and accessories powerhouse Gucci.

By mid-morning on a wet and windy British midsummer day, burly security guards had erected velvet ropes along one side of the store's gilded floor-to-ceiling windows. Inside, a dozen black-clad assistants raced around on magenta carpets, serving the 20-some customers on the ground floor. An orderly line made up mostly of tourists formed outside, many of them looking hungrily through the corner store's glass panes.

It is this sort of slavish devotion from Gucci's customer base that resulted in the brand reporting a 43.4 per cent increase in sales in the first six months of the year. That, combined with a sales increase of 28.5 per cent from its sister brand YSL, propelled its parent group, Kering,…