He revolutionized men’s fashion in the 1960s and helped Giorgio Armani achieve his breakthrough in the industry: the famous Italian fashion designer Nino Cerruti died at the weekend at the age of 91 as a result of hip surgery. “A giant among Italian entrepreneurs is leaving us,” said Deputy Minister for Economic Development Gilberto Pichetto on the designer’s death.
Nino Cerruti was born in 1930 in Biella in Piedmont, where his grandfather’s fabric factory was located, which he took over at the age of 20. In 1957, the man who had studied philosophy and would have preferred to be a journalist, opened his first menswear company, Hitman, near Milan, producing elegant clothes on an industrial scale. Giorgio Armani began his career at Hitman in the mid-1960s.
A boutique in Paris
In 1967, Nino Cerruti opened his first men’s boutique on the Place de la Madeleine in Paris and with it the design center Cerruti 1881 – as a tribute to the year in which his grandfather had the small textile factory. However, production continued in Italy. The grand seigneur of Italian fashion stood for elegance and understatement and a certain nonchalance. His creations are considered unobtrusively elegant, fashion for everyday life. The typical Cerruti design – soft silhouettes, lots of color and tradition – delighted customers such as the French film star Jean-Paul Belmondo. Cerruti was soon in demand in Hollywood, too, and his designs were worn in front of and behind the camera by stars such as Michael Douglas, Richard Gere, Jack Nicholson and Robert Redford.
The designer of the stars
Like Giorgio Armani, Gianni Versace and Gianfranco Ferré, who started their own brands in the 1970s, Cerruti continued the fashion and business expansion with its “casual chic”. In addition to men’s fashion, he soon also brought out women’s fashion, in addition to ready-made clothing he also created sports, jeans and sports fashion.
He did good business in fragrances and outfitted athletes such as American tennis player Jimmy Connors, Swedish skier Ingemar Stenmark and the Ferrari Formula 1 team.
In a “Playboy” interview in 2009, Cerruti criticized the fact that most politicians dress badly because nobody tells them how to do it. “I always ask myself if there is nobody who could advise them,” said Cerruti. “Poetic designers’ search for sensitivity, for more freedom, is being massacred,” he said in a 2016 interview.
His own epoch was romantic, today everything is just business.
In 2000 Cerruti sold the majority of his company to the Italian investor group Fin.Part (fashion group with the brands Frette, Maska and Moncler). The spring/summer 2002 collection, presented in 2001, was the last he designed. After bankruptcy, Fin.Part sold the company to the US investment fund MatlinPatterson in 2006. In 2010, it finally changed hands again with the Chinese trading company Trinity Limited.
Source: Nachrichten
