The House That Gildo Built

The Evolution of an Italian Menswear Dynasty
 

- David Coggins

ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA IS ONE OF THE DEFINITIVE AND MOST INFLUENTIAL names in men’s tailoring. It’s also one of the most successful, with earnings of more than one billion Euros a year. The Italian house has over 500 stores worldwide and has become a key player in China, where growth has been astounding. Since opening its first store in Beijing in 1991, the company has seen the Chinese market grow into its number one earner, now reportedly accounting for a third of its revenue.

The house began as a modest textile producer in 1910. Eighteen-year old Ermenegildo, son of a watchmaker and one of 10 children, opened a fabric mill in Trivero, a small town in the alpine foothills near Turin, Italy. Zegna’s woollens were extraordinarily well made and splendidly diverse in weight and style, and soon the company was supplying fabrics to fashion labels and tailors around the world, as it still does. In the 1960s, Zegna began its own tailored clothing line, and today it is unique in that it oversees every aspect of production: It mills its own fabric and designs and manufactures the clothing made from it. In business school you would call that vertical integration, and the equation works brilliantly for Zegna. It gives the company an unprecedented level of control, along with the ability to experiment with and develop new technologies, establishing the state of the textile arts. Beyond that, Zegna’s success stems from something much simpler: It understands how men want to dress.

A family-run enterprise, the firm’s current CEO, Ermenegildo (known as Gildo), is the grandson of its namesake founder. “Passion is integral to our success,” he says. “The legacy that was passed down from my grandfather and my father, and the vision and drive I would like to hand down to the next generation of the Zegna family, these are constant motivators to continue that success.”