Cerruti 1881

The Cerruti name predates the fashion house by nearly a century: three Cerruti brothers founded a wool mill, Lanificio Fratelli Cerruti, in Biella in 1881, and it was that mill's name the couture house adopted when Nino Cerruti later built a ready-to-wear label around it. Nino inherited control of the family business at twenty, after his father's death forced him to abandon his philosophy studies; his first men's collection, shown under the Hitman name in 1957, was received as a genuine break from the era's stiffer tailoring conventions. A young Giorgio Armani worked inside that world before starting his own house, designing for Cerruti's Hitman line between 1964 and 1970 — formative years frequently credited with shaping the softer, less structured silhouette Armani later made his signature. Nino Cerruti launched the Cerruti 1881 menswear line proper in 1967, the same year he opened his first Paris boutique on Place de la Madeleine, with a womenswear collection following a year later. The mill in Biella and the Paris fashion house therefore represent two ends of one continuous operation — textile manufacturing and couture — bound together under a single family name for most of the twentieth century, even as the retail side of the business has since passed through multiple owners and restructurings.