Etro

Gerolamo "Gimmo" Etro founded his Milan textile house in 1968, supplying fabrics to couture before deciding the fabrics deserved their own label. The 1981 arrival of paisley set the course: inspired by the antique Kashmir shawls he and his wife Roberta collected, the teardrop boteh became Etro's signature the way monograms serve other houses — except this one predates fashion by a millennium.

The house grew into full menswear, womenswear and home collections while staying family-run to an unusual degree — each of Gimmo's four children took a division: Kean the menswear, Veronica the womenswear, Jacopo accessories and textiles, Ippolito the management. The Milan headquarters holds one of Europe's great private textile archives, thousands of documents deep — the paisley trail running back to the Indian and Kashmiri shawls that started the collection.

L Catterton took a majority stake in 2021 and Marco De Vincenzo now directs the collections, but the register is constant: bohemian luxury with a library behind it — velvet, jacquard, embroidery, and always, somewhere, the paisley making its ancient argument.