Zegna

Ermenegildo Zegna was founded in 1910 in the Italian Alpine village of Trivero, in the Piedmont region, by Ermenegildo Zegna at age 18. The original business was a small wool mill producing fabric from Australian merino, with a focus on quality that was unusual for the Italian textile industry of the era. The Zegna family has run the company for four generations; the current chairman, Gildo Zegna, is Ermenegildo's grandson. The modern Zegna vocabulary is built on a hundred-year textile tradition: the Trofeo wool (the brand's signature fine merino, used by Zegna and supplied to other luxury houses), Achill wool (the rarer-than-vicuña Australian fibre Zegna helped revive), the Su Misura bespoke tailoring service, and the brand's deep-research initiative in regenerative wool farming (the brand purchased a 35,000-acre Argentinian estate to produce its own raw fibres). Production is overwhelmingly Italian, anchored at the Lanificio Zegna mill in Trivero. Zegna went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021 and acquired Thom Browne for $500M in 2018. The Zegna Group portfolio now includes Tom Ford International (acquired 2022, the Tom Ford fashion business under Zegna's control). The brand operates around 500 stores globally; the Trivero campus (which Ermenegildo built into a fully integrated mill-and-village in the 1930s) remains the brand's spiritual and operational centre. Few luxury houses are as completely vertically integrated, from sheep to suit, as Zegna.