Nino Cerruti: Fashion Icon

“Fashion is balance, with a dash of theater,” was Nino Cerruti’s favorite bon mot. So, deconstructed jackets with colorful lining. A white single-breasted jacket with a hinted pinstripe. A jacket with holes, lots of unorthodox color combinations. It’s precisely these subtle asymmetries and mistakes that make up Italian elegance.

At just 20 years of age, Nino Cerutti had to take on his father’s legacy and abandon his studies in philosophy to do so. Fashion is also a thought process. If it is good, it anticipates social developments. With his “Hitman” label, he invented the prèt-à-porter for men in 1956, i.e. the good suit off the rack. In 1965 he opened a boutique, pardon, brand world in Paris, called “Cerruti 1881”. There he launched women’s fashion, the first designer to focus on pants. And this at a time when in Paris in many restaurants women were denied entry in just those. As the first fashion designer to work with sports stars and to design the outfits for the Ferrari Formula 1 team, Nino Cerruti was once again ahead of his time. At the latest when Cerruti fashion became the secret stars of numerous Hollywood films in the 1990s and Nino Cerruti wrapped international film stars such as Michael Douglas and Anthony Hopkins in his fashion beyond their screen appearances, he and his creations became immortal.

“Luxury is not classism,” Nino Cerruti also once said. He said it was all about respect for quality in his early days. “Luxury was not just for people who had money to spend. But for people who understood an idea.”