Brunello Cucinelli has built a a billion-dollar fashion business on ethical philosophy and endless cashmere. We spend time in Italy with the son of a bricklayer who is friends with Jeff Bezos and King Charles, is courting AI, expanding his empire in Palm Beach, and quotes Kant over aperitivo.
On a damp January morning at Pitti Immagine Uomo, the menswear trade show in Florence, Italy, luxury fashion designer Brunello Cucinelli was holding court at his sprawling stand on the windowless lower level of the Fortezza da Basso exhibition center. He was nattily attired in a burgundy corduroy sports coat, white corduroy pants, white shirt, and charcoal gray necktie, all of his own design. Cucinelli is one of the only fashion designers–slash-founders who makes a personal appearance at the fair—he spends two full days at his stand, gladhanding and chatting with visitors, and clearly relishes the social interaction and attention.
“Excuse me,” he said when the chief of the Italian armed forces walked in. Cucinelli greeted the officer and they posed for photographers. Afterward, Cucinelli confided: “The general only wears his uniform, but he said he likes my clothes.” During his nearly 50-year career, Cucinelli has perfected the art of “quiet luxury,” the high-priced, understated fashion that is made from the finest materials in hushed colors and is the preferred dress code for the one percent. His specialty is cashmere, for knitwear as well as suiting fabric, though in summer he uses linen and organza, too. Plenty of other designers have built their brands on the old-money aesthetic, but along the way they have watered it down, moving from exclusivity to accessibility, from quality to quantity, as they chased the vaunted $1 billion–turnover mark, and then, once achieving it, more—much more.
Cucinelli reached $1 billion in 2023 without sacrificing his integrity. He never introduced affordable, “entry-level” products, like logo-stamped lipsticks and cotton tees. Or offered lower-priced lines. Or moved into hospitality. Or farmed out production to low-cost contractors in developing nations. Or sold his brand to a luxury group—he and his family, who all work for the company, own 51 percent; the rest is traded on the stock market.
No, Cucinelli has stayed true to his original mission: to own and run a company that sells luxury items made in Italy, while treating his employees with respect—what he calls human capitalism, a philosophy he developed that strives to balance profit with human dignity, ethics, and community well-being.
Not that he has eschewed modernity along the way; indeed, Cucinelli is also resolutely forward-looking. With the help of tech billionaire clients, such as LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Cucinelli has introduced artificial intelligence into his company—internally, to make operations run more efficiently, and externally, to engage consumers in a friendly manner.
“The philosopher Immanuel Kant said that beauty is a symbol of the morally good,” Cucinelli says to me a few weeks after Pitti, invoking one of the many revered thinkers he regularly quotes; he fashions himself as a modern Renaissance man. He is sitting at his neat desk in his office on the top floor of a medieval castle in Solomeo, the quaint Umbrian hilltop village where his wife was born, and where his company is headquartered. He speaks in his rapid-fire Italian, which is translated by an interpreter. “I want to craft Italian products—beautiful, high-quality products—and also be very exclusive,” he says. “I’ve always maintained that luxury needs to be exclusive.”
Cucinelli’s aesthetic is quite specific, and refined: the womenswear is inspired by the Italian haute bourgeois manner of dress, which is a sort of Euro-preppy chic, and the menswear is rooted in the English aristocracy. “The trousers that I’m wearing—they’re really British in style,” he admits. “But the colors”—muted tones, like gray, taupe, and navy—“that is our DNA,” he says. Indeed, for his 70th birthday party in Solomeo last year, Cucinelli asked his 600 guests to dress in shades of white, panama, beige, and light gray.
This is an excerpt from PALMER Vol. 8. To read the full story, click here to purchase the issue.
