Brunello Cucinelli

Brunello Cucinelli founded his eponymous company in 1978 in the village of Solomeo, outside Perugia, with a small sum of capital and a single proposition, dyed cashmere knitwear in colors the category had not seen before.

The early focus was artisanal women’s knitwear in colored cashmere, unusual at the time, and the bright palette set the house apart from the muted naturals that dominated Italian knitting mills. The founder has long been described as a “philosopher-designer”, a label that stuck as the company tied its commercial identity to the restoration of the medieval hamlet it operated from.

Menswear arrived later and grew into a defining part of the house. The brand exclusively produced women’s cashmere sweaters until 1994, when the men’s line, also made of cashmere, was first introduced, and the first Brunello Cucinelli mono-brand store opened in Porto Cervo that same year.

The men’s collections expanded outward from knitwear into soft tailoring, unstructured sport coats in flannel and linen, washed cotton chinos, suede field jackets, and shawl-collar cardigans cut close to the body.

The vocabulary sits near Loro Piana on the fiber side and near Italian tailors like Boglioli and Kiton on the jacket side, though Cucinelli’s looser shoulder and pale, sun-bleached palette mark it as its own thing. A clear credential came in 2012, when the company was listed on the Italian Stock Exchange, and in 2023 it joined the FTSE MIB index with a market capitalisation of about €5.7 billion.

The business has scaled while keeping production close to home. Production is carried out entirely in Italy, primarily in the Umbria region, and the manufacturing process retains an artisanal component. Succession planning began over a decade ago, when in 2014, Cucinelli set up a trust to benefit his daughters, Camilla and Carolina, in order to guarantee a proper handover of his namesake company, and the next generation now sits inside the business alongside their spouses.

Growth has continued in parallel, with the brand increasing its sales by 24% compared to 2022, to 1.14 billion euros in 2023, and the 2024 acquisition of the Sartoria Eugubina sewing workshop and the construction of a new factory to meet increasing consumer demand.

In menswear today, the house dresses a customer who wants Italian tailoring softened for daily wear, finance and tech executives, collectors, and a younger cohort drawn in through the cashmere hoodies and sneakers that now sit beside the suits.