Alessandro Sartori trained in textile engineering in Biella before completing a fashion design degree at Istituto Marangoni in Milan in 1989. He joined Ermenegildo Zegna as a menswear designer the same year.

In 2003, the house named him creative director of Z Zegna, the diffusion line he debuted at Pitti Uomo in Florence that year and brought to New York Fashion Week in February 2007. That apprenticeship inside Biella’s wool economy shaped the method that has defined his work since. He designs soft Italian tailoring in lightweight woolens, cashmere, and silk-linen blends, reworking the suit as a malleable wardrobe piece traced from mill to garment.

LVMH appointed Sartori artistic director of Berluti in July 2011. The brief was to extend the patina house from footwear into a full menswear label.

His debut fall-winter 2012 collection put the brand’s hand-finished leather work alongside softened blazers, unlined jackets, and ribbed-cuff trousers. By fall-winter 2015, the offer had loosened further into hand-loomed cashmere blended with leather, coated silk trenches, and felted jersey knits shown on a mirrored Paris catwalk.

The work sat alongside what Tomas Maier was doing at Bottega Veneta in the same period, a luxury menswear reoriented around touch, patina, and leather craft instead of formal tailoring codes. Revenues climbed from under €30 million in 2011 to over €130 million by 2016 across 46 boutiques, and Sartori stepped down in February of that year.

Sartori resigned from Berluti on February 1, 2016, and Zegna named him artistic director that June, giving him creative oversight of the mainline and the group’s diffusion offerings under a single vision. His debut fall-winter 2017 show at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan reset the house around cashmere blends, interchangeable layers, and a languid silhouette.

Subsequent collections have organized themselves around the Oasi Cashmere and Oasi Lino programs, both certified 100% traceable by 2024 from Inner Mongolian goats and Normandy flax fields respectively. The Zegna chapter places Sartori inside a small group of Italian creative directors reworking luxury menswear from the fiber up, where suiting and knitwear share a single supply chain and the wardrobe is designed for decades of wear.