Ferragamo

Ferragamo was founded in 1927 by Salvatore Ferragamo in Florence, after the founder had spent over a decade in California designing footwear for the film industry. The original proposition was a shoe that married Italian artisanal handwork with a study of how the foot actually functioned, pioneering construction methods that emphasized comfort, balance, and structural support while maintaining elegance.

That technical approach, combined with a celebrity clientele cultivated in California, produced the label that stuck. In 1923, Ferragamo opened the Hollywood Boot Shop and the press started to call him the “shoemaker to the stars”, a tag that traveled with the house for the rest of the century.

Menswear sits inside a business where footwear and leather goods are the focus of the brand, representing over 86% of its revenue in 2021, and the men’s offer has long been organized around shoemaking craft, manufactured using several techniques, including lasted, tubular, stitched, and “Tramezza” stitched welting.

Under Maximilian Davis, appointed in 2022, the ready-to-wear has gained a clearer design language. Tailoring cuts wide, shoulders loosen, and fabrics move with ease. That positions Ferragamo alongside Italian houses like Prada and Gucci in the Milan tailoring conversation, while Davis’s own background, renowned for tailoring and family-driven design narratives, gave the appointment industry weight from the start.

The business has shifted from family workshop to listed company, going public on the Italian stock exchange in 2011, though the Ferragamo family has remained majority shareholders with approximately 65% stakes in the company.

Leadership has changed more than once in recent years. In 2022, in an effort to modernize the brand, Salvatore Ferragamo was rebranded as “Ferragamo” and debuted a new logo ahead of its spring-summer 2023 show during Milan Fashion Week, the first under the creative direction of Davis. It was met with generally favorable responses, with critics noting the modernized tailoring.

Results have been uneven since, with a net loss of €68 million in 2024, a significant decline from a €26 million profit in 2023, attributed to decreased sales in key markets, particularly in Asia, and CEO Marco Gobbetti stepping down in March 2025, with Chairman Leonardo Ferragamo assuming interim executive responsibilities.

Today, the men’s wardrobe dresses a customer who wants Florentine shoemaking and Milanese suiting in one place, sitting in the middle tier of European fashion houses, neither a streetwear-led name nor a couture address, and trading on close to a century of footwear history, while Davis works to translate that archive for a younger audience.