The Teary Eyes of Umberto Cucinelli
The image that explains everything is not a cashmere sweater, not a restored castle, not a Latin inscription carved into Umbrian stone. It is a man's face — specifically, the face of Umberto Cucinelli, an uneducated farmer who left his land in the early 1960s to work in a cement factory on the outskirts of Perugia, and who came home each evening with something broken behind his eyes. His son Brunello, then a teenager, watched. The factory did not beat Umberto. Nobody struck him. What they did was smaller and, in its way, worse: they looked through him, mocked his rustic dialect, treated him as something less than a person engaged in the ordinary human transaction of trading labor for wages. Umberto did not complain about the pay, which was meager, or the work, which was brutal. What he said, over and over, to no one in particular, was this: "What have I done evil to God to be subject to such humiliation?"
His son heard it. Heard it at the dinner table, heard it in the silences between sentences, heard it decades later when he stood before the leaders of the G20 in Rome and before the cameras of Giuseppe Tornatore and before every journalist who has ever asked him the same question — Why do you run your company this way? — and gave the same answer. The answer is always the teary eyes of his father. It is the foundational wound, the primal scene, the thing Brunello Cucinelli has been trying to repair for nearly fifty years by building — in a twelfth-century hilltop hamlet called Solomeo, population 436 — one of the most improbable luxury empires on earth: a company that sells $3,000 cashmere sweaters to billionaires while insisting, with an earnestness that can feel either prophetic or theatrical depending on your tolerance for philosophy delivered in Italian, that the whole enterprise exists to restore human dignity to the act of work.
Whether you believe him — whether the project is sincere idealism or magnificent brand theater or, most likely, some volatile compound of both — is the question that every profile of Cucinelli eventually arrives at and none quite resolves.
By the Numbers
The Cucinelli Empire
€1.14B2023 annual revenues (29% growth over 2021)
~2,000Direct employees worldwide
~7,000Artisans in ~400 external workshops
20%Annual profits earmarked 'for humanity'
20%Above-market premium on worker wages
100%Production made in Italy
436Population of Solomeo in last census
A Peasant's Curriculum
Before the sweaters, before the stock exchange listing, before
Jeff Bezos flew to Umbria to discuss humanity's next thousand years over plates of spaghetti all'amatriciana, there was a boy who could not quite fit in anywhere. Brunello Cucinelli was born on September 3, 1953, in Castel Rigone, a village near Perugia so old that its restaurant owner, when asked about local history, began with its settlement by barbarians in the years before Christ. The family had no electricity, no running water. Thirteen people shared the farmhouse. They collected rainwater, worked the land with animals, followed the sun along its arc until it set, at which point the stars became — in the absence of any competing light source — a kind of overwhelming presence. "I was a kid, and I was in love with the sky," he would say decades later.
The pastoral idyll ended abruptly when Brunello was around thirteen. The family moved to the Perugia suburbs. Umberto took the cement factory job. The boy who had spoken a rustic dialect found himself mocked at school; you could see from what they wore, Cucinelli later recalled, that it was not city wear. He probably wore the same pair of pants every day. His mother ironed them each night.
At twelve, enamored of St. Francis — that other famous Umbrian who renounced his father's wealth for radical simplicity — Cucinelli flirted with the priesthood and spent a single night in a seminary before deciding he missed his parents and going home. He was not an industrious student. He earned a diploma as a land surveyor, enrolled in engineering at the University of Perugia, and dropped out after two years. His real education took place at Bar di Gigino, a café whose regulars included a neighborhood prostitute, a university professor, and an assortment of card players. Cucinelli had, by his own account, a mathematical mind — "I see all the cards that haven't been played" — and the money he won at cards went toward eating out, going dancing, and a handsome camel coat.
His father, Umberto — who lived to be one hundred and died only recently — was patient but not infinitely so. "One night, at one-thirty in the morning, I said to him, 'Stop doing this — stop hanging out in the bar,'" Umberto recalled. "It was time for him to start working. Brunello had lots of ideas, but he didn't know how to start."
The philosopher who unlocked something was Kant. Cucinelli discovered him at twenty-one:
"There are only two things that really move me: the starry sky above me, and the moral law within me." For a boy who had grown up staring at the sky because there was no electricity to power anything else, the resonance was physical. From Kant he moved to
Socrates, to Plato's
Republic, to Seneca, to Marcus Aurelius, to St. Benedict's Rule — assembling, through years of autodidactic reading, a personal pantheon that he would later install as marble busts around his fireplace and consult, in the manner of Machiavelli during his exile, in solitary literary conversation. He was gifted a late uncle's copy of Plato's
Phaedrus as a child, and from those pages, he later said, "was born my desire to collect, read, and preserve books."
From the teary eyes of my father. When we were living in the countryside, the atmosphere, the ambiance — life was good. Then he went to work in a factory. He was being humiliated and offended. He would not complain about the hardship or the tiny wages, but what he did say was, "What have I done evil to God to be subject to such humiliation?"
Fifty-Three Sweaters
The origin myth of the company, like all good origin myths, has the quality of a parable. Cucinelli was twenty-four, employed briefly as a model for an Umbrian sportswear company — he had always dressed well, read fashion magazines, stayed current on trends — when he noticed something: cashmere, at the time, came only in natural colors. Black, gray, beige. Business sweaters for business people. Benetton was making a fortune selling brightly colored Shetland wool. What if you did the same thing, but in cashmere?
He took out a loan of 500,000 lire — roughly $500 — and opened a forty-square-meter workshop. He ordered twenty kilograms of ecru-colored cashmere yarn from a local merchant who agreed, with fatherly generosity, to wait for payment: "You'll pay me when you earn your first money. I know you, you're a good young man." Cucinelli brought six sweaters to a dye expert named Alessio, perhaps one of the greatest specialists in cashmere dyeing in Italy, and asked him to turn them into six different colors. Alessio's initial response: "You're crazy to dye cashmere in these colors." For most of a morning Cucinelli begged. "Let's give it a try," Alessio finally said, "but I can't guarantee the result."
Cucinelli took the dyed sweaters north. His first customer was Albert Franz, owner of a boutique in Naturno, a small town near Bolzano, who placed an order for fifty-three pieces. "That first fifty-three I sold, I felt like
Alexander the Great," Cucinelli said. He expanded to Germany — "I was told that Germans pay really well, and they pay on time" — and then to the United States. By 1998, the company was selling 200,000 cashmere sweaters a year, despite operating only one tiny monobrand store. In 2000, responding to American buyers who wanted a complete Cucinelli look, he expanded into a wider range of sportswear and accessories. The product line broadened, but the DNA remained: artisanal Italian craftsmanship, muted and expensive, the kind of clothing that makes the wearer look as though they have never tried to look like anything at all.
In 1978, the same year he sold those first sweaters, Cucinelli founded his company — initially called Smail (Società Manufatti in Lana), later renamed after himself. In 1981, he married Federica Benda, a girl from Solomeo whom he had courted as a long-haired teenager on a motorbike, roaring into her village in his best outfit, hoping she would notice him from the bus. They moved to Solomeo after their daughters, Camilla and Carolina, were born. And there, in his wife's hometown, at the top of a hill overlooking the Umbrian valley, Cucinelli began to build.
The Castle and the Kingdom
In 1985, Cucinelli bought the fourteenth-century castle of Solomeo from its absentee owner, a lawyer who lived in another region. The castle was dilapidated, the village nearly abandoned. Federica's parents knew the lawyer personally, and their trust secured the deal — including a payment extension. The purchase price is not recorded in any public source, but the ambition was immediately clear: Cucinelli intended not merely to house his business but to resurrect an entire village as a physical manifestation of his ideas about work, beauty, and human dignity.
The renovation of Solomeo is a perpetual project. Over the past four decades, Cucinelli has converted the castle's honey-colored stone chambers into a factory where knitting machines hum and laundering rumbles in the basement. A Renaissance villa nearby became a subsidized dining hall for employees — long tables set with bottles of Pellegrino and wine, local ladies serving minestre, pastas, platters of grilled meat, salad — where workers pay less than three euros for lunch and tourists occasionally mistake the vaulted-ceiling room with its views of the hills for an attractive restaurant. He restored the Church of St. Bartholomew, founded in the late twelfth century and rebuilt in the seventeenth. He repaved streets, restored squares, built a woodland park. He constructed a two-hundred-and-forty-seat theatre — Teatro Cucinelli, opened in 2008 — crafted in the architectural vernacular of the sixteenth century, with a pseudo-classical portico whose Latin inscription, "B. CVCINELLI CVRAVIT A DOMINI MMVIII," recalls the façade of the Pantheon.
In 2018, he unveiled a five-meter monument titled "Tribute to Human Dignity," built of travertine blocks according to ancient techniques, with the names of the five continents inscribed in bronze beneath its arches — Africa placed beneath the central arch to commemorate mankind's original home. He demolished aging modern factories that marred the view from the castle to the theatre and reclaimed the land for agriculture: vineyards, olive groves, orchards, wheat. "We have not consumed our beloved land," he told the G20 leaders in 2021. He is now building a Universal Library of Solomeo, inspired by Ptolemy I of Alexandria and Emperor Hadrian, to be housed in a seventeenth-century villa and stocked with volumes in all the world's languages.
The village itself operates as a kind of living set — the Middle Ages by way of something more polished, more intentional. Workers are not asked to clock in or out. Ceramic plaques inscribed with quotations from various sages dot the streets: Hadrian outside the factory entrance ("I feel responsible for all the beauty in the world"), Shakespeare on the pathway to the theatre ("We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep"). It is a fantasy of beneficent feudalism, as Rebecca Mead observed in The New Yorker in 2010, with Cucinelli as the enlightened overlord and the residents — many of them his employees — as appreciative underlings. Solomeo re-creates a past that never existed. There are blooming planters in the castle courtyard instead of snuffling pigs. The Piazza della Pace offers faultless views over the valley, its wall just high enough to obscure the less pleasing sight of the larger modern factory at the base of the hill.
But the residents seem largely unbothered by the feudal analogy. Don Sandro, who served as priest of St. Bartholomew's for over a decade, told Mead: "He's a good guy. He's good at what he does. And he tries to work a lot on a social level, and a human level." Don Sandro was wearing a dark-blue Cucinelli sweater. Stefania Natalicchi, proprietress of Solomeo's only store — a hole-in-the-wall grocery selling everything from artisanal chocolates to Silly String — remembered Cucinelli as a long-haired teenager on a motorbike and could hardly believe he had brought a theatre to their village. Her mother, a farmer who had never seen anything like it, was given a reserved seat near the front for the inauguration. "She had no idea how something like this could be," Natalicchi said, her eyes filling with tears. "It was a beautiful night."
The Benedictine Rule of Cashmere
The operating philosophy of Brunello Cucinelli SpA is simultaneously simple and extravagant in its claims. Cucinelli calls it "humanistic capitalism" — a term he has used so consistently and so publicly that it has become inseparable from the brand itself. The idea, distilled: profit is necessary and good, but it must be pursued with ethics, dignity, and morals; workers must be treated as "thinking souls"; a portion of earnings must be returned to the community; and the human being must lie at the center of the production process because "quality cannot exist without humanity."
The practical manifestations: employees receive wages approximately 20 percent above the Italian market rate (where a factory worker typically starts at around €1,000 per month). The entire company takes a ninety-minute lunch break. No one is expected to send emails after 5:30 p.m. "If I make you overwork, I have stolen your soul," Cucinelli says. Workers are gently prodded to contemplate ideas but never surveilled — there are no time clocks, no email surveillance, no weekend texts from the boss. The company earmarks 20 percent of annual profits "for humanity" — funding everything from a hospital in Malawi to the restoration of Norcia's civic bell tower after the devastating 2016 earthquake that killed 300 people, to the Teatro Cucinelli, to a soccer stadium in Castel Rigone where Cucinelli and his middle-aged childhood friends play at least twice a week, running around in Nike tracksuits and cashmere neck warmers before repairing to a restaurant in a converted castle for spaghetti all'amatriciana and cigars.
I wanted a company that made healthy profits, but did so with ethics, dignity and morals. I wanted human beings to work in slightly better places, earn a little more in wages and feel like thinking souls at work.
The reference points are deliberately ancient. St. Benedict's Rule — ora et labora, pray and work — provides the daily cadence. Hadrian's conviction that he was "responsible for all the beauty in the world" provides the aesthetic mandate. Theodore Levitt, the twentieth-century Harvard marketing scholar who argued that the purpose of companies is to keep and serve customers, provides the commercial logic. Cucinelli weaves these together with a fluency that can seem either deeply considered or lightly performative, depending on whether you catch him before or after his post-lunch nap.
Production itself is resolutely local. All Cucinelli clothing is made in Italy, 80 percent of it in Umbria. The manual component accounts for 60 percent of manufacturing. Approximately 400 independent artisan workshops produce the collections, 70 percent of them working exclusively for Cucinelli. The company employs a creative team of sixty people who work daily alongside over one hundred tailors. Even a cloistered convent in Perugia contributes embroidery work. In May 2023, Cucinelli and Chanel jointly acquired minority stakes (24.5 percent each) in Cariaggi, one of their Italian cashmere yarn producers — a move Cucinelli's North American CEO, Massimo Caronna, described as protecting "the raw material and the production for the next 50 to 100 years."
Caronna — who joined the company in 1997, three years before the product line expanded beyond knitwear, and who has watched it grow from a single category into a billion-euro enterprise — distills his boss's philosophy into a single inversion: "I'm not worried about who's going to buy the product, but I'm worried about who's going to produce the product." The supply-side anxiety is real. Italy's artisan population is aging. Young Italians increasingly reject manual trades. Cucinelli has responded by founding a School of Contemporary High Craftsmanship and Arts in Solomeo, where young people are trained free of charge and can then work either for Cucinelli or for any other Italian company. It is a bet — a characteristically long one — that investing in human capital will yield dividends over generations.
The IPO and the Paradox of Listing a Soul
On April 27, 2012, Brunello Cucinelli SpA listed on the Milan Stock Exchange in what was that year's only Italian IPO. The timing was audacious: Europe was deep in its sovereign debt crisis, the Italian luxury sector was stagnant, and the idea of a self-described humanistic capitalist submitting to the quarterly scrutiny of financial markets seemed, to many, either brave or deluded.
Cucinelli had spent a year and a half before the listing running the company as though it were already public — accustoming himself and his team to the disciplines of transparency, regulatory compliance, and investor communication. The offering made him a billionaire. More importantly, it introduced a paradox he would spend the next decade navigating: how do you maintain a philosophy built on long-term thinking, human dignity, and the deliberate rejection of growth-at-all-costs when your shareholders include fund managers who measure performance in ninety-day increments?
His answer has been characteristically idiosyncratic. Cucinelli's investor presentations and earnings calls are famous for their philosophical digressions. Where another CEO might cite comparable-store sales, Cucinelli is more likely to quote Horace or Cicero. When discussing margins, he insists the markup must be "reasonable" — the company's operating margin of roughly 13.8 percent runs below the 17 percent average for luxury peers. "Would you buy a sweater," he asks, implicitly of anyone who questions his pricing strategy, "if you knew its maker was being humiliated?" He uses the word "gracious" to describe his growth targets — 7 to 10 percent annually — and "gentle" to describe the luxury segment he occupies. These are not words that appear frequently in equity research.
The stock has not always rewarded the philosophy. Shares fell by more than a third from their January 2014 peak, temporarily stripping Cucinelli of billionaire status. Analyst sentiment has historically been cautious: at one point, only one of thirteen covering analysts rated the stock a buy. Luca Solca, then head of luxury-goods research at Exane BNP Paribas, posed the central skeptic's question: "Whether the brand has enough unique features and underlying tangible elements to maintain its very high pricing long-term."
But the post-pandemic period answered with force. While much of the luxury sector struggled, Cucinelli reported revenues of €919.5 million in 2022 (up 29 percent from 2021), crossed the €1 billion threshold in 2023, and raised its full-year 2025 revenue growth forecast to 11–12 percent. The company's current market capitalization exceeds $8 billion. Gildo Zegna — CEO of Ermenegildo Zegna Group, which holds a 3 percent stake in Cucinelli — called it "natural to become an investor. We admire his philanthropic and humanistic capitalism." The stock, it turns out, has been a far better investment than the cautious analysts predicted. Whether that validates the philosophy or merely the product is a question Cucinelli would probably answer with a passage from Marcus Aurelius.
The Silicon Valley Conquest
The unlikeliest chapter of Cucinelli's career is also its most revealing: how an Italian farmer's son who does not own a computer became the preferred clothier of the technology industry's most powerful people.
The list of customers reads like a cap table: Jeff Bezos,
Marc Benioff,
Mark Zuckerberg (whose signature gray T-shirts are custom-ordered from Cucinelli at nearly $300 apiece), Reid Hoffman, Dick Costolo, the founders of Instagram, Twitter, Dropbox, LinkedIn. "It has almost become a badge of status," noted
Women's Wear Daily, "signaling that the wearer isn't only a brilliant techie and businessman, but also knows something about fashion beyond the hoodie."
The relationship deepened beyond transactions. In the summer of 2019, Cucinelli hosted Bezos, Hoffman, and other tech leaders in Solomeo for a visit that mixed philosophy, pasta, and entrepreneurship — and generated international headlines (along with an unfortunate photoshopped diversity incident). Benioff, the Salesforce founder, met Cucinelli in San Francisco in 2015 and bonded over humanistic capitalism. Cucinelli became a regular guest at Dreamforce, Salesforce's annual conference, where he delivered a 2017 keynote on humanism in technology. Benioff reportedly took the stage wearing a pin-striped navy Cucinelli suit made of vicuña wool — the rare, impossibly soft fiber sourced from South American animals. "We share questions about eternity and leaving a mark on earth," Cucinelli said of his tech clients. When he first met Bezos, he brought a bust of Emperor Hadrian as a gift. They discussed what they could do for humanity in the next one to two thousand years. "I told him I would come back to Seattle in 500 years and see what he did for the city."
The connection is not accidental. Silicon Valley's new wealth class needed a sartorial identity that signaled wealth without vulgarity, taste without effort, a post-hoodie maturity that didn't capitulate to the suit-and-tie establishment they had disrupted. Cucinelli's clothing — soft-shouldered blazers, cashmere T-shirts, oatmeal-toned slacks — provided exactly this: a uniform for people who had transcended the need to wear a uniform. That the man behind the clothes also happened to be a self-taught philosopher who quoted Marcus Aurelius and refused to send emails after 5:30 p.m. made him irresistible to an industry increasingly anxious about its own relationship to human dignity, attention, and the soul-stealing potential of its products.
"Technology is a blessing from creation," Cucinelli told the Business of Fashion, "but sometimes it steals the soul that creation bestowed upon us."
Father Cassian and the Question of Necessity
One day, a journalist asked Cucinelli whether St. Benedict would approve of his business — founded as it is upon providing the least needy of people with the most unnecessary of objects. The question landed. Cucinelli paused, then offered to take the journalist to meet his "spiritual father": Father Cassian Folsom, a Benedictine monk and an American who, in 2000, had re-established a monastery in Norcia — St. Benedict's birthplace — for the first time since Napoleon closed down Italy's religious communities two hundred years earlier.
Father Cassian Folsom was a gaunt, bearded figure in a long black habit and black Birkenstocks who greeted visitors in a narrow room overlooking a cloister. He had come to Norcia from the United States, drawn by the town's historical resonance, only to discover that its central piazza hosted rock concerts that started at ten while his monks went to bed at nine. The fourteen monks in his community were mostly American — "In Italy, vocations are down in general," he explained. "Our way of life is very demanding. People value comfort over everything else, and they don't want a sacrificial life."
Father Cassian showed Cucinelli plans for renovating a ruined Capuchin monastery outside Norcia. The price: five or six million euros. The amount raised so far: nothing. "We have faith that this will happen," Father Cassian said. "I move forward, and I hope that sooner or later people follow after me."
Then Cucinelli asked: Would St. Benedict approve? Father Cassian weighed the question. He mentioned the beauty of the workmanship emerging from Cucinelli's factories, the concern for the individual worker. Benedict, he concluded, would rule in Cucinelli's favor. "Obviously, Brunello's work is a little out of our category," the monk said. "But quality is quality."
The exchange crystallizes the tension that runs through everything Cucinelli does. He invokes Benedictine simplicity while selling $1,500 cardigans. He quotes Hadrian on beauty while obscuring his modern factory behind a carefully calibrated wall. He distributes copies of Obama's speeches to employees who may prefer, as one seamstress gently noted, not to have much time for reading Marcus Aurelius. The philosophy is real — visitors to Solomeo consistently report a palpable contentment among workers, a sense of being treated, as seamstress Rosella Cianetti put it, "like humans" — but it exists in productive tension with the commerce it serves. This is not a contradiction Cucinelli denies. It is, rather, the paradox he has chosen to inhabit.
Emily in Paris, and the Afterlife of a Living Man
In September 2024, Cucinelli received an invitation he did not understand. Darren Star, creator of Emily in Paris, wanted him at the Rome premiere of the Netflix show's fourth season. "Why should I go to Rome to see the premiere of 'Emily in Paris'?" Cucinelli recalled, laughing. "I have nothing to do with it!" He declined. The next day, emails poured in from India, China, everywhere. It turned out Star had modeled an entire character — Marcello Muratori, an Italian heir to a luxury cashmere company founded by his late father, Umberto — on Cucinelli. The fictional hamlet was called Solitano. The fictional philosophy was unmistakable.
Star had visited Solomeo in October 2023 at the suggestion of fashion industry friends. "I was a little nervous, hoping he would be pleased, since I admire him so much," Star said. "The surprise was how much the reality of Solomeo and Brunello himself surpassed my imagination. As beautiful as our fictional Solitano is — we didn't do it justice."
By late 2025, Cucinelli had added another layer to his self-mythologizing project: a documentary film, Brunello: The Gracious Visionary, directed by the Oscar-winning Giuseppe Tornatore of Cinema Paradiso fame. "I told myself that I didn't want them to make a film about me when I was dead, but to give viewers the chance to hear my voice," Cucinelli said. "And I wanted Giuseppe to direct it because Nuovo Cinema Paradiso is the film closest to my heart." The film, scored by Oscar-winning composer Nicola Piovani, blends documentary footage with fictional re-enactments — a young Cucinelli played by Italian actor Saul Nanni — and premiered at Cinecittà Studios in Rome before an audience that included Jessica Chastain, Jeff Goldblum, Chris Pine, Jonathan Bailey, former Prime Minister Mario Draghi, and current Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
Tornatore had initially been reluctant. He knew nothing about fashion. But Cucinelli's wife, Federica, explained: "When Brunello wants something, he doesn't let go until he gets it." The director organized his narrative around Cucinelli's lifelong relationship with card games — a structural conceit that honored the years spent at Bar di Gigino while also revealing the mathematical sharpness beneath the philosophical surface. Tornatore filmed many scenes in their original childhood locations, including the farmhouse where Cucinelli grew up, which was largely unchanged. When Cucinelli learned that electricity had been added, he bought the property on the spot and had the electricity removed.
"I agreed to make this film because I've reached that age when one begins to contemplate the 'afterlife,' so to speak," Cucinelli told Vogue. "I'd rather not leave it to someone else to tell my story once I'm gone — this way I won't be turning in my grave over how badly they told it." Tornatore returned the compliment with characteristic dryness: "He was so discreet, it was as if he were already dead."
The Succession and the Next Five Hundred Years
Cucinelli is seventy-two. He trains two hours a day — swimming, soccer, the "Five Tibetans" (an ancient set of exercises he calls "the secret of eternal youth") — and works with a personal physiotherapist who is seventy-seven and once trained world champion boxers. His daily routine follows what he describes as Benedictine rhythm: wake early, swim, work until one, pasta for lunch at home, a nap (naked, he specifies), work until 5:30, exercise, dinner at eight, then the piazza for cards and conversation, or two and a half hours in front of the fireplace with no television, "just beautiful thoughts."
But he is thinking about endings. His daughters, Camilla and Carolina, hold senior positions as vice presidents and creative co-directors. His son-in-law, Riccardo Stefanelli, serves as co-CEO alongside Luca Lisandroni. The succession plan is designed to transition from founder-led operation to multigenerational family enterprise — a structure familiar in Italian business but notoriously difficult to execute. "I would like my company to still be there for the coming 100, 200 years," Cucinelli told the Business of Fashion. "And I would like whoever runs it to keep believing in a contemporary capitalism, to make a fair profit while respecting human beings and creation."
He thinks in timescales that would strike most CEOs as delusional and most historians as grandiose. "I have three-year business plans and thirty-year business plans but also three-centuries business plans," he told Om Malik in 2015. The castle's factory spaces have been fitted with multiple kitchens and bathrooms so they can be converted into luxury apartments should the business fail. The buildings he has restored in Solomeo, he imagines, will last another five hundred years. The Universal Library, inspired by Ptolemy I and Hadrian, is designed as "a gift for the next thousand years."
When the financial crisis hit in the fall of 2008, Cucinelli called his employees together and promised no layoffs for eighteen months. In return, he asked them to think more expansively. One cleaning lady, inspired by a collection of autographed soccer balls displayed in a cashmere-lined suitcase in Cucinelli's office, suggested making a soccer ball from cashmere. Several were produced, as promotional items. When the pandemic arrived in 2020, he again made no one redundant — and the company emerged with an almost 60 percent revenue increase in the first half of 2021.
His approach to the wholesale channel remains contrarian. While luxury peers have shifted overwhelmingly to direct retail — Prada at 90 percent, Moncler at 81 percent, Zegna at 87 percent — Cucinelli maintains roughly 36 percent of revenues through wholesale, defending his relationships with high-end department stores even as Saks Global teeters toward bankruptcy. "Hypothetically speaking, I would buy Saks Global tomorrow," he told Reuters, having experienced, in forty-five years of business, losses of just 0.1 percent annually from multi-brand partners. "Practically nothing."
The Fire, the Busts, and the Beautiful Night
Every evening, in a restored Renaissance villa at the top of Solomeo, Brunello Cucinelli sits in front of his fireplace. The television is off. On the mantelpiece, or nearby, are marble busts of Socrates, Seneca, Aristotle, and Marcus Aurelius — and, at one point, a commissioned bust of Barack Obama, whose speech in Cairo convinced Cucinelli that the time had come to build an ecumenical sacred park in the Solomeo woodland. (He had a recurring dream in which he was about to meet Obama but never did. "If one time I could meet him — I would walk to Washington if I had to.") Books are piled on every surface, and the piles themselves are piled with scraps of paper bearing quotations from Henry James ("There are three rules to live a serene life — be kind, be kind, be kind") and St. Paul ("I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith").
"I sit in front of the fire and talk to them," he said of his marble philosophers.
It is, depending on your temperament, either the most endearing or the most absurd image in the Cucinelli mythology: the billionaire cashmere king in his cream-colored corduroy pants and oatmeal sweater, consulting the ancients by firelight, in a village he rebuilt stone by stone according to principles he assembled book by book, while his employees sleep in houses he restored and his daughters prepare to inherit an empire whose operating manual is a mash-up of Kant, St. Benedict, and Charlie Chaplin.
But here is what the skeptic must contend with: the company works. Not merely as a business — the revenues, the margins, the growth rates speak for themselves — but as a place. Visitors to Solomeo report something they did not expect and cannot quite explain: a feeling. Bob Mitchell, a Connecticut retailer who sold Cucinelli's clothes for more than a decade, described it: "You walk around Solomeo, and you see people smiling and happy to be there. There is an intangible that is not something you can create quickly." Ron Frasch, the former president of Saks Fifth Avenue, wrote to say he felt lucky to have the company as a close partner. Rosella Cianetti, the seamstress who had been making clothes for forty years and spent the last seven at Cucinelli, fixed a moth hole in a sweater with the skill of Arachne and said simply: "We're treated like humans, and in other places we are treated more like machines. We get respect for what we do with our hands. It doesn't seem like a lot, but we appreciate it."
She did not, she admitted, have much time for reading Marcus Aurelius.
On the night of the theatre inauguration, Stefania Natalicchi's mother — a farmer who had never seen anything like it — sat in a reserved seat near the front and wept. For a village of 436 people, tucked into a hillside in Umbria, the construction of a two-hundred-and-forty-seat theatre was not merely an amenity. It was a declaration that their lives deserved beauty, that the place they lived was worth adorning, that someone had looked at them and decided they were not invisible. It was, in other words, the opposite of what had happened to Umberto Cucinelli in the cement factory.
Every morning at about six, Brunello takes a tour of his domain with his foreman, Carlo Brunetti, to decide on the work of the day. Workers pry up patches of seemingly faultless cobblestones and carefully lay them again. The renovation of Solomeo is perpetual. There is always a stone to reset, a plaque to inscribe, a view to improve. Cucinelli hopes to demolish a modern building that stands between his castle and the theatre, marring the vista. He considers the question, turns it over. The building stands.
Obviously, Brunello's work is a little out of our category. But quality is quality.
