Ermenegildo Zegna Profiles

Ermenegildo Zegna founded the company in 1910 in Trivero in the Biellese Prealps. Zegna quickly gained a reputation for producing fine quality wool for suits, and by the end of the 1930s the wool mill employed 1,000 workers. This profiles page tells the founder's story in order: the Trivero mill, the New York corporation of 1938, the sons who joined in 1942, and the ready-made suit line that followed his death. Of all the pages in this series, this is the one the others depend on.

In 1938 the Zegna Woollens Corporation was set up in New York, although exports were not helped by the privations of war. The biography searches in the references gather the wider coverage; the official Zegna website is also linked there.

Illustrative image created for this guide — an artistic impression, not this designer's own garments.

The Mill and the Sons

When Ermenegildo's sons Aldo (born 1920) and Angelo (born 1924) joined the company in 1942, it was renamed Ermenegildo Zegna and Sons. By 1955, the company employed 1,400 workers — a mill that had grown, in forty-five years, from a Trivero workshop into one of Italy's defining textile names, on the strength of a single discipline: fine quality wool for suits, made without compromise.

That cloth-first inheritance is what the collections, fall, spring and runway pages in this series file in garment form: the suits the house is known for begin, every season, in the mill the founder built.

1966 and the Ready-Made Suit

Ermenegildo died in 1966 at the age of 74. Aldo and Angelo took over the business, and two years later they launched a line of ready-made suits, produced in Zegna's factory in Novara — the step that turned a great cloth maker into a great clothing house, carrying the mill's standards into finished garments under the founder's name.

Read with the collections page, the profile completes its arc: the founder who perfected the cloth in Trivero, the sons who built the company through the war years and beyond, and the ready-made line of 1968 that made the name a byword for Italian tailoring. The profiles record keeps the order straight: 1910, 1938, 1942, 1955, 1966, 1968.

Photos