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Sitting front and center in a black suit and black shirt is tonight's ringmaster: Bruno Sälzer, 50, chairman and CEO of a company founded in 1923 not far from this field. Back then, it was a small sewing outfit helmed by a guy called Hugo Boss. Today Hugo Boss AG has a retail value of $6.5 billion and?for 2006, the year of the most recent declared figures?net sales of $1.97 billion with a net profit of $170 million. It also has 9,385 full-time employees, not to mention those working for subsidiaries around the world...
What follows is not the most earth-shattering fashion show, mostly because Hugo Boss clothes are designed for reality and not exaggerated for the runway. Yet it is certainly one of the biggest. A Paris extravaganza staged by Jean Paul Gaultier, for example, will probably feature 100 looks. But tonight an estimated 2,000 items, all impeccably made by Hugo Boss and not one of them a repeat, are shown under the labels Boss Black, Boss Orange and Hugo (both for men and women), as well as Boss Green and Boss Selection...
...scale of this operation: when it comes to giant single-fashion brands, Hugo Boss AG is huge (although not, it should be noted, as huge as Polo Ralph Lauren). LVMH (the market leader), Gucci Group/PPR and Richemont, which owns Chloé, are also bigger, but they are multi-brand conglomerates. Of the single brands, for menswear only, Hugo Boss is as big as its two nearest competitors, Giorgio Armani and Ermenegildo Zegna, combined. The company still makes 1.6 million suits a year, but that's old news; it now reflects a wider cultural shift and has repositioned itself from a suit...
What's palpable at Boss is a forward motion so fast you can feel it. Year-on-year growth is at 15%, which Sälzer equates to the growth of Shanghai, where you blink and another skyscraper has gone up. "You can feel the growth, [whereas] a 5% growth in a brand or a city is more organic," he says, pointing to tonight's audience, which is full of youthful faces. "If you grow, you hire mostly young people, and if you don't grow, your company looks older...
...conspiring with the Mafia. All this while the center-right (led by Silvio Berlusconi) watched its ally, the governor of Sicily, celebrate as a victory a recent court decision that determined he was not a mafioso, even while finding that he had done favors for a noted Mob boss. In this febrile environment, Berlusconi is again seeking the Prime Minister's office, while Prodi has been replaced as the center-left candidate by former Rome mayor Walter Veltroni. This will be the first election for Veltroni's Democratic Party, and it should take to heart the lesson Prodi missed: that...