Word: fashion
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...will that formula change the face of luxury? "If they change something in fashion, it will be in how they manage companies, but it will never be the product, the style, the design," says Bensoussan. "They don't know anything about it. After all, the next day they are looking into fruit smoothies...
...Renzo Rosso, announced he wanted to swap out his group shares to become sole owner of Diesel. A modest farmer's son from outside Padua, Italy, with a textiles-trade-school diploma, Rosso, 50, is not your typical luxury-group CEO. Sure, he flies in private jets and frequents fashion shows, but most of the time he wears jeans or sweats, and his curly hairdo is more Peter Frampton than Bernard Arnault...
Except Rosso, of course, who for 20 years has remained singlemindedly focused on the development of the brand and fanatically obsessed with the idea that casual clothing could be fashion's long-term winner. Since he bought out his partners, he has grown Diesel from $7 million to $1.4 billion last year, acquiring the small Belgian designer Martin Margiela in 2002 and signing up manufacturing and distribution agreements with the trendy Milan-based DSquared designers, Dean and Dan Katen. Rumors are rife that additional deals are in the works, specifically acquisitions...
Diesel continues to be seen as an innovator (Rosso claims to have developed many of the manufacturing innovations for denim) in one of the most dynamic corners of the fashion cosmos, the jeans bar, where consumers are falling over one another to pay $150 or $200 a pair. That is a recent phenomenon. Jeans were long considered a $30, five-pocket commodity, with connotations of youth, rebels and weekends in the Western world. Periodically, prices spiked for so-called designer jeans (think Calvin Klein in 1980). But those remained a status sell focused on pocket stitching and the tag; most...
Rosso's big idea was to improve the product and the margins. (He had road tested the first part of that formula as a teenager selling friends $7 jeans he made on his mother's sewing machine.) In 1988 he hired a young Dutch fashion-school grad named Wilbert Das, and they began to experiment with dyes and destruction?all sorts of techniques to age the jeans and give them a more vintage feel. They moved pockets, reshaped the jeans, introduced curves?and then charged a whopping $79. Their look was Rosso's look, a blend of thrift store, Americana...