Fashion is rebooting with quite a few houses opting for live menswear shows at the moment, albeit with smaller and obviously safely distanced members of the audience. The Pitti trade shows, taking place at the end of June, are also rebooting with special safety regulations that include mask wearing and body temperature scanning, but also special medical facilities and even rapid testing hubs.
Yet there are signs that merely returning to the usual shows is not really the future of fashion and there seems to be very different trends and needs for fashion companies.
For example, it was recently announced that Ermenegildo Zegna and Prada bought a majority stake in Italian cashmere company Filati Biagioli Modesto SpA together. The Montale (near Pistoia)-based Biagioli Modesto, founded in 1919, is extremely well-known for its high quality cashmere, silk, camel, angora, alpaca, linen, lambswool and extra-fine merino yarns and for humble yet striking presentations at yarn trade fairs, but it is definitely not that usual to see two companies and fashion powerhouses investing together in a yarn company, even a luxury one.
The details of the deal remain undisclosed but Prada and Ermenegildo Zegna will each have a 40% stake in the company, while the Biagioli family will retain a 15% stake and the remaining 5% will be owned by Chief Executive Officer Renato Cotto (who has worked for other yarn and textile companies, including Zegna Baruffa, Cariaggi and Loro Piana). Besides, Gildo Zegna, CEO of his family's company, will take on the role of Chairman, while Franca Biagioli and Patrizio Bertelli, CEO of Prada, will join the Board of Directors.
It is obvious that, while Zegna and Prada may want to expand their knitwear offer in this way, this move is more about protecting the Italian supply chain, a decision maybe dictated by what happened during the Coronavirus pandemic in other fields.
Last year when Italy was in dire need of masks and PPE equipment and the country realised it was impossible to just import these products from China as usual, quite a few Italian companies reconverted their plants to produce them. In March 2020, after receiving a request from the Tuscany region, Prada made 110,000 sanitary masks and 80,000 medical overalls for health-care personnel in Montone (Perugia); nowadays most of the face masks that you find in shops and supermarkets in Italy are made by local companies.
With this acquisition Zegna and Prada aren't doing anything extremely revolutionary: a lack of semiconductors drove America to review the supply chains in some key industries such as semiconductor chips and invest domestically; by buying a majority stake in Biagioli Modesto, both the companies will have the possibility of expanding knitwear collections, but will also protect supply chains, think locally, and check quality closely and at every step of the process (it is worth mentioning here that with this agreement Biagioli Modesto will still be able to work for other companies and will not be limited to work only for Zegna and Prada).
Both the Zegna Group and Prada started a while back a process of acquisitions similar to Chanel's that, through its Paraffection subsidiary, has been buying throughout the years a variety of maisons producing key parts, yarns and accessories for its own collections. Apart from its Lanificio Zegna, the Zegna Group for example already owns Lanerie Agnona, Tessitura di Novara, Bonotto and Dondi, plus a a controlling stake in Pelle Tessuta, and a majority stake in men's hat brand Cappellificio Cervo, besides, it recently acquired 60% of Tessitura Ubertino.
Now, mergers and acquisition are not new in Italy, but these partnerships are maybe showing new directions and the will to collaborate further together to hopefully create a healthier industry and this may have been the result of a change in attitudes introduced by Coronavirus. After all there have been further signs of solidarity in these last few months: in April 2021, after a fire burnt down a Valentino manufacturing plant in Tuscany, Bertelli made one of Prada's nearby factories available to a number of Valentino's employees to make sure they could keep on working in rather difficult times for the fashion industry.
Besides, different fashion groups have so far contributed to the vaccination campaign. Gucci, Prada and Armani opened their headquarters to vaccinate their employees; Renzo Rosso's OTB also contributed to set up a vaccination hub in Bassano Del Grappa for the local population; the OVS Group offered its spaces in Mestre, to vaccinate employees in the Veneto region, but also families of its employees and locals.
The Solomeo-based king of cashmere Brunello Cucinelli has been busy vaccinating his 1,174 employees against COVID-19 (for the time being Cucinelli has asked no vax employees to stay at home with a paid leave for six months, but ideally he would like everybody to be vaccinated).
The vaccination hub he established in the Solomeo-headquarters through his fashion company and the Brunello and Federica Cucinelli Foundation, is also open to locals (it was also visited by general Francesco Paolo Figliuolo, Extraordinary Commissioner for the Implementation of Health Measures to Contain the COVID-19 pandemic) and Cucinelli pays for the salaries of the 16 individuals in charge of administering the vaccinations. In a nutshell, maybe gone are the days when fashion was just about hanging around the front row with impossibly hip people, who knows, we may be making way for another and healthier (rather than merely trendier...) fashion scene.
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