Antonio Cerruti founded the lanificio in Biella in 1881 with two brothers and a cousin, though the family had been in textiles since around 1770. It sits on the banks of the river Cervo and still runs its own spinning, weaving, dyeing and finishing. The reason most people have heard of it is Nino Cerruti, who took charge at twenty and spent the next fifty years arguing that a man could look serious without looking stiff. The cloth carries that argument. Cerruti is soft, fluid and quietly luxurious rather than sharp and structured, which is a useful thing to have on a shelf in a city where nobody wants an armour-plated suit.
Founded 1881, run by a twenty year old from 1951
The mill was founded in 1881 by Antonio Cerruti with two brothers and a cousin, on the Cervo in Biella. It grew fast, expanded through the interwar years and exported heavily, particularly to America. Under Silvio Cerruti the plants were modernised through the 1940s, and by 1945 it employed around 700 people.
Nino Cerruti took over in 1951 at the age of twenty, after his father died. He launched the Hitman menswear company in the 1950s, then created the Cerruti 1881 luxury ready-to-wear brand and opened a Paris flagship in 1967. In 2001 the holding company sold the fashion brand so that Nino could concentrate on the wool mill, which was always the part he cared about most. He died in January 2022, aged 91.
Ownership moved to Njord Partners in 2018 and then, from November 2022, to the Piacenza Group 1733, another Biellese family mill and one of the oldest textile businesses in the world. The mill stayed in Biella and stayed vertical, which is what mattered.
Soft, fluid and combed: what casual chic actually meant
Nino Cerruti is credited with inventing casual chic, and that phrase has been worn out by four decades of advertising. Strip the marketing off it and the idea is concrete: take formal clothing and remove the rigidity, so a jacket sits on a man rather than around him.
You cannot do that with cutting alone. It needs cloth with a soft hand and a fluid fall, and Cerruti built its reputation on fine combed woollens that do exactly that. The fabric drapes early, follows the body, and settles rather than holding a shape you have to fight.
For Chennai that character does real work. A suit that hangs softly is a suit you can wear for twelve hours in heat and humidity. A stiff one becomes a chore by two in the afternoon. Take the lighter Cerruti constructions here and cut them with a soft canvas and little shoulder padding, and you get a formal garment you will actually keep on in a meeting.
The Hollywood years, and why you half recognise the name
From the late 1960s onward Cerruti became a major supplier to Hollywood costume departments, and the mill dressed a long run of films through the seventies, eighties and nineties. If you have a mental image of what an expensive, softly tailored man looked like on screen in that era, there is a good chance you are picturing Cerruti cloth.
That history is a nice story, but it is also a useful shorthand at the counter. Cerruti is what you pick when you want a suit that reads as relaxed money rather than corporate authority. It is a jacketing house as much as a suiting one, and their softer cloths make excellent odd jackets to wear over plain trousers, which for a lot of Chennai workplaces is a more wearable answer than a full suit.
When we reach for Cerruti
Cerruti suits the customer who wants formal clothes to feel easy. Someone who has decided that a suit which makes him stand differently is not a suit he will wear. Someone who wants a jacket for a Friday evening rather than a Monday boardroom.
If your brief is authority, a crisp British worsted or a firmer Italian cloth will serve you better and we will point you there. If your brief is comfort with real quality behind it, Cerruti is one of the best answers in the room.
Cerruti cloth is available to order through us. Bring the question of what the garment is for, and we will pull the right weight rather than the prettiest piece on the shelf.