Italian designer Nino Cerruti, the man who reinvented the suit to turn him into a comfortable garment and launched designers like Giorgio Armani, died on Saturday, January 15 in Vercelli (northern Italy) at 91 years.
Cerruti died as a result of complications after a hip operation, the press media reported, which echoed a communication that was sent to the employees of his luxury firm.
Born in 1930 in Biella, in the region of Piedmont, Italy, the creative was one of the great protagonists of the fashion of the twentieth century with his revolutionary ideas.It is Nino Cerruti who came up with the image of a minimalist Sharon Stone dressed in white, without underwear, in his most famous scene of basic instinct or the iconic lunar suit that Julia Roberts wore when he goes to his first Pole matchIn Pretty Woman.
He entered the golden history of Hollywood doing cinematographic collaborations and wearing large female stars, such as Catherine Deneuve or Faye Dunaway.While he triumphed with the big business that would change his life, his homonym.
Descendant of a family of textile industrialists from Biella, Cerruti inherited the very young family business, after the death of his father, at twenty, and dedicated great efforts to the research and development of materials.This was what would end up leading to the top.
Since 1957 he managed to make a name worldwide with the presentation in Milan of his first line of clothing, the "Hitman".In 1962 he founded the "Flying Cross" brand with Osvaldo Test and in 1967 he opened the first Boutique Cerruti 1881 in the Place de la Madeleine in Paris, which entailed to transfer the main headquarters of the firm to the fashion capital.
In the middle of the sixties in their society "Fratelli Cerruti" new emerging names of Italian fashion began to collaborate, hiring as a designer with a then unknown Giorgio Armani.
Nino Cerruti managed to bring fashion to a new dimension, rejuvenating it and reinventing it without losing the taste and elegance that characterized him by retaining traditional methods.His illustrious client list included names such as Michael Douglas, Clint Eastwood or Harrison Ford.
The great success harvested with what was his first pret-a-porter line pushed him to create what would be his first female line, one that would end up representing 20 percent of the total turnover of his company.In 1975 his Hitman line began the production and distribution of knit garments, shirts and the casual line: Cerruti 1881 Brothers.
At that time the female line is also born, which twenty years later will represent 20 percent of the total turnover of the company, and in 1975 Hitman began the production and distribution of knit garments, shirts and the casual line: Cerruti 1881 Brothers.
In the late 1970s, he also launched the first male perfume linked to the brand, called "Nino Cerruti", which followed other intuitions and innovations such as the sports line, especially appreciated for clothes dedicated to tennis and skiing and that dressed starssuch as the American Jimmy Connors or the Swedish skier Ingemar Stenmark.
In the eighties he began to design for Hollywood celebrities. Diseñó el vestuario de Bonnie & Clyde, Pretty Woman o Instinto básico."It's a long history, told in the present time," Cerruti used to say.His contribution in history will be something unforgettable.
