Nino Cerruti, a pioneering Italian fashion designer who introduced “casual chic” to men’s fashion and dressed Hollywood luminaries in his heyday, has died at the age of 91.
He died at the Vercelli hospital in Piedmont’s northwest area, where he had been taken for a hip operation, according to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera.
“A giant among Italian entrepreneurs has left us,” said Gilberto Pichetto, deputy minister for economic development.
Cerruti, who created the first deconstructed jacket in the 1970s, was one of the leading figures in men’s ready-to-wear fashion in the 20th century, with a look that was at once stylish and relaxed.
“I want men more free in their elegance, more elegant in their freedom,” he once said.
Tall and slim, Cerruti always insisted on being the first to try on his creations, many of which he kept stored away at the woollen mill his grandfather founded in the northern town of Biella in 1881.
“I have always dressed the same person — myself,” he once said.
