Cerruti

Fine worsteds with a fashion hand

Lanificio Fratelli Cerruti has woven on the banks of the river Cervo in Biella since 1881, when Antonio Cerruti founded the mill with two brothers and a cousin. The family's wool trade reaches back further still, to the 1770s, but 1881 is the year the house keeps on the label.

The name most people know arrived in 1951, when Nino Cerruti took charge at twenty after his father Silvio's death. He opened a Paris couture house in 1967 under the name Cerruti 1881, and spent the following decades dressing film stars, on screen in Wall Street and Pretty Woman, and off it at Cannes and the Oscars. Few Biella mills have ever sat that close to fashion.

It shows in the cloth. Cerruti worsteds drape softly and take colour well, with a hand that reads as designed rather than simply woven. They suit commissions where the photographs matter as much as the wearing: a wedding suit, say, or tailoring for an evening that will be documented.

There is no fixed Cerruti garment in our range at present. The lengths move through our cloth library as bolts are cut and replaced, so ask what the current book holds at your next fitting.