At Zegna, the Next Generation Takes Inspiration from Family Heritage

N orth of Turin, the scenic Strada Provinciale 232 switches sharply up the Italian Alps, looping through the village of Trivero at 2,425 feet of elevation before diving back down toward the grassy Piedmont flatlands. Known as the Panoramica Zegna for its vast views of the province of Biella, the road exists because in 1938 the textile baron Ermenegildo Zegna required a means to reach his mill and a community he was building in his quest to overtake Britain’s traditional dominance in wool suiting.

Three years ago, the SP232 emerged on Zegna’s luxury clothing and accessories in the form of small imprints or sewn strips of leather or fabric, drawn with a line down the middle, like the dividing line on highways. It is a subtle if-you-know-you-know logo, a reminder of the brand’s Alpine origins, and one of the signs of the new path the company is taking with a push from the fourth generation of its founding family, including 38-year-old Edoardo Zegna.

Edo, as his friends know him, is injecting into the brand ideas he gleaned from his time studying and working in the U.S. and U.K., including a stint as head of product at the San Francisco-based apparel label Everlane. Much of his strategy is new to the tradition of Italian menswear brands that have long been sold by highlighting the quality of materials, hours of workmanship and skill of the artisans involved.

Ambitious in his aspirations for Zegna, Edo, chief marketing, digital and sustainability officer, is shifting the company’s approach to create emotional attachments with consumers by sharing the romance of Zegna’s origins and family history. It’s a tale about Trivero. It’s about the SP232. It’s a story of a family that continues to run the company—whose shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange—as the generations pile on.

It is also, lately, interwoven with the story of another Italian family, now American, in the film business. But more on the Coppolas in a bit.

First we should talk about another key element of the Zegna tale, the Oasi Zegna, or “Zegna oasis,” a nearly 38.6-square-mile forested nature reserve created by founder Ermenegildo Zegna surrounding his original mill. The founder planted thousands of trees, creating a forest that is now open to the public, with hiking trails and panoramic vistas.

“It’s a diamond that hasn’t been claimed,” Edo says of its potential to help tell the story of Zegna. The reserve is featured in a book published by Rizzoli, as well as in Zegna’s new marketing, raising the role of biodiversity in nature and natural fibers, and of land stewardship—all part of the new Zegna narrative.

“We are not in the business of products anymore,” Edo says. “We are in the business of stories.”

His own cross-Atlantic story begins in New York, where he was born in 1986, before being raised largely in Lugano, in Switzerland’s Italian-speaking Ticino region. After studying business at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., Edo jumped to a gig at Gap and then Everlane, which was pioneering the concept of telling a garment’s “story”—where it was made, who made it, with what materials—in much the way the farm-to-table movement speaks about fresh, local produce.

Today, Edo is one half of a power couple, living in London with his wife, Leila Rastegar Zegna, a partner at the venture capital firm Kindred Capital, and their three children. He is one of 11 Zegnas in his generation and one of two who work for the label, the other being his younger brother Angelo, CEO of the EMEA region and global client strategy director, who is named after their grandfather.

Edo joined the business in 2014, after applying for the job in the family tradition: He filed an application and made a presentation before an independent board. “There are rules in the family. You have to have a university degree,” he says. “You have to work outside the company for at least three years.”

After passing this exam of sorts, he became head of omnichannel and progressed through the ranks over a decade. “I’m fourth generation and I see myself as a custodian,” he says.

It is clear upon sitting down with Edo that he has spent time in venture-capital-tech-bro circles. He has absorbed their lingua franca as well as concepts of selling products, which he is translating to Italian luxury menswear.

“You need to create unscalable ideas,” he says, referring to the math used to identify products that can be replicated inexpensively en masse. Scale is the holy grail of venture capital. Fashion is famously not scalable. Each product must be sourced, manufactured and individually distributed. “Unscalable,” he repeats. “And then figure out a way to scale them.”

You can scale romance. You can scale a story. Which is what Edo, seated in a large sitting room at Salon 94, a New York art gallery on East 89th Street, was attempting in September as Zegna took over the gallery to tell its tale to North Americans. The brand outfitted each of the gallery’s three stories like a private club, or perhaps more accurately, a private college for the study of the Zegna story.

For a week, Edo and his father, Ermenegildo “Gildo,” Zegna’s chief executive and chairman, brought together clients and glitterati of the arts, venture capital and business worlds at breakfasts, lunches and dinners where they were educated, entertained and ultimately sold on Zegna. The tours ended on the third floor, which had been turned into a made-to-measure atelier for clothing and accessories not available in stores.

At the center were special versions of Il Conte, a versatile tailored collar-up-or-down jacket that is the hero of Zegna’s latest ad campaign with Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen. The family patriarch was the real Count di Monte Rubello, a title bestowed on him by the then King of Italy, referring to a mountain near the Oasi. The title didn’t pass down through the family, though: Italy’s monarchy ended in 1946.

Downstairs, on the first floor, guests passed through a film room where they encountered the voice and visage of Roman Coppola, the filmmaker and entrepreneurial son of Francis Ford Coppola, discussing the Oasi as the land itself appeared behind and around him.

Roman says he was surprised to be approached by the Zegnas to participate in a film about the Oasi and the company’s heritage, but he understands why they relate to his family. The Coppolas have been involved in music and film for four generations. Roman’s great-grandfather invented a music recording device. His grandfather won an Oscar as a composer. His parents are film legends, and he and his sister are both filmmakers. The extended family includes the actors Nicolas Cage, Jason Schwartzman and Talia Shire.

“I related to that so when Edoardo and the Zegna folks reached out to me, I found that resonant,” Roman says. He, too, was taken with the Oasi message of land caretaking, and the heritage of the family mill. “It is very beautiful and super progressive that they planted trees 100 years ago,” he says. “And the fact that the factory is literally out the window.”

Roman moved upstairs to the final fete of the week’s Zegna gallery takeover, to host a glittering dinner attended by the kind of crowd that a revered label can expect to attract: His sister Sofia Coppola; her husband, musician Thomas Mars; Roman’s niece Gia Coppola, who is also a filmmaker; the actors Bernadette Peters and Ethan Hawke; “Saturday Night Live” comedienne Chloe Fineman and the musician The Dare. The dinner’s entertainment included a not-quite-impromptu aria sung by an opera singer, who left her seat to perform after Roman’s toast.

Luxury brands are well known for assembling cornucopias of celebrities. But it is almost surprising that more Italian brands haven’t taken up another tried-and-true device: touting their heritage in the way that Louis Vuitton highlights its founding luggage maker or Christian Dior leans into its classic Bar jacket, season after season. Among Italians, Brunello Cucinelli stands out for building a brand on a story—in Cucinelli’s case, a relatively new one, given he is the founder, a narrative emphasizing how he has turned the village of Solomeo, in Umbria, into a center of cashmere, fair trade and ancient philosophy.

As Edo plumbs the story-telling riches of Trivero, the SP232 road and the Oasi, he is talking up community-oriented endeavors that previous generations, including his great-grandfather, chose not to emphasize. He figures they were just being demure.

“The fact that nobody knows about [Oasi Zegna] means that he didn’t do it for money,” Edo says of Ermenegildo. “He didn’t do it for fame.”

His great-grandfather built a school, a hospital and a ski resort for his 1,000 laborers that still operates today. There is also Casa Zegna, Ermenegildo’s sprawling mansion, which houses the brand’s archives and hosts periodic exhibitions. The private Zegna family foundation, which controls the Oasi and is carefully walled-off and protected from the publicly traded Zegna apparel brand, still regularly meets.

The casa is only a part of the story and plays a small role in the Zegna family reality of today. “Nobody sleeps there,” Edo says. “It’s a bit like sleeping in Versailles. It’s a daunting experience.”