The fashion designer and businessman Nino Cerruti was first and last a native of the city of Biella in northern Italy, where alpine-pastured sheep, and mountain water and its millwheel powers, had been supplying an industry in fine wool textiles for a millennium. He was bred to the spinning and loom trades – “I was born in a manger,” he said, “only instead of straw, there was wool” – and he returned to those trades, and Biella, for his last years.
In between, Cerruti, who has died aged 91, became an international fashion name, whose relaxed suits made star appearances in more than 100 Hollywood movies, by applying his profound knowledge of the properties of good wool and other natural fibres to a modern masculine tailoring that did not depend for shape on an invisible interior armature of canvas, padding and lining.
