Cerruti

Cerruti began as a wool mill in the Piedmontese town of Biella in 1881, and was reinvented as a couture house in 1967 by Nino Cerruti, who pulled the family textile operation into modern menswear and dressed actors including Jack Nicholson and Richard Gere through the 1970s and 1980s. The first fragrances followed in 1979 and quickly settled into the brand's tailoring vocabulary: dry, slightly austere masculines with citrus and aromatic notes. The defining release remains Cerruti 1881 pour Homme from 1990, a lavender-citrus aromatic that became a reference point for the era's clean Italian masculines. The fragrance business is licensed and has changed hands several times, while the parent group has been controlled since 2017 by the Chinese conglomerate Shandong Ruyi. Current output stays close to the original aesthetic: groomed, restrained, sold mostly through department-store distribution.