This story is part of My First Job in Fashion , interviews with fashion insiders on the roles who made them who they are today.
New England was my first job. But it was also much more than that, and for three main reasons. The first one is that I wasn’t working for anybody else: I founded the company and set it up on my own aged 20. The second is that it was a project that lasted around 20 years. And the third is that New England was also my school: everything I learnt from doing it for all that time equipped me when it came to starting all over again with Moncler.
Fashion really is in my blood, and I never wanted to do anything else. I remember sitting around the table with my family as a six or seven-year-old at home in Como; every night, the talk would be about patterns, fabrics, orders: work. Both my parents were in the fabric industry. It became my passion, too. I wasn’t very good at school, honestly. I didn’t have the motivation. What I was enthusiastic about was clothes. When I was a teenager, I made a prontomoda, a small collection of jackets, around the kitchen table. I sold them to my friends and tried to sell them to a few stores: it was interesting and not only because when you’re that age, you need the money. It gave me a lot of energy. Then, after school finally finished, I went to visit my father, who by that point was living in the US and had his company, Gianfranco Ruffini, in New York. There was talk of college, which didn’t interest me. Dad offered me a job. It would have been easier to stay there and earn a salary, and I would have learnt to speak English really well, too, but it wasn’t something that excited me either. It didn’t give me that energy.
While I was there, I would travel a lot around the east coast, exploring. And I realised this area, the heartland of prep, was really close to my DNA. I’m talking about Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket Island, Hyannis Port, Rhode Island and Boston. I found it both very European, but also very unique. I saw something. So I told my dad I was going back to Como to start a line myself. That was in 1982. I chose the name New England Company after the region that inspired me.
My first office was just one room next to the lake. I got it on a cheap rent because it didn’t have a window. At that time, button-down shirts, like they sell in Brooks Brothers, were not big in Italy. But they meant something to me so that’s where I started, with a line of 25 shirts. There was only one model, but all the fabrics were different: not the traditional Oxford and not the traditional stripes or basic colour. Instead, they were patterned and much more connected to the Italian DNA.
To make them, I spent some time around Val Brembana near Bergamo, where there are a lot of shirt specialists. I found a small company run by a couple and their two sons with just eight or nine people in the workshop, and they helped me develop the idea and make the first samples. And then we made around 1,800 pieces, which felt like a lot. I loaded them into my car, a white Volvo station wagon, and started trying to sell them. I thought I knew of about 25 stores in Italy that would understand what I was trying to do, so I visited them all. Honestly, at the beginning, it was very tough. But it was also invaluable. I learnt everything because I had everything on my shoulders. I was commercial director, production director, chief designer, CFO and delivery driver, too.
Mine was a first job that lasted for a very long time, and I don’t want to bore you. But, slowly, I learnt and grew the company step by step. The next step was chinos, and again, we used a different kind of fabric. This time around it was a heavy cotton that I imported from Colombia, and I added embroideries, very Italian, and sometimes maybe a little too much. I stuck to this formula of a preppy foundation built with creative Italian taste. Because the garments were classic but expressed in a new and unusual way, it offered a real alternative, especially for summertime, to a big audience of men whose fashion ideas were quite cautious but who also did not want to be dressed exactly like everybody else: it was just different enough. And so it grew and grew until, in the late 1990s, we had around 300 employees. At some point around then, another company offered to buy New England from me. At first, I couldn’t even think about the idea: I’d created it and raised it from nothing, and it would have felt like I would have been selling my kids. But of course, it wasn’t like that at all. So I thought about it and eventually agreed to sell.
This is how my first job ended when I was in my late 30s, leaving me wondering what I was going to do next. I knew I couldn’t stop working — I just have too much energy. Quite quickly, I decided I didn’t want to try and make a new brand. What I wanted to do was find something with a story I could build on. And I already knew all about Moncler: I got my first jacket when I was 14 — it was light blue and I wore it to school every day on my bike, and it saved me in the Como winters. I was doing some consulting around the time my chapter at New England was coming to an end, and that’s when I reconnected with the Moncler brand. At that time, the business was in a bad condition. So when the owners decided to sell, I thought it was an amazing, perfect opportunity to take the next step I’d been looking for. Which is how my first job led to my second job here at Moncler. Everything I learnt while building New England proved invaluable as I set about rebuilding Moncler. And just like New England, what I do at Moncler is much more than just a job: it’s where I put all my focus, all my passion and all my energy. Because I still love going into the office every day.
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
More from this author:
A-Cold-Wall sold to Frasers Group-backed Four Marketing
The first woman on the moon will wear this Prada spacesuit
Roberto Cavalli’s Fausto Puglisi on revitalising the brand while honouring the man
