A Mill Owner Buys a Page

The name set in Roman capitals across the bottom of this January 1989 page of American Vogue belonged to nobody's idea of a celebrity designer. Umberto Ginocchietti owned a knitwear operation in Perugia, and when the New York Times had introduced him to American readers two years earlier, it led with the trade fact rather than the label: here was a mill owner whose fabrics went out under the names Giorgio Armani, Claude Montana and Krizia.

Umbria was full of stories like his. The region's knitwear district grew out of Luisa Spagnoli's angora workshops and ended up clothing half of Europe; one regional trade history puts it with wonderful bluntness: in 1975-80, Umberto Ginocchietti was the pullover in Germany. Between 1985 and 1990 the cashmere business followed, pulled away from Britain by Italian spinning technology, and suddenly the quiet suppliers of Perugia had reason to want their own names on the page.

Buying recognition meant hiring a recognisable face, so here is Cindy Crawford, all sunlit hair and white embroidered knit, carrying an unfamous name toward famous company. She was a year away from the February cover moment that fixed her place in the decade ahead, and she gives the page more warmth than the louder knitwear of that season ever asked for.

My favourite part sits in the top corner, where the ad lists its two American stockists like a parish notice: Antoinette of Santa Barbara, Charles Sumner of Boston and Chestnut Hill, with a telephone number tucked under the logo. A Perugian mill, the most photographed woman of the next decade, and a shop you could ring in Massachusetts.

Sources:

In Italy, the Staid Is Now Stylish — The New York Times

Perugia Knitwear — Google Arts & Culture