We all have dreams of revisiting our childhood, but how many of us have the chance to reconstruct it with the help of an Oscar-winning director? That’s precisely what Brunello Cucinelli, the 72-year-old son of Italian sharecroppers who went on build a multi-billion-dollar global luxury fashion empire, has done with the biopic-doc hybrid Brunello Cuccinnelli: A Gracious Visionary, written and directed by Cinema Paradiso director Giuseppe Tornatore.
Earlier this week, Cucinelli hosted a gala screening of the film (to be released in theaters this summer) at the opulent David H Koch theater in New York’s Lincoln Center. Before the film began, Cucinelli stood on stage and addressed a black-tie audience packed with media titans celebrity admirers, many of whom were wearing his clothes, the couture equivalent of wearing a rock band’s tee-shirt to the concert. Among the crowd were Oscar Isaac, Naomi Watts, Katie Holmes, Joshua Jackson (who reunited with his Dawson’s Creek costar Katie Holmes), Grace Gummer, Martha Stewart, Ryan Seacrest, Grace Gummer, Allison Williams, Jay Ellis, Darren Star, Shonda Rhimes, Conde Nast CEO Roger Lynch, and Vanity Fair editor Mark Guiducci.
Brunello Cucinelli at Tuesday night’s screening.
Joe Schildhorn/BFA.com
“I wanted a poet to tell my story,” Cucinelli said of Tornatore. “Because poets are the greatest men on Earth.”
The lofty sentiment was classic Cucinelli, a fashion mogul who would prefer to talk about anything but fashion. In his telling, the raw materials at the heart of the Cucinelli brand are not merely fine fabrics but art, literature, and philosophy. It would be easier to dismiss such high-mindedness if he didn’t live it so fully.
The heart of the Cucinelli operation is the rustic Umbrian village of Solomeo, where his wife, Federica, grew up. After building his fortune, Cucinelli acquired and restored much of the village and surrounding land and transformed it into a manifestation of his worldview, a made-in-Italy fantasy steeped in high culture, la dolce vita and la grande Bellezza. He razed run-down factories and replaced them with vineyards and olive groves (which supplied, respectively, the wine and olive oil on the tables at the reception that followed Tuesday’s screening). He built a theater and a “universal library” à la Borges, and surrounded himself with marble busts of people — mostly men — who have inspired him, including Socrates, Hadrian, and Barack Obama.
Even as he earned his billions, Cucinelli has continued to honor his humble rural past, never more evocatively than with this film. Unlike Citizen Kane, he managed to hold on to his Rosebud. Five years ago, he bought the hilltop farmhouse he grew up in, where he and his family worked the land. The farm serves as the picturesque setting for the film’s semi-scripted early scenes, reminiscent of the Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, and shot with a similarly nostalgic eye.
In a conversation the following morning at Casa Cucinelli, his New York headquarters on Fifth Avenue, Cucinelli was especially animated, shaking my shoulder, bolting up from the couch and pacing the room as he talked about movies, history, religion, artificial intelligence — anything but fashion.
You grew up in central Italy, in a deeply rural setting. The first time you saw the ocean was when you were 14 years old. When was the first time you saw a movie?
I was 12, in the parish youth center. It was Ben Hur, with Charlton Heston. When the chariots in the Roman Coliseum charged toward the camera, we flinched as though to get out of the way. For many people, this was their first time seeing moving images. We had no television at home.
How did this collaboration with Giuseppe Tornatore begin?
Giuseppe and I are more or less the same age. My favorite movie is Cinema Paradiso, because I lived the same kind of life. So when I thought I wanted to do something for my grandchildren, those who will come after me. I wanted to leave a small monument. You have the theater, the winery, these are monuments, hallmarks. But I wanted a poet to create it. He filmed me for 60 hours. It’s truly Giuseppe’s masterpiece.
What was behind the idea to combine scripted storytelling with a traditional documentary?
It was Giuseppe’s idea. He had this idea that I would be part of the reconstructed scenes, but he did not say anything beforehand. So on the first day he tells me, come up to the house in the country tomorrow morning — it’s the house where I grew up, which is mine now, I bought it five years ago. Nothing changed in all those decades. Nothing. The bedroom stayed the same.
I showed up, and there were the oxen plowing the land. There was the actor who was playing my dad, the boy playing me, there I was, in the middle of that scene. But I didn’t know Giuseppe was filming. I entered the kitchen — my kitchen — all the actors at the table were eating, they were calling each other by their characters’ names, which were the family members I grew up with: There was Giovannino, Umberto, my uncle, my grandpa… I can’t even tell you how overwhelming it was.
Steven Spielberg described a similar emotion in making his autobiographical film The Fabelmans, when he reconstructed his childhood home. Very few of us are given the chance to travel to our past like that.
I spent two beautiful years going into the research and talking about myself. And I was involved in the casting, too. Then Giuseppe spent one year on the edit. He kept asking me, “Would you like to take a look at some footage?” And I said, “No, nothing, I don’t want to see anything.” It was a risk, because I had done 60 hours of filming. A month before the premiere in December, he said, “It’s done, let’s take a look at it.” He said, “you have to look at it with grace.” I couldn’t sleep the night before. He handed me a note pad and said, “Just jot down what you want to change.” At the end of the movie I returned the note pad. It was blank. I said, “Don’t change anything.”
In the film, you talk about your product without ever talking about the product.
Not even in life do I talk about the product.
So how does the poetry — all these lofty ideas you espouse — make its way into the clothing?
It takes the human touch. Jean-Jacques Rousseau always says that you are creative when everything around you is in balance with Creation. And if I treat you with respect, that respect spawns a sense of responsibility, and in turn that responsibility spawns creativity. We have never allowed employees to work from home because they would miss out on collective creativity, shared creativity. And if you think about it, today, all remote work runs the risk of being replaced by A.I. That’s why I say, do not ever allow people to work from home, because perhaps you will receive a letter one day that your services are no longer needed.
Is A.I. something you’re actively resisting?
No not at all. We’ve just launched a new website that is A.I.–generated, which various Silicon Valley titans, Reid Hoffman, Marc Benioff, have said was very highly creative. So I’m not scared of A.I. at all. Because when you think about A.I., it is something rational, scientific. Reason. Zero, one, zero, one. But what it is missing is this touch of folly. Madness. Inside us, with have both Appollo and Dionysus. We have Voltaire and Rousseau. So I’m not scared at all.
I was surprised to see Reid Hoffman interviewed in the film. How did that relationship start?
I started having discussions with him in 2015. I went to Silicon Valley, I met with Benioff; Kevin Systrom, the founder of Instagram; Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’ widow … We had a dinner party together. And they asked me to speak about humanism. And I said you and your wives have your mobile phones, and nobody is laughing, talking. So there must be a problem. And that’s when the relationship kicked off. So every couple of years in Solomeo we have a gathering with all these geniuses. And I ask, which of you will be able to insert the human touch into technology? Which of you will be the Leonardo DaVincis of our era?
Yet the Silicon Valley ethos of “move fast and break things” seems to be in contradiction with what the Brunello Cucinelli brand is about, the idea that quality requires slowness, patience, deliberation.
Yes, but it needs to be combined with innovation. You shouldn’t be fast, but you need to be quick. In Italian, these are different concepts. You need to be contemporary, in step with the times.
After this first foray in cinema, do you have any desire make more movies?
No, no, no. I told Giuseppe Tornatore, if you were to think of a love story — but truly a love story — one of those movies like Out of Africa or Love Story, one of those movies that make you wipe tears away, I would support you. Because I think movies are so harsh these days, and we are all longing for something like that. But I don’t want to make any more movies.
