Merino sheep are clever animals, and if they dream it may be they dream of their wool winding up in a 90-year-old stucco building that looks like a run-down movie studio—complete with ivy-covered walls and its own guardhouse—in a little valley in the foothills of the Piedmontese Alps. There, in the nearly vertical town of Trivero, up a flight of marble stairs, and little touched since its possessor's death, is the office of Ermenegildo Zegna, who took to greatness the fabric mill that his father, Angelo, founded in the late 1800s. And next to the row of books where 80 years ago Ermenegildo recorded the fabrics his looms wove, there is a painting, on a blue and green plate, of a beautiful merino. His name is lost to history, but his extraordinary visage—horns like baroque croissants, muzzle like Joe Camel, fur like an Abyssinian cat that's put its paw in a socket—has been made permanent by the artisan's hand. His place of honor on the wall is rivaled only by that of a mustachioed, curiously beige and sheeplike face—that of Angelo Zegna himself.
Fabric is too often ignored, treated as suit-making's machine code: You just want it to work; you don't care how. That's a particular shame, because the manufacture of fabric knits together the obsession of manhood—looking, feeling, and being at the top of your game—with the passion of boyhood—the roaring of machines and the turning of wheels. What most men see of Zegna are elegant shops full of jackets, pants, and ties, but the company was originally—and at its heart remains—a fabric house, and it is an important reason why it occupies the top of the quality-suitmaker hierarchy. The two million yards of fabric Zegna produces every year go not just into its own clothes but also into Ralph Lauren's and Hugo Boss's. And Tom Ford is using some of it in the bespoke suits available at the store he recently opened on Madison Avenue. Zegna has even dedicated an entire factory—one capable of putting 20 hours of labor into every handmade suit—to the new Ford line.
Not long ago, I was invited to visit the Zegna plant to witness the birth of a new swatch. The first thing I noticed was how empty the mill seemed. It was between shifts, and the bags and bales of wool, yarn, and fabric seemed to move around the huge spaces on their own. The machines were the stars—I counted a dozen huge puce apparatuses, bigger than cars, like spaghetti-makers on steroids, each given generous space on the otherwise empty industrial floors. They spun, shuttled, and ricocheted threads and yarns ceaselessly under no apparent eye.
