Edoardo Zegna’s antidote to the luxury slump

Welcome to The Luxury Minute by Jing Daily, where we take you inside the boardroom for unfiltered conversations with C-suite executives and creatives shaping fashion and beauty across global markets. In our inaugural podcast episode, we speak with Edoardo Zegna, chief marketing, digital, and sustainability officer at the Milan-based fashion house Zegna. Listen now on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. While the industry chases speed and constant newness, one luxury menswear house is betting its future on the opposite strategy: radical slowness. Zegna, the 115-year-old Italian brand, is turning a century-old reforestation project into a blueprint for navigating today’s challenging luxury market. “I will have done my job fully if in 10 years, somebody would say, ‘Who is Zegna? Zegna is the slowest brand in the world,'” says Edoardo Zegna, a fourth-generation member of the founding family. ”I think it’s the most romantic and luxurious compliment that one can give to us.” Founded in 1910 by Ermenegildo Zegna as a wool mill in Trivero in the Italian Alps, the company has evolved into one of the world’s leading luxury menswear houses. In 2021, Zegna went public with a $3.1 billion valuation and has since acquired both Tom Ford and Thom Browne, forming what the industry calls a menswear trinity. Today, its Dubai store ranks as the brand’s number one location globally, welcoming over 1,000 visitors daily. But Zegna’s real differentiator lies in Oasi Zegna, a 100-square-kilometer natural territory where the founder planted half a million trees beginning in the 1930s and built infrastructure for the local community. For Edoardo Zegna, this legacy represents more than heritage marketing — it's a philosophy that guides everything from product development to customer experience across key markets including China and the Middle East. Recorded in Dubai during the brand’s Spring Summer 2025 fashion show, Edoardo Zegna discusses navigating the tension between family legacy and shareholder expectations, why Zegna launched its first Villa Zegna experience in Shanghai, and how the brand competes “at the dinner table” rather than on Instagram. Listen now on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Continue reading for excerpts from the full conversation. Jing Daily: Throughout this exhibition, we’ve had the opportunity to immerse ourselves in the world of Zegna, and a few themes have stood out: vision and legacy. We hear these words a lot, but there’s been a real engagement with this feeling of what’s passed down through generations and the responsibility we have toward that—whether it’s fashion, the environment, or something our grandparents left us. Zegna has a legacy spanning a hundred years, and you are now in the fourth generation of its founding family. On a personal level, how do you view and understand the legacy and story of this brand? Edoardo Zegna: My cousins and I are in the fourth generation. We are lucky beneficiaries of something that was done way before us. None of our generation has met the founder. But I think in some ways the best way to pay homage to him is to be as crazy as he was. In this private club, where we brought the essence and spirit of the founders home, we tried to bring a bit of that vision. You needed to be kind of mad, in 1910, to decide to set up your own mill in the mountains in northern Italy. Not only set up the factory and the millwork and so forth, but also give back to the communities. He built a hospital. He built a town. He built a half-Olympic swimming pool for the employees to enjoy themselves in the summer. Then he built a ski resort for them to enjoy themselves in the winter. He built a road to connect all of this. Then, he planted half a million trees. In some ways, the fact that so few people know about this—and my generation and I are the ones to actually tell this story—I think is representative of how authentic he was. Because he didn't do it for money. He didn't do it for fame. He didn't do it for ego. He did it because it felt right. And I think it's such an amazing sentiment in today's world where everything is so commercialized and so fake and so pushed to the limits. All I have to do is just tell the story. JD: Fashion has become very commercialized, and I'm always interested in understanding how that can exist alongside the core of fashion, which should be creativity. Even when we think about other fashion brands that have been around for generations and are family-owned, we’ve largely lost that. But when I started to learn more about Oasi Zegna and Ermenegildo Zegna’s history, I really felt the intention. As you said, there was no Instagram in 1930. The motivation wasn’t a bunch of likes. There was actually a person who cared about this land, the community built around it, and garments rooted in craft. You can really feel that this is a family and someone’s great-grandparent created this. How do you balance the emotion of this family history with the commercial realities of running a brand? EZ: To me it was very important to figure out a way to put the founder’s story on the clothing—a sign, a symbol that made you fly to that place, gave you those emotions, gave you those feelings. And behind all of our products, now we have these two lines, these two stripes, that are a metaphor for the road that the founder built to connect us. I want somebody to wear Zegna with pride — with the two stripes that are very subtle in the back—that represent them and say something about them that’s not just about looking to wear fashion or needing something for formal occasions. It says something about them. I do my job because of that. It needs to explode with emotions, and that's why I do what I do. And that's why we're doing what we're doing. JD: Did you always feel called to nurture the company in this form? EZ: I never had an obligation to do that, but I've always had this sense of giving back to my family. I had first pursued my own career and lived in America. Then, it was about timing, and it was about the right timing. We decided within the family to go public. It felt like a moment in time where I had to go all in — I couldn’t just be peripheral. Pre-IPO, when we started having conversations with the family, there was that willingness to make a shift. That's when we lost the word Ermenegildo, the founder’s name, which is also my father's name. And so it is a big deal to, you know, ask your father, are you okay if we remove your name from the brand? There were a lot of emotional layers there. That’s when we called it Zegna. We decided to change the font on the logo. We decided to change the logo into the brand mark, and really took a conscious decision to strive to go into a real luxury place — using all of the sentiments of the story of Oasi Zegna as a luxury place, as a whole, as a feeling. JD: You’ve mentioned a little about intentionality and the idea of slowness. To me, this is refreshing. It's needed. And it can take embracing slowness to be a visionary. You think about the planting of these trees, which probably seemed slow at the time, but a hundred years later it’s not. I want to hear from you about this idea of slowness and how you embrace it within a fast-paced market and within a public company with shareholder interest. EZ: The most expensive thing in the world is time. I can't buy it. It's about appreciation. It’s about communities. It’s about not creating a collection every day. It's about coming out with a product only when it's perfect. It's about testing it. It's a style of life. Clearly, we are extremely quick on service—our made-to-measure service delivers in three weeks globally. We move extremely quickly. I move extremely quickly. I'm talking about the aura that sits around the brand. And I think I will have done my job fully if, in 10 years, somebody would say, “Who is Zegna? Zegna is the slowest brand in the world.” I love that. I think it's the most romantic and luxurious compliment that one can give to us. - Listen to the full episode now on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

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Edoardo Zegna’s antidote to the luxury slump