Renzo Rosso: Beyond the Big League

The Agent 

Athletes, actors, models, musicians—they all rely on other businessmen, their agents, to put them on the map. But one thing we forget to consider is how our favorite fashion designers become so popular in their industry. Just like the other guys, fashion designers have businessmen working behind them as agents too.

One such businessman is Renzo Rosso, founder of Diesel and owner of his holding group OTB (short for Only The Brave). Responsible for the popularity of Maison Martin Margiela, Marni, and Viktor & Rolf, along with his own $3 billion fortune built from inventing the ‘distressed’ Diesel jean, Rosso spends his time scouting for new talent in the fashion world.

Always on the lookout, Rosso seeks designers with promise by analyzing their work for signs of megabrand potential. And Rosso knows how to take these brands to the top—now famously donned by Kanye West and Jay-Z, the fashion brand Margiela went from stagnant and struggling to expand in 2001 to a $100 million powerhouse today, all thanks to Rosso.  

While Rosso’s vested-in “babies” craft high fashion clothing and accessories, Rosso has crafted his business in an equally creative manner. He has sought out and worked with labels from every end of the spectrum, from the pop-inspired costume and denimwear designer DSquared to the wild and unusual gown designer Vivienne Westwood.

An Innovative Touch

In fact, it was his own calculated efforts that brought Vivienne Westwood designs into what they are today—Rosso explains, “One day we bought a company called Staff International with this incredible know-how in tailoring. We thought that with that knowledge and with the sort of product Diesel already made we could be unique. So we began manufacturing the Vivienne Westwood line.” Now you know whom to thank for the structured blazers and draping mesh layers you saw in Westwood’s ready-to-wear show in Paris last week.

Rosso’s strategy begins with this: “I never select a designer who will be similar to someone who already exists.” Instead of setting his sights on known designers that offer high income and stability, Rosso seeks to develop new talent, and develop new talent he does. Rosso works as consultant to his brands as well as a ‘talent scout’ and investor, most recently for the rising star Maison Martin Margiela. Rosso began by restructuring the label, vertically integrating Staff International to enable in-house design, production, and sales. Rosso then suggested adding a collection of publically consumable items like sneakers, belts, and bags to Margiela’s glamour-injected product offering to help identify the brand’s clean, logo-free, streetstyle-meets-high-style aesthetic. From what we’ve heard from Kanye on the radio, [“What’s that jacket, Margiela?”] Rosso’s vision earned the brand entry into the celebrity world.

Kanye West took a liking to Margiela's bedazzled masks, using the same one seen in the Fall '12 Haute Couture show to make a statement in his 2013 tour performances.

New Competition

Rosso’s clearly paved the runway for several designers in the fashion industry, but he’s not the only one on the hunt for fresh fashion talent—he competes against many of his kind to find new investment projects in the industry, and the competition’s becoming stiff. Giant conglomerates like LVMH, Gucci Group, and Kering are all megabrands that seek to buy out luxury fashion brands, and given their enormous presence in the industry, many say that these three groups run the world of fashion.

What has set Rosso apart from the megabrands in the past comes from the fact that he started his company single-handedly and from the bottom up (growing up on an Italian farm, Rosso made his own fortune when he founded the Diesel brand with Adriano Goldschmied at the age of 23), and his business remains family-owned and private today. While large public groups like LVMH, worth nearly $65 billion, have tended to make profit-driven decisions to buy up familiar, established brands, Rosso has enjoyed the flexibility to venture into the unknown and develop new talent without worrying about the pleasing shareholders.

However, Rosso’s competition seems to be onto him. Recently, economic conditions have stagnated growth with bigger brands that Rosso’s competition was once more interested in. Suddenly, the moguls are racing to get their hands on the same type of up-and-coming talent Rosso has always focused on.

This year, Rosso admitted that LVMH beat him to the punch when they bought out new British labels J.W. Anderson and Nicholas Kirkwood, which he had been eyeing for quite some time: “We also considered investing in them but we never expected LVMH to move so quickly,” he explained to Reuters. As these giant holding companies, which undoubtedly have different priorities and visions for their brands, begin encroaching upon the same young talent Rosso seeks, things could get ugly—“What groups like LVMH are doing, is preventing designers like Anderson from working for somebody else,” he claims. Surely, he means somebody else who can perhaps offer more creative insight—somebody like himself.