Adriano Goldschmied, the revolutionary master of Italian denim

He was a master, he had many disciples and some of them have, proverbially, surpassed him, judging by the notoriety they achieved. The master's name was Adriano Goldschmied and he died on Sunday at the age of 82; the disciples are, among others, Renzo Rosso, Claudio Buziol (creator of Replay), Tato and Nicola Bardelle (founders of Americanino and Jacob Cohën), just to name a few from the Genius Group, a nursery created in the 1980s as a breeding ground for denim culture.

Almost certainly and for everyone Goldschmied remained and will always remain the master, cultivator of his own dreams (until the very end he worked on the zero-impact jeans project) and those of others: he was able to inspire young creatives and future entrepreneurs and devoted more energy to them than to building a personal empire or the myth of himself. He created a brand that bears his name, of course, and was a consultant to many brands in the sector, in Italia and abroad, starting from Veneto to conquer California. He was among the first to realise how versatile denim was and how much creativity and textile innovation it could unleash. Goldschmied helped build an ecosystem, a denim supply chain, made up of creative designers, product developers, dyers and specialised textile companies, ready to go beyond the limits that traditional denim cloth had and inspiring new fabrics that, in addition to natural fabric, contained small percentages of elastic fibres.

Thanks to one of the many happy intuitions of Stefano Beraldo, CEO of Ovs, Goldschmied also returned to prominence in Italia in recent years: in May 2023, the capsule of jeans for women and men was presented in Milan, which arrived in Ovs shops the following September. In the same days of that spring three years ago, Goldschmied relaunched the historic Daily Blue label, among the many projects cultivated thanks to the company House of Gold, founded in Los Angeles in 2014 with Vincenzo Marrocco.

Premium jeans (including Daily Blue) cost ten to twenty times the price of those that appeared at Ovs, which started at €19.99: Beraldo and Goldshmied allowed everyone to buy a piece of denim history. "I wish I had invented jeans," confessed Yves Saint Laurent when he was already famous for ready-to-wear and haute couture. But perhaps today, a young stylist should dream of being Adriano Goldschmied: he embodied dedication and expertise, he did not follow strategies that had nothing to do with the nature of denim, a fantastic fabric that can be to a creative person what a blank canvas is to an artist, and he was always far removed from the excesses of digital marketing. Fashion today needs figures like Goldschmied and perhaps it will be his disciples, Renzo Rosso in primis, who will discover new ones and make them grow.