The Italian Fashion Family Diaspora

Increasingly the children of the most famous brands are going their own ways.

MILAN — When Alice Etro was a little girl, she used to spend after-school hours with her father, Kean Etro, creative director of Etro men’s wear, playing with fabric samples in the design studio of the fashion brand that her grandfather Gimmo started in 1968. She’d create garments from off-cuts for her dolls and play with the tubes from the rolls of cloth.

“I loved it all,” she said. She remembers the thrill of attending a runway show, and the walk-through alone with her parents. “I wanted to be him,” she added, of her designer father. Expectations were she would follow in his footsteps and join the family firm, just as he and his three siblings had followed their parents. As, indeed, has been the norm among many of Italy’s storied fashion dynasties.

There’s an expression in Italian — “capitalismo familiare” or family capitalism — that denotes the passing on of a private company from one generation to the next, said Matteo Persivale, special correspondent for the newspaper Corriere della Sera. For decades it has been the rule in fashion, where the stewardship of brands was passed down like a closely kept saffron risotto recipe or a chalet in Cortina.