Allegri

Leading Italian company in the manufacture of men’s and women’s raincoats and sportswear. It was founded by Allegro and Renato Allegri in Vinci, the Tuscan village where Leonardo was born, and had an immediate success with a nylon raincoat. It was the late 1950s and early 1960s, a period when their activity began to go beyond simple waterproof items and became part of the international culture of the trench coat, steadily modernizing the line. The operating headquarters are still in Vinci, but they answer to Dismi 92, a public company with a paid-up capital of €5 million. The president is Pietro Allegri and the managing directors are Augusto and Dianora Allegri. In the last decade, their line has become more fashionable and has benefited from research and the testing of new materials, with more productive technology and innovative marketing strategies. This was a process that above all involved an expansion of the very vocabulary of the raincoat, as it became richer in fashion and in style, more innovative in its forms and proportions, and showed a greater concern for detail, resulting in the complete diversity of some 200 Collections a year. In 1990 Allegri was awarded the Pitti Immagine Uomo prize for its extraordinary results in rainwear and sportswear, a field in which Italian firms had to compete with more established and traditional manufacturers, especially the British. The year 1999 saw the launching of Ironside, a raincoat fabric made of nylon fiber and steel thread. The company has two factories with 250 workers, plus 1,500 more in the induced activity. Today the Group has some 770 clients in Italy and more than 720 worldwide, among which are the most prestigious stores in the U.S., Germany, Japan and England. Allegri has three active licenses. The most long-lived is with Giorgio Armani, started back in 1976 and expanded over the years into a licensing arrangement that is still in force. The license with the young English designer Neil Barrett dates to 1999, and the one with Pirelli for the new P.Zero line began in January 2002. Pirelli entrusted Allegri with the design and commercialization of its new men’s and women’s wear lines. In addition to the premises in Vinci, the company has an extraordinary showroom in Milan’s Palazzo Serbelloni. It also owns the Allegri Weather Points, single-brand boutiques in Milan, Florence and Tokyo (Tokyo opened in 2001), conceived as meeting places where, always in accord with the interactive and technological spirit of the firm, there is a meteorological “totem,” made of a new, weather-resistant, washable and recyclable material that provides round-the-clock information on weather conditions and on the astronomical chart of the skies above the main cities of the world. In 2001 Weather Point also became the brand for a line of sportswear and travelwear aimed at a young audience. In Spring-Summer 2005 the company launched a new line designed by the avant-garde Belgian firm A.F. Vandevorst. The line is to maintain the technical quality of the firms products, but also to convey a more sophisticated allure.