Rivetti, Marco
Marco Rivetti (1943-1996). Italian clothing industrialist. He was chairman and managing director of Gruppo Finanziario Tessile.
Origin
Born in Turin, he began working at GFT in the early 1970s. Rivetti was directly employed by his uncle Piergiorgio, the father who owned the family business and with whom he did not always have an easy relationship. Furthermore, these were the years of the energy crisis and the packaging industry, like almost all sectors of world industry, was going through a desperate period. Even Facis, the leading brand for men’s and Italian industrial fashion, had suddenly seen its sales plummet.
Marco Rivetti was the first Italian textile industrialist to realize that something had profoundly changed. Together with a small team of collaborators, he tried to respond to the public’s new taste. This led to a collaboration with Giorgio Armani and Sergio Galeotti, who were practically unknown at the time. Bringing together Armani’s then brand new clothing ideas with the production and distribution power of the Gruppo Finanziario Tessile. He inaugurated the era of stylish and Italian-made products on a global scale.
Years later, Rivetti jokingly said that it took a protestor from 1968, as he had been, to seek out new ideas and invent contemporary Made in Italy.
His dedication to art
A competent collector and a lover of contemporary art (he was the driving force behind the creation of the Rivoli museum). An informed man of quick intuitions, decisions and choices. One who was one of the first to understand that fashion was not just big business but a project about the body: that it was not just Fashion shows but also part of contemporary culture.
This key inspired understanding many projects by the Gruppo Finanziario Tessile. Later which helped them in collaborating with critics such as Germano Celant, with architects such as Arata Isozaki, Frank Gehry and Aldo Rossi, and with artists such as Oldenburg.
The same philosophy, i.e. giving space to the culture of fashion and culture in general, was applied by Rivetti. When
in 1985, he agreed to become president of what were the agonizing Florentine textile and clothing fairs, brought to their knees by the overwhelming power of the Milan of stylists.
In Florence, Franco Tancredi, then president of Centro Moda, had recently (’84) hired a consultant, Luigi Settembrini, to attempt what seemed like an improbable relaunch of the Fortezza da Basso trade fair centre.
Settembrini, who had always been a consultant to the Rivetti family and the Group, convinced Marco to accept the presidency. Thus Pitti Immagine was born, which today not only organises some of the most important fashion fairs in the world but is considered one of the most lively international laboratories of fashion culture.
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Rivetti, Marco (Italian Version)
