There are few people who know the luxury world better than Marco Angeloni.
His great-grandfather was one of the founders of Roman tailors Brioni and his father, Umberto Angeloni, led the storied Italian house through the 1990s and early 2000s. Angeloni followed in their footsteps, working at Brioni before embarking on a career in luxury consulting. It wasn’t long before he felt the call of the family business. “I was never able to touch anything with my hands and make a difference apart from presenting beautiful business plans,” he remembers of his previous posts.
Eventually, he decided to join his father’s latest venture: reviving Caruso, a menswear label founded in the Emilia-Romagna town of Soragna in 1958. “My father found an amazing mix of very high-end quality and modern manufacturing,” says Angeloni. “It was the perfect base on which to relaunch a brand that already existed but had never been properly managed.” He took over as CEO in 2018 after his father stepped down, and guided the brand through the difficult pandemic years.
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Angeloni knew he had to find a point of difference, an idea and style that would help Caruso find its place in the world. “It needed a specific positioning,” he says. “Not just a beautiful suit — a suit for someone who is looking to be elegant but doesn’t want to be outdated, or too classic, or too old. This is when our motto ‘playful elegance’ came to life.” In 2022, Angeloni hired Max Kibardin as creative director. Kibardin had founded his eponymous luxury footwear and accessories label in 2005, and spent time consulting for labels including Tod’s and OTB Group, the company behind Diesel, Maison Margiela, and Marni. Now, Kibardin was tasked with bringing the idea of playful elegance into everything Caruso does.
“I know the archetypes, I know the rules, so I can play with them,” says Kibardin of this philosophy. “With the Angeloni family, we’re talking about a deeply rooted sartorial experience. The company has been involved in the best-made garments in the men’s industry, so we can play with the rules; we can create something new.” Caruso’s legacy, meanwhile, is built on its work for other labels, including decades spent making suits for Ralph Lauren Purple Label, Dior, and Tom Ford, among others.
Playing with said rules means taking more risks in terms of color and fabrics, with shades of green and brown joining the more traditional tones in each collection. Another change for Caruso has been its approach to collaborations, including a recent release with Japanese label Sanyocoat. “We had never really done a trench, which is a staple of a man’s wardrobe,” Angeloni says. “Since we didn’t have that know-how, we said, ‘If we do it, we should do it with the best.’”
In Sanyocoat, they discovered an equally historic brand founded on similar values. “It was very interesting to put two countries, two philosophies, together,” says Kibardin. “What they have in common is quality and attention to detail.” The collab also provided an opportunity to place Caruso in a new context, away from its Italian heartland. “I loved the idea of taking our customer outside of Soragna, outside of Parma, outside of Italy, and putting him on a global scale,” says Kibardin.
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Collaborations like this are all part of Angeloni’s plan to introduce more people to “this beautiful hidden secret” — spreading Caruso’s playful elegance without compromising on the things that brought him and his father here in the first place. “We like a clubbish idea of like-minded connoisseurs who know quality,” he says. “People who appreciate what we do.”
