Renzo Rosso

Denim genius Renzo Rosso built a global fashion and lifestyle empire, but he got his start with his mother's sewing machine in Italy's Po Valley. At 15, he made a pair of eccentric bell-bottoms which were an immediate hit among his friends. Five years later, having passed through Padua's Istituto Marconi to study textile manufacturing because he thought it was easy, he joined denim guru Adriano Goldschmied at Moltex, an Italian manufacturing outfit. In 1978, they renamed the firm Diesel in a nod to the decade's oil crises, and by '85 Rosso had bought Diesel outright from Goldschmied to focus on the American market. Betting on rising incomes among style-conscious, rich youngsters of the Wall Street boom era, and relying on ad campaigns that were controversial for controversy's sake, Diesel took the U.S. market by surprise, experiencing hockey stick growth selling expensive jeans. Rosso added high-end manufacturer Staff International to his portfolio in order to streamline operations, bringing design, production, and distribution in-house in 2000, while in 2002 he began an acquisition spree that included up-market fashion houses like Paris's Maison Margiela, Amsterdam's Viktor & Rolf in 2008, and Milanese name Marni in 2012. Rosso fully owns OTB, the holding company through which he runs his global empire, which stands for Only The Brave. He's also one of the largest shareholders in global e-commerce firm Yoox through Red Circle, his family's investment vehicle, which holds stakes in Italian tech incubator H-Farm, the boutique Pelican Hotel in Miami's South Beach, a winery near his northern Italian home, and London's Chiltern Firehouse in partnership with renown hotelier Andre Balazs, among other positions.