Brunello Cucinelli

The Italian king of quiet luxury whose cashmere empire and humanistic capitalism philosophy have made him fashion's moral compass. Cucinelli started the company in 1978 with a single idea — dyeing cashmere in colors nobody else was using — and built it into a publicly traded house while restoring Solomeo, the medieval Umbrian hamlet where it's headquartered, into the company's permanent home. His "humanistic capitalism" isn't just branding: employees are paid above local market rates and the workday is structured around a genuine lunch break, a philosophy Cucinelli has talked about publicly for decades rather than adopted recently for PR.