Renzo Rosso grew up on a small farm outside Vicenza, in Veneto, the son of country people who worked the land. He learned to sew on his mother’s machine and made his first pair of trousers as a teenager, then went to study at an industrial textile high school in Padua.
Somewhere along the way, he got hold of an idea that would have sounded absurd to most people around him: that blue jeans, the most American garment there is, could be made into something Italian, and that he was the one to do it. In 1978, at twenty-three, with a little money and a good deal of nerve, he co-founded a jeans label in the village of Molvena and gave it a name that meant nothing in particular. He called it Diesel.
