Etro: The Milanese House Where Paisley, Travel and Bohemian Luxury Meet

In the landscape of Italian luxury fashion, Etro occupies a position of singular distinctiveness. The Milan-based house — founded by Gimmo Etro in 1968 as a textile company and evolved into one of Italy’s most recognisable luxury fashion brands — has built its identity on a combination of extraordinary fabric expertise, the paisley motif that has become its signature and a bohemian, travel-inspired aesthetic that sets it apart from every other house in the Italian luxury market.

In 2026, under the creative direction of Marco De Vincenzo, Etro continues to evolve its distinctive identity with a contemporary sensibility that honours the house’s heritage while finding new ways to express the richness and the cultural curiosity that have always defined it.

The Etro Heritage

Gimmo Etro founded his company in Milan in 1968, initially producing fabrics for the home furnishing market. The extraordinary quality of the textiles — woven in Como, Italy’s great silk weaving centre, using techniques and colour combinations of exceptional sophistication — established Etro’s reputation as a fabric house of the highest order before the expansion into fashion accessories and ready-to-wear.

The paisley motif — the teardrop-shaped decorative element that originated in Persian and South Asian textile traditions and that Etro adopted as its signature pattern in the 1980s — became one of Italian luxury fashion’s most recognisable motifs. Applied to everything from cashmere scarves to leather bags and ready-to-wear, the Etro paisley communicates the house’s values of cultural curiosity, material richness and bohemian sophistication with immediate effect.

The Fabric Heritage

Etro’s founding as a textile company gives it a relationship with fabric that most luxury fashion houses cannot match. The house’s archive — which contains thousands of textile designs developed across decades of production — provides a creative resource of extraordinary depth that successive creative directors have drawn on in different ways.

The cashmere scarves and throws that remain among the house’s most consistently sought-after products represent this textile heritage at its most accessible and most enduring. A Etro cashmere scarf — in the paisley pattern, in the house’s characteristic colour combinations — is one of the most recognisable luxury accessories in the Italian market and one of the most reliable gifting propositions in the luxury category.

The Travel Inspiration

Etro’s aesthetic has always drawn deeply on the cultures and the textiles of the world’s great travel destinations — the bazaars of Marrakech, the temples of India, the souks of Istanbul. This cultural curiosity, expressed through colour combinations, pattern references and the incorporation of artisanal techniques from traditions across the world, gives the house’s collections a richness and a depth that the more narrowly focused Italian luxury houses cannot match.

For the high-net-worth buyer who approaches fashion as a form of cultural engagement — who wants clothes and accessories that reflect a genuine curiosity about the world rather than a single aesthetic position — Etro provides one of the most rewarding and most distinctive propositions in the luxury market.

The Pegaso

The Etro Pegaso — the winged horse that serves as the house’s emblem — appears across the brand’s products as a symbol of the freedom, creativity and cultural aspiration that define the Etro identity. The Pegaso hardware on bags and accessories, the embroidered Pegaso motifs on ready-to-wear and the sculptural Pegaso objects that appear in Etro’s home collection all connect the individual products to the house’s broader aesthetic vision.

The Marco De Vincenzo Era

Marco De Vincenzo’s appointment as Creative Director in 2022 — bringing to Etro a designer whose own label had been celebrated for its extraordinary textile intelligence and its ability to combine technical complexity with genuine wearability — represented a natural fit between a designer’s strengths and a house’s heritage. De Vincenzo’s approach has honoured Etro’s textile foundation while introducing a contemporary lightness and a design precision that has refreshed the house’s aesthetic for a new generation of buyers.

The Verdict

Etro in 2026 is the luxury fashion house for the buyer who values cultural curiosity, textile richness and the bohemian sophistication of a house that has always looked at the world with genuine interest and genuine respect. Its combination of extraordinary fabric heritage, the paisley’s enduring cultural resonance and a creative direction of genuine intelligence makes it one of the most distinctive and most rewarding propositions in the Italian luxury market.

Explore Etro’s current collections and discover Milanese luxury at its most culturally curious and most texturally rich.