Adriano Goldschmied, the Italian businessman known as “the godfather of denim” for his role in developing ever-more-refined versions of the world’s most popular fabric, died on April 5 in Castelfranco Veneto, a town near his home in Asolo, Italy. He was 82.
His death, in a hospital, was from cancer, according to his daughters Sara, Marta and Glenda Goldschmied.
On any given day, marketers say — quoting Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward, the social scientists behind the Global Denim Project at University College London — nearly half the world’s population is wearing jeans. Last year, more than $98 billion worth of jeans were sold worldwide, according to Mordor Intelligence, a market research company.
And the odds are, as Emma McClendon, a fashion historian, said recently, “If you wear jeans, you own a pair that is influenced in some way by Adriano’s presence in the industry.”
Dr. McClendon, who in 2015 organized “Denim: Fashion’s Frontier,” an expansive historical exhibition at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan, described Mr. Goldschmied as a “master of branding and storytelling and market positioning.”
An energetic ski bum and competitive multihull sailor, Mr. Goldschmied got involved with denim in the 1970s, when he began making high-end hippy clothes — bespoke denim hot pants and patched jeans — and selling them to jet-setters in Cortina d’Ampezzo, the Italian ski resort once frequented by Brigitte Bardot.
“It was an era of play,” Dr. McClendon said, “as society was changing, and people were playing with dress codes and what was appropriate to wear.”
For Mr. Goldschmied, jeans were synonymous with America and with the new, his daughter Glenda said. In 1981, he founded the Genius Group, a denim think tank and collective based in Asolo, to come up with denim brands that might get in on the action. The British designer Katharine Hamnett and the Italian entrepreneurs Claudio Buziol and Renzo Rosso were part of the group. Its ventures included Diesel, the provocative denim company, and the pricey Italian brands Replay and Goldie.
As Italy’s mills began making denim to supply these new brands, Mr. Goldschmied oversaw innovations in the way the fabric was treated, which by the 1980s involved all sorts of interventions by what are known as wash houses, where the fabric is rinsed, pummeled and sanded to get the ideal lived-in look and feel. The pummeling is done with rocks in large industrial washing machines, and though it was perhaps a Japanese technique to use lighter pumice stones, which cause less damage to the machines, it was Mr. Goldschmied’s research that brought the method to Europe.
“Stonewashed” entered the vernacular, along with “whiskering,” “distressed” and “destructed.”
Mr. Goldschmied was also excited about stretch, becoming a booster of Tencel, a semi-synthetic fiber that could be mixed with denim.
Did he invent these treatments and modifications? No, but he consulted with mills and brands to deploy them at the high end. Maurizio Donadi, a denim collector and designer, called Mr. Goldschmied “an orchestra leader” in the premium denim category.
A pair of AG Jeans, a line Mr. Goldschmied founded in 2000 and sold to a partner in 2004, might have went for as much as $130 in the early days, or about $255 today, adjusted for inflation. Prices haven’t risen much, if at all: One of AG’s current best sellers, the “ex-boyfriend” jean, in a “slouchy slim fit,” retails for $235.
“They were made very, very well,” Mr. Donadi said of Mr. Goldschmied’s jeans. “The high quality justified the price — so ‘expensive’ became ‘premium,’ a trajectory in the vocabulary we use.”
As Guy Trebay wrote in The New York Times in 2004, “Premium denims are to Levi’s as microbrews are to mass-market beers like Budweiser.”
“I design collections, I design lines and I design change,” Mr. Goldschmied told an interviewer in 2018. But, he added, “for me, it’s more important to create a team and to create new energy.”
Adriano Goldschmied was born on Nov. 29, 1943, in Vico Canavese, in northwestern Italy, to Sofia (Arvanitis) Goldschmied and Livio Goldschmied, who worked as an engineer for Olivetti before World War II.
The family was Jewish, and his father joined the Italian resistance after the Nazis invaded the country in September 1943. When Adriano was born, his mother was in hiding with his sister. His father tried to get home to see the new baby, but was captured by the Germans on the way and sent to Auschwitz, where he later died. His mother eventually took the children to Trieste, where her parents lived.
As a young man, Adriano was more interested in skiing than university, so in the 1960s he moved north, to Cortina, the ski resort in the Southern Alps.
By the 1970s, denim was ripe for enterprise. It wasn’t being manufactured in Italy, but Mr. Goldschmied and a partner went searching for it. On a tip, they bought rolls of the fabric, sight unseen, from a shipment that had landed in Naples.
As it happened, those “rolls” turned out to be off-cuts — just scraps of material. But Mr. Goldschmied thought, as he told his daughters later: “What the hell? I’ll patchwork it together and make hot pants.”
With his first wife, Rossella (Schiena) Goldschmied, he opened a store in Cortina called King’s Shop and started a denim line, Daily Blue, in 1974.
In the 1990s, Mr. Goldschmied moved to Los Angeles, where high-end denim brands were proliferating at a dizzying rate.
The treatments being used on denim were also proliferating, growing ever more elaborate and environmentally problematic. In 2011, Mr. Goldschmied described to The Los Angeles Times the steps involved in producing a typical pair of “premium” jeans. They included multiple washings, rinsings and bleachings, the aforementioned stone pummeling, and dips in vats of resin to stiffen the jeans so that they could be molded and creased. After all that, they’d be cured in an oven, sanded by hand and subjected to a blowtorch.
In the last few decades, Mr. Goldschmied had begun to investigate ways to minimize those environmental effects — cutting down on water use and toxic chemicals, for example — and make a more sustainable product.
In addition to his daughters, he is survived by his wife, Michela (Zagni) Goldschmied, whom he married in 1985; two grandchildren; and his sister, Diana Goldschmied.
By his count, Mr. Goldschmied collaborated on or started more than 50 brands, including Gap 1969, a retro label named for the year that the Gap was founded, as well as Goldsign and AG Adriano Goldschmied, now known as AG Jeans.
Yet he never wore his own creations. A classicist at heart, Mr. Goldschmied favored vintage 501 button-fly Levi’s.
Penelope Green is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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