MILAN — Zegna continues to take a longterm view.

The Ermenegildo Zegna Founder’s Scholarship is marking its tenth edition as the luxurious menswear company renews its commitment to Italian graduate students for an additional 15 years.

In 2014, the Ermenegildo Zegna Group earmarked 25 million euros to stimulate excellence in Italy.

The group pledged to offer 1 million euros every year for 25 years to enable talented Italian graduates to pursue postgraduate studies or conduct research outside of Italy.

The funds are granted given that those students return to Italy upon completion of their programs abroad. The aim is to forestall a “brain drain” that always affects Italy.

The scholarship is known as after the founding father of the firm, who died in 1966 and who was known for his philanthropic activities and his modern approach to business.

It pays tribute to Zegna’s ethical vision and concrete actions to enhance the lifetime of the community and to guard the environment within the Trivero, Italy, area where the corporate is headquartered, at the middle of the Oasi Zegna.

Chairman and CEO Gildo Zegna said the funding “is a project of social responsibility that could be very dear to us since it is aimed toward the brand new generations, bringing back talents into our country – hence taking a look at the long run of Italy and of its industry.

“The Zegna Group, a union between industry, family and territory, should be for us a stimulus to hold forward and protect the values of Made in Italy. It’s a challenge that must unite the Italian entrepreneurs of today and tomorrow,” he added.

This system enables students from greater than 20 top Italian universities to review at leading centers of learning abroad, and goals to feed a virtuous circle of data and skills that actively contribute to the event of the country once the students return home.

The chief has long said the founder continues to encourage the Zegna family’s mission and actions toward social responsibility greater than 100 years on.

In the primary 10 years of the project, 425 scholarships were awarded. Within the 2023-24 edition, 71 students will go to universities including Harvard, Columbia and UCLA within the U.S.; Oxford, Cambridge and the London School of Economics within the U.K.; the College of Europe in Belgium; the Max Planck Institute in Germany; ETH in Switzerland; Adelaide University in Australia, and Keio University in Japan.

On the occasion of the tenth edition of this system, Fondazione Zegna held a gathering of greater than 170 scholarship members on the Oasi Zegna, which included a visit to the wool mill founded in 1910 and the archives.

“Just as Ermenegildo Zegna placed his wool mill at the middle of an ecosystem through which individuals, society and the environment were certain together in positive and sustainably reciprocal interdependence, we at the moment are creating connections and dialogue and producing shared values on the local and international levels,” Zegna said.

The scholarship is in sync with Zegna’s efforts to deal in a positive way with the generational handover in several industries and to safeguard the manufacturing pipeline. Zegna has through the years built its own pipeline and textile supply chain, which incorporates Bonotto and Dondi, amongst others. As well as, it has turn into an example of the increasing cooperative approach amongst Italian fashion entrepreneurs.

Zegna has twice made joint investments with Prada Group. Last month, it purchased a minority stake in knitwear specialist Luigi Fedeli e Figlio Srl. In 2021, it acquired 40 percent of Filati Biagioli Modesto SpA, which focuses on the production of cashmere and other precious yarns.

While mindful of the past and its heritage, the group has been going through some major changes, buying a majority stake in Thom Browne in 2018; rebranding Zegna ahead of its initial public offer on the Recent York Stock Exchange in 2021, and shifting from a licensing deal to an exclusive supplier agreement of Tom Ford with The Estée Lauder Cos. following the wonder giant’s deal to purchase the American brand in November. 

Zegna will produce and distribute all of Ford’s men’s and girls’s fashion, accessories, underwear, fantastic jewelry, childrenswear, textile and residential design products, as reported.