{"id":467434,"date":"2025-10-02T03:29:27","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T03:29:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/467434\/"},"modified":"2025-10-02T03:29:27","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T03:29:27","slug":"an-italian-geek-in-king-charless-court","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/467434\/","title":{"rendered":"An Italian Geek in King Charles\u2019s Court"},"content":{"rendered":"

Federico Marchetti, the Italian fashion entrepreneur, is a master of sprezzatura\u2014the courtier\u2019s art of cloaking ambition and cunning in an air of guileless nonchalance. In the early days of e-commerce, he convinced Giorgio Armani, the king of Italian fashion, that selling clothes online would not damage his brand. He also built digital stores for other \u00e9lite fashion houses, and created Yoox, a high-end online retailer. In 2018, Marchetti, then forty-nine, sold the company at a valuation of six billion dollars. But, instead of retiring, he sought out a new liege. He had served the king of fashion so ably (Armani does very good business online) that it was not entirely surprising when he joined forces with an actual king: Charles III<\/a> of England.<\/p>\n

Marchetti was in town during Fashion Week to promote his memoir, \u201cThe Geek of Chic.\u201d (The title is borrowed from a 2012 New Yorker profile<\/a> of him.) On a Wednesday evening, Silas Chou, a Hong Kong-based textile and fashion tycoon, hosted a book party in his eighty-second-floor apartment on West Fifty-seventh Street. Guests observed a moment of silence for Armani, who had died a few days earlier, at the age of ninety-one, before tucking into what Chou described, not inaccurately, as \u201cthe best Chinese food you\u2019ve ever eaten.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two days later, Marchetti, who lives in Milan and on Lake Como, was having breakfast at a downtown caf\u00e9 outside the Police Building, where he keeps an apartment, talking about his relationship with King Charles. When they met for the first time, in 2017, at an event in London, Charles was still a prince. They bonded over their shoes. \u201cI said, \u2018Your shoes look amazing!\u2019 And he said, \u2018They\u2019re twenty years old!\u2019\u00a0\u201d Marchetti recalled. \u201cThey were perfect, absolutely perfect. And my shoes were perfect, too, and ten years old.\u201d Charles has long been devoted to promoting sustainability in the fashion industry, part of his broader environmental advocacy. \u201cHe is someone who is wearing for twenty years the same coat\u2014the camel,\u201d Marchetti noted. He recited a motto of the King\u2019s: \u201cBuy less but buy better.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2021, Charles, admiring Marchetti\u2019s get-up-and-go, invited him to chair his fashion task force. \u201cHe calls me his Italian secret weapon, because he loves that I\u2019m an action man,\u201d Marchetti said. Soon, Marchetti was invited to a small dinner at Dumfries House, an estate in Scotland owned by the King\u2019s Foundation, Charles\u2019s charitable nonprofit. (Marchetti is now a trustee.) \u201cThe dress code said \u2018smoking jacket,\u2019\u00a0\u201d he recalled. \u201cIn Italy, we don\u2019t have \u2018smoking jacket.\u2019 I had to Google it.\u201d (It refers to a velvet or silk dinner jacket worn with tuxedo trousers.) Charles himself, Marchetti remembered, had on \u201can amazing outfit with matching colors that only a very sophisticated man can put together. I thought, Oh, my God, you\u2019re so stylish.\u201d<\/p>\n

Marchetti felt compelled to acquire a kilt for his new duties; he had one made by a Scotsman, who dreamed up a new tartan, in cream, orange, and gray. (The kilt-maker said that the pattern was \u201cinspired by two national symbols of Italy, the wolf and the lily.\u201d) The etiquette of kilt-wearing, however, flummoxed the Italian. \u201cI was told that, if the King\u2019s not wearing the kilt, no one else can,\u201d he said. (That turned out to be wrong.) Marchetti had also heard idle gossip to the effect that \u201can international person cannot wear the kilt.\u201d (Also untrue.) So far, he has played it safe, in trousers.<\/p>\n

\"Two<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI was hurrying to work and she was walking her dog, and it started to rain and she didn\u2019t have an umbrella, and I jumped in a cab and there was already someone in it, and then we met on Tinder.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cartoon by Liam Francis Walsh<\/p>\n

On another occasion at Dumfries, Marchetti made a bold choice because, he said, \u201cI\u2019m a courageous man.\u201d He wore green shoes, a cheeky take on the John Lobb wing tip, made in collaboration with Paul Smith. The gambit paid off with the King and his court. \u201cNow every time they introduce me to somebody, they say, \u2018This is the most stylish man of Italy,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Marchetti recalled. (He has persuaded his friend, the movie director Luca Guadagnino<\/a>, to design the interiors of the Milan and Lake Como residences, which he shares with his wife, the British fashion journalist Kerry Olsen, and their fourteen-year-old daughter, Maggie.)<\/p>\n

Marchetti was one of only a few Italians invited to Charles\u2019s coronation ceremony, in 2023; others included the President of the Republic and Andrea Bocelli. For the occasion, his friend Brunello Cucinelli made him a morning suit: white tie, striped pants, and tails. One of Marchetti\u2019s gifts to the King was even bolder than his green shoes: a chrome-plated toothpaste squeezer from Lorenzi, a venerable knife shop in Milan. It was a reference to a minor scandal from years ago, caused by a report, in the Guardian, that the prince\u2019s toothpaste was squeezed onto his brush by a servant.<\/p>\n

\u201cHis valet told me, \u2018You\u2019re a brave man, to bring him a gift like this,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Marchetti recalled. Charles, in a thank-you note, indicated that he was amused.<\/p>\n

Does he use the toothpaste squeezer?<\/p>\n

\u201cI never asked,\u201d Marchetti said. Even an action man knows that, when dealing with kings, discretion is the better part of valor.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Federico Marchetti, the Italian fashion entrepreneur, is a master of sprezzatura\u2014the courtier\u2019s art of cloaking ambition and cunning…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":467435,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7708],"tags":[1816,7709,7730,7731,1760,18753,7710,519,155926,11993],"class_list":{"0":"post-467434","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-royals","8":"tag-audio","9":"tag-british-royal-family","10":"tag-charles","11":"tag-charles-iii","12":"tag-king-charles","13":"tag-magazine","14":"tag-royal-families","15":"tag-royal-family","16":"tag-sidekick-dept","17":"tag-splitscreenimageleftinset"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115302456889489059","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=467434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467434\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/467435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=467434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=467434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=467434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}