LA RINASCENTE 1865-2017:
THE HISTORY OF DEPARTMENT STORE

On 4 June, the brothers Luigi and Ferdinando Bocconi opened their first fabric and tailoring shop at the corner of Via Santa Radegonda in Milan. By the following year, they were employing more than one hundred workers, tailoring off-the-peg suits for men.

Between 1872 and 1876, they opened branches in Rome’s Via del Corso, in Genoa, Trieste, Palermo and Turin.

The Bocconi brothers inaugurated the major department store Aux Villes d’Italie at the Hôtel Confortable. The first of its kind in Italy, it was modelled on Aristide Boucicaut’s store Le Bon Marché in Paris (1852), made famous by Émile Zola in his novel Au Bonheur des Dames (1883). In 1880 the sign was changed to the Italian version of the name, Alle Città d’Italia. In 1887, the brothers opened their new store in Rome’s Piazza Colonna, designed by Giulio De Angelis, and in 1889 the new store in Milan’s Piazza Duomo, designed by Giovanni Giachi.

The Bocconi Stores were sold to Senatore Borletti, who entrusted Gabriele D’Annunzio with creating the new name. This is how the joint stock company La Rinascente was born and was officially registred on 27th September 1917. La Rinascente opened to the public on 7 December 1918, in the building in Piazza del Duomo, which was destroyed in a fire a few days after the inauguration.

In 1919 and 1920, the branches in Turin, Genoa, Bologna, Florence, Rome, Naples and Palermo all reopened after renovation.

La Rinascente’s building in Milan’s Piazza del Duomo was inaugurated on 23 March after reconstruction that had transformed it and made it larger. The management of the company as a whole was in the hands of Umberto Brustio, the brother-in-law of the major shareholder Senator Borletti.

The celebrated poster created by Aldo Mazza to mark the reopening of the stores, which depicts new branches budding from the trunk of an olive tree, is a reference to the symbolic concept of rebirth. In this period, a successful relationship developed between La Rinascente and Marcello Dudovich. The artist from Trieste was to continue creating advertising posters for the company until 1956.

Gio Ponti, assisted by Emilio Lancia, designed the Domus Nova series of modern furnishings, produced and sold by La Rinascente. The purpose of this new series was to update the look of Italy’s middle-class homes and the furnishings in them. The décor was simple in form, yet elegant, and was produced to furnish four rooms: a family room, a dining room, a master bedroom and a young girls’ bedroom. All of them were put on show at the III Monza Biennale.

After partnering with the German company Leonhard Tietz to introduce the single-price store into Italy, La Rinascente merged with Upim stores to create a single company. One of the partners in this new venture, which numbered five branches of La Rinascente and twenty-five Upim stores all over Italy, was the Jelmoli major department store based in Zurich.

An escalator was installed in La Rinascente’s store in Piazza Colonna, Rome: it was the first escalator to be installed in a commercial building in Italy.

These were the years when Italian products were launched and came in for fulsome praise, synthetic materials were much admired and rayon, cafioc (a substitute for cotton, made from hemp) and artificial wool were introduced.

La Rinascente promoted campaigns to encourage the consumption of the products of Italian industry, while its distribution forged a vital connection with consumers, learning to interpret the public’s needs.

Since Senator Borletti had died in 1939, Umberto Brustio was elected President of the company.

In 1941, a decision made by the clothing corporation approved La Rinascente’s superiority to the Standa and Coin stores, which together accounted for half the sales surface area of La Rinascente. In the following year, the twenty-fifth anniversary of its foundation, the company had five La Rinascente stores and fifty-two Upim stores.

The war left the company severely damaged, as its stores in Genoa and Cagliari were destroyed. On 16 August, the flagship store in Milan’s Piazza del Duomo was hit by a bombing raid: only one La Rinascente store in Rome and thirty-seven Upim stores scattered all over Italy were still partly operational at this stage.

The city of Milan allowed La Rinascente to rent three large halls in the historical Palazzo della Ragione in Via Mercanti. In 1945 and 1946, nineteen Upim stores, La Rinascente’s branch in Cagliari, the company’s headquarters in Milan’s Via Carducci and the storage facilities were rebuilt.

On 4 December, the flagship store in Piazza del Duomo reopened in American style. The architectural design of the building’s exterior was the work of Ferdinando Reggiori, while Carlo Pagani designed the display windows, the entrances, the interior architecture and the décor. Modern escalators provided convenient links between the building’s various floors.

Max Huber designed the new lR logo, while Albe Steiner took over and retained responsibility for external and internal display designs and advertising graphics until 1955.

La Rinascente established the Compasso d’Oro Award, from a brainchild of Gio Ponti and Alberto Rosselli. Albe Steiner designed the logo and suggested the name for the award.

Lora Lamm was responsible for the advertising graphics, while Amneris Latis was art director in the Advertising Office.

These were years of great ferment: in 1955, the new La Rinascente Social Club was inaugurated in Milan’s Via Durini and the Public Relations Office was established; in 1956 it was the turn of the establishment of the Study Office.

Umberto Brustio retired as the company’s top manager after nearly forty years at the helm, accepting the position of Honorary President.

Senator Borletti’s son Aldo was elected company president and also held the position of general manager, together with Cesare and Giorgio Brustio. The most important individual in the company’s top management was Cesare Brustio, general manager and company vice-president.

Building on the model of the first supermarket opened in Italy on 27 November 1957 in Milan’s Viale Regina Giovanna, the La Rinascente-Upim conglomerate now added to its activities by launching the SMA chain of supermarkets, the most modern and up-to-date model of distribution and retail sales for foodstuffs.

La Rinascente opened its store in Piazza Fiume, Rome, designed by Franco Albini and Franca Helg.

The building has almost no windows at all, so as to enable the best possible use of the interior space, to the benefit of the displays. The store occupies seven floors linked together by lifts and escalators, while 50 sales departments presented all the variants on assortments already familiar from the flagship store in Milan. This made La Rinascente Rome’s most comprehensive shopping centre.

The celebrated French fashion designer Pierre Cardin signed a contract with La Rinascente to produce a line of his clothing at affordable prices, declaring that fashion should be accessible to everyone, democratic and in step with the times.

Adriana Botti Monti became art director for the Advertising Office. The numerous awards and professional acknowledgements she won were to be the milestones marking her career.

When Aldo Borletti passed away in 1967, the new president of the group was Senatore Borletti Jr., while Cesare Brustio held the office of managing director.

The Borletti family sold its shareholdings to IFI, in the FIAT group, and Mediobanca, who had already held shares since 1965, when Jelmoli had left the company. In 1970, the ambassador Guido Colonna di Paliano was appointed the new president of the company.

The group now had five La Rinascente stores, 150 UPIM stores and fifty-four SMA supermarkets.

La Rinascente-Città Mercato was opened in Brescia, the first hypermarket devoted to selling goods at affordable prices. The aim of the company’s new management was to overcome the divide between mass distribution and traditional commerce.

The flagship store in Piazza Duomo was renewed and the new structure for La Rinascente in the 1970s was rational and in line with the times. In 1973, La Rinascente inaugurated its store in Turin.

Umberto Brustio died on 25 April 1972. On 23 March 1973, Senatore Borletti Jr. was appointed company vice-president.

The group took over the Italian stores owned by one of the United States’ largest distribution firms, J.C. Penney, which had four points of sale in Lombardy. Benefitting from its experience in distribution networks and modern organisation, as well as from the company’s success, La Rinascente was now focused on reviving its fortunes: in the first half of this year, it increased its sales by 20.7%.

Afterwards 1983, the group opened Italy’s first Bricocenter, a supermarket for do-it-yourself enthusiasts, in Turin. Two years later, it concluded negotiations to take over Croff Nuova SpA, a company specialised in distributing products for the home.

The FIAT group, which owned La Rinascente, concluded a financial and technical agreement with the French Auchan group, which led to the launch of a process of conversion of La Rinascente’s twenty-three Città Mercato stores and two Joyland stores into Auchan outlets. The group ended the year with an increase in turnover and developed new strategies to reach its objective of strengthening its foodstuffs sector by opening forty hypermarkets by the end of 2002.

Following a group divestment, the major department store La Rinascente was taken over by a group of investors (20% Pirelli Real Estate, 46% Investitori Associati, 30% Deutsche Bank, 4% Borletti family), who created La Rinascente SpA. The new management team was led by Vittorio Radice.

In 2007, the Food Hall was opened on the seventh floor of the Milan flagship store, followed in 2009 by the Design Supermarket.

In May 2011, the thai company Central Retail Corporation took over ownership of La Rinascente. Sudhitahn Chirathivat became president and Tos Chirathivat was director of La Rinascente. In particular Tos Chirathivat announced in a press conference he desire to make La Rinascente known around the world nd across all of Asia. The following year, Alberto Baldan – general director since 2007 - became CEO. Vittorio Radice was then appointed vice-president of La Rinascente, along with his task of the group’s luxury department stores international development.

On 26 May, Milan’s La Rinascente, which in the previous year had celebrated the 150th anniversary of the Bocconi’ brothers’ first store and whose Central group had meanwhile taken over the Illum department store in Copenhagen (2013) and KaDeWe in Berlin (2015), won an award as the World’s Best Department Store during the ceremony for the Global Department Store Summit 2016 held in Zürich.

In 2017, to celebrate the centenary of its name coined by Gabriele D’Annunzio, Rinascente set up an exhibition at Palazzo Reale called “LR100. Rinascente. Stories of Innovation”. Design, fashion, art and communication played a central role through a journey that showed how Rinascente created new paradigms of style, and encouraged the creation of production systems for the fashion and design industries.