Hugo Boss

Hugo Boss is a German clothing company headquartered in Metzingen, a town south of Stuttgart, where the tailor Hugo Boss set up his workshop in 1923 making work clothes, raincoats and uniforms. After the founder died in 1948, his grandsons Uwe and Jochen Holy took over in 1967 and turned the firm into a men's fashion manufacturer, using lighter Italian fabrics and heavy advertising and product placement, and expanding into the United States from 1976. The company went public in 1985 and was renamed Hugo Boss AG. The Italian textile group Marzotto became its majority shareholder in 1991. In the 1990s it adopted a three-label strategy of Boss, Hugo and Baldessarini, and in 1998 it launched its first women's collection. The company has also had to face its history of producing uniforms for the Nazi regime with forced labor, and in 1999 it pledged to compensate former slave laborers.