The Watch Over the Cuff

In most photographs of Gianni Agnelli, if you look at the wrist rather than the face, there is a watch sitting on top of the shirt cuff. It looks as if he had forgotten to put it in its proper place. Sometimes it is a diver's watch on the sleeve of a ski jacket, sometimes something far more precious over a fine cotton cuff, and it is always slightly wrong in exactly the right way.

The internet has decided this is a flourish, a rich man's wink. The explanations that survive in the accounts of his life are much duller, and much better. A shirt made to measure fits closely at the wrist, and a metal case against bare skin rubs. A man whose day is measured in appointments does not want to drag back two layers of sleeve to know what time it is. So the watch went on top of the cuff, where it hurt less and could be read at a glance.

I like this story because of what it says about the man the world took as its model of Italian elegance. He was solving small irritations, and the elegance came afterwards, almost as a by-product.

There are, to be fair, two versions of the reason. Agnelli himself is said to have claimed he simply had no time to pull back a cuff every time he wanted to know the hour. His friend Taki Theodoracopulos told a slightly different story: that Agnelli had always worn the watch underneath, like anyone else, until his evening shirts were made to measure in Rome, with cuffs far tighter than an off-the-peg Brooks Brothers shirt. Either way the logic is the same. A real problem, solved quickly, by a man who could not be bothered to suffer.

A day with too much in it

Agnelli ran Fiat for three decades, from 1966 to 1996. Italy called him L'Avvocato, the lawyer, although he never practised law, and half-seriously called him its uncrowned king. His days, in the years Vedlen cares about, ran between board meetings in Turin, summers on the water around Capri, winters in St. Moritz, and a great deal of time in between spent in cars, helicopters and on the decks of boats.

That is a life in motion, and it does something to a wardrobe. The classical dress code was designed for a man who sat down: in an office, at a club, at a dinner table. Nobody had built it for someone who stepped from a limousine to a helicopter to a yacht before lunch, and Agnelli quietly rebuilt the parts that got in his way.

You do not live between Turin and St. Moritz, and neither do I. But the shape of the day is familiar. A train in the morning, a meeting, a laptop in a café, a drive, a dinner, a weekend away with one bag. The suit that looks so authoritative on a hanger often turns out to be a small torture by three in the afternoon: the collar pressing, the sleeve pulling across the back when you reach for a seatbelt, the shoes that were made for standing in a room. Many people conclude that dressing well means being slightly uncomfortable. Agnelli spent his life demonstrating the opposite.

The man behind the photographs

The photographs are generous to him, and they flatter a life that was harder than it looks in them. His father, Edoardo, died in a seaplane accident in 1935, when Gianni was fourteen. His grandfather, Giovanni, who had founded Fiat, took charge of the boy and of the family's future, and the company was run for years by Vittorio Valletta until Gianni was ready to take it over. In between there was a war, on the Russian front and in North Africa, from which he came back wounded. Then came roughly two decades in which he was known as much for the Riviera as for Fiat. The private life had more shadow than the pictures suggest, and this is not a biography. I leave that part to the biographers.

What interests me is the man who emerged from all that. He became, in the end, a serious figure: a chairman who owned newspapers and the Juventus football club, and who, it was said, telephoned the club's president every morning at six. He answered most questions with a one-liner, which his friends found charming and others found evasive. And he refused bodyguards, even in the years when Italian terrorists were kidnapping industrialists, on the theory that bodyguards see too much and talk too much. That is either foolish or magnificent, and I suspect he would have said it was both.

There is a small lesson about class in that refusal, and it has nothing to do with clothes. It is a kind of discretion, an unwillingness to make a fuss about one's own importance. The most powerful man in Italy wandered around in a way that suggested he had nothing to be afraid of, and nothing to prove.

Friday afternoons at the Hôtel du Cap

There is a story about Agnelli that has been told so often it has hardened into legend, and unlike most legends it seems to be true at least in outline. On a Friday afternoon, to begin the weekend, he would fly to the Riviera by helicopter and, instead of landing, jump into the Mediterranean in front of the Hôtel du Cap at Cap d'Antibes, then swim ashore to a cocktail waiting by the pool.

The English writer Nick Foulkes, in an essay on the rakes of the Riviera, records a friend's memory of a summer in the early sixties, when Aristotle Onassis gave a party a lift in a helicopter from Nice. The grounds of Agnelli's villa, La Leopolda, were large enough for the machine to land, but that was not the Agnelli way. They jumped out into his swimming pool instead. On other weekends, the story goes, he would telephone friends at six in the morning to ask how the sea looked, and half an hour later land on their lawn to announce that it was time to go sailing. His cook once recalled that he suggested flying to the Matterhorn for a couple of hours' skiing.

I am not recommending any of this. The hotel is still there, on the tip of the Cap, and so is the sea, but the helicopter is not included. What the story tells you is something about lightness. Here was a man who treated a helicopter like a taxi and the Mediterranean like the deep end of a swimming pool, and who apparently found nothing remarkable in either. It also tells you something about his clothes. A man who spends his weekends jumping out of aircraft cannot afford a wardrobe that is precious about itself. Whatever he wore had to survive wind, water, rotor blades, boat decks, the short walk from one world to another, and still look right when he arrived.

What sprezzatura actually means

The Italian word for it is sprezzatura, and it is older than most people imagine. Baldassare Castiglione used it in The Book of the Courtier, published in 1528, for a certain nonchalance that hides the effort behind everything one does, so that even difficult things look easy. If you have ever wondered about the meaning of sprezzatura in men's elegance, this is the whole of it. It has almost nothing to do with looking careless. It means being so prepared that you no longer appear to be trying.

This matters for Agnelli, because his looseness sat on top of very serious tailoring. His suits came from the Caraceni workshops, the school of Italian tailoring that combined a British sense of structure with a much lighter hand: modest padding in the shoulder, a clean chest, and buttonholes stitched by hand. He wore double-breasted suits in heavy grey flannel. He simply asked his tailors to remove whatever made the armour feel like armour. The ease was designed and ordered, like everything else.

It would be naive to think he did not know where the cameras were. Those who have studied him say he understood the power of photography very early, and that his little irregularities became a personal signature partly because he knew they would be noticed. This does not make the ease false. It makes it deliberate, which is precisely what Castiglione said it should be.

The leg behind the boots

In 1952, on the Riviera, Agnelli crashed his Ferrari into the back of a lorry. The circumstances were the kind that gossip columnists remember and gentlemen do not repeat, so I will skip them. The result was that his leg was shattered, so badly that doctors reportedly considered amputation. They saved it, but it was never right again.

What he did next is the most instructive thing in this whole story. A photograph from 1954 shows him walking a harbour quay with a cane. Later, according to those who knew him, he refused to use one. He skied with a brace and a boot that came up to the knee, and friends said that despite the ruined leg he was still faster on the slopes than almost anyone, and did it with great elegance. And on the ground, instead of a brace, he wore boots: suede boots, sometimes rugged, ankle-high walking boots, with tailored double-breasted suits. Taki, again, said that this was necessity and not fashion, because the boots held his foot steady.

It is worth pausing on this. The single most imitated eccentricity of a man who was supposed to have invented modern menswear was, on this account, the by-product of a medical problem. He did not hide the boots, and he did not apologise for them. He wore them as if they had been a decision, and within a few years everyone else was trying to work out why he had decided so well. There are men who make a style out of their gifts. Agnelli made one out of his limitation, and that is a harder thing.

Several accounts say his cars were adapted for the same reason. One special-order Fiat is described as having been fitted with an automatic gearbox, because after the accident he preferred not to use a clutch. Again the same principle: if something in your life does not work, do not suffer it. Redesign it, and do it quietly.

A quilted jacket over a tie

Here is another of his habits that looks like a fashion statement and was, in all likelihood, a piece of logistics. Agnelli was among the first men in Europe to wear a quilted down jacket over a tailored suit, or over a blazer and tie. A number of style writers say it was a Moncler, though the name is only ever attached to it in passing. Few if any men had done this before him, and it looked shocking, until you consider the day he lived.

Picture the morning in Turin: a suit, a tie, a meeting. Then a helicopter to the mountains, where the heliport is cold and the wind comes off the snow. Then a slope, a lunch, a walk to the car. The formal clothes do not need to be abandoned for this. They only need a layer on top. One story from the Riviera describes a white jet landing at dawn on the little runway at La Môle, behind Saint-Tropez, and Agnelli walking down the steps in a chambray shirt and a sleeveless goose-down jacket. The whole town assumed he was in Monaco for the Grand Prix qualifying. He was, as usual, where nobody was looking.

I think this is one of the most useful ideas Agnelli left behind, and it has aged well. He understood clothing as a system for moving between environments, and he wanted the pieces to work together as easily as the helicopter and the car. Nothing had to be changed. Something had to be added, and taken off again.

There is a small practical lesson for you, and it explains why the soft shoulder matters more than anything else. A padded shoulder cannot take a layer on top. The down jacket crushes it, and the whole outline collapses. On a soft shoulder, a light quilted jacket or a gilet sits perfectly well, and when you take it off, the jacket underneath has not lost its shape. If you travel, commute, or spend a winter on train platforms, this is the arrangement worth borrowing.

Denim, and knowing which room you are in

Agnelli wore grey by day and blue in the evening. That is close to a rule, and he kept it: grey flannel suits for the office and the lunch table, and midnight blue for dinner, sometimes with the double-breasted dinner jacket worn open, which purists still find shocking. For sailing, accounts of his wardrobe describe long-sleeved shirts or polos in linen, blue or white. For the mountain, the puffer. For Turin, the flannel. He had an answer for every room.

And sometimes he gave the wrong answer on purpose. On the fourth of July in 1991, he was invited on Malcolm Forbes's boat. The other guests turned up in blazers and something like it. Agnelli wore a washed denim shirt, blue jeans, suede chukka boots and a red bandana, with the watch, of course, on top of his cuff. Denim on denim, at a party for the richest men in America, and by every account he looked better than anyone else there.

The lesson here is not "wear denim to formal occasions." It is more careful than that. He knew what the room expected, and he made a judgment about what the room could stand. There is a difference between someone who ignores the rules because he does not know them and someone who bends them because he knows precisely how far they will go. Most of us are not in Agnelli's position, and a mistake in this department is expensive. But the principle holds at any scale: dress for the occasion, and then, if you really understand the occasion, allow yourself one irregularity.

The silver Panda

Now the story I find most affecting. In the 1980s and 1990s, if you were in St. Moritz in winter and saw a small silver box going up the hill towards the cable car, with skis on the roof and a man in walking boots at the wheel, there was a good chance it was Gianni Agnelli. The car was a Fiat Panda 4x4.

He could have had anything. He was chairman of Fiat, a major shareholder in Ferrari, and he owned Ferraris. He kept, at various times, a collection of special cars built for him by his own company. And yet, according to the histories of the car, over his lifetime he owned eleven Panda 4x4s, kept in the various places he lived. One of them was a 1993 Trekking version in silver metallic, and he drove it in St. Moritz until 2001. Another, bought new in 1986, was used for fifteen years of winter holidays.

To understand why this matters, you need to know where the Panda came from. In the summer of 1976, Fiat asked the designer Giorgetto Giugiaro, working with the engineer Aldo Mantovani, for the simplest possible car: a plain box that would weigh and cost no more than the Fiat 126 it was replacing. They spent about two weeks on it, in Porto Cervo in Sardinia, on what was more or less a working holiday. The flat windows, the exposed door hinges, the dashboard shelf that was little more than a piece of cloth slung like a hammock: these were economies, and they were also good ideas. The rear seat could be taken out. The front seats folded flat into a bed. It is said that the deck chairs and sun loungers on the beach were part of the inspiration.

Giugiaro gave a famous description of it to the Turin newspaper La Stampa in February 1980. The Panda, he said, was like a pair of jeans: a simple, practical, no-frills way of dressing. He said he had tried to bring to the car the spirit of military design, and especially of helicopters, meaning light, rational things made to do a certain job as well as possible. The Panda won the Compasso d'Oro, Italy's most respected industrial design prize, in 1981. And Country Life reports that Giugiaro, who shaped Ferraris and Maseratis and James Bond's Lotus Esprit, has cited the Panda as his favourite creation.

The 4x4 version came in 1983, with a drivetrain from the Austrian firm Steyr-Puch, and it was reputedly the first small, transverse-engined production car with four-wheel drive. It could climb a steep, icy road that stopped far more expensive vehicles. So of course a man who lived half the winter in St. Moritz wanted one. The practical case is complete.

But I think there is more to it, and this is where the Panda belongs in an essay about class. Here are a chairman and a designer, both at the top of their fields, who looked at one of the cheapest cars in Europe and recognised the same thing: that it was exactly right. Nothing in it was there for show. Everything was there for a reason. It was a beautiful object in the only sense that matters, which is that the form followed the purpose, and it did not care what it cost.

To be fair, it was also his own company's car, and there is a cynical reading in which he was a walking advertisement. That may be true, and I think it would have amused him. But you do not buy eleven of something as a marketing exercise. You buy eleven because you have found the right tool, and you want one wherever you happen to be.

There is a quiet joke in the aftermath. In recent years the Trekking that belonged to Agnelli was sold at auction in Turin for €37,000, at the time a record for a Panda. Another of his Pandas was offered by RM Sotheby's in 2025 with an estimate of €20,000 to €40,000. The cheapest car he owned turned out to be, in its way, one of the most valuable. Beauty and price are different scales, and it is one of the oldest signs of taste that you can read both.

An eye for things

The Panda is one clue to the eye behind the clothes. The other is on a roof in Turin.

Gianni and his wife Marella collected art over many decades. Marella, incidentally, was a figure of great taste in her own right, and appeared on the international best-dressed lists of the sixties. The collection was never large, and it was never a display of money. When they gave it to the city, in 2002, it comprised twenty-five works: Canaletto and Bellotto and Tiepolo, two sculptures by Canova, a Renoir, a Manet, Modigliani, Matisse, two Picassos, and early twentieth-century Italians like Balla and Severini, who were painting speed at the time when Fiat was learning to make it.

It is now housed in the Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli, in a glass and steel box that Renzo Piano designed and suspended above the roof of the Lingotto. The Lingotto was the great early Fiat factory, and its roof was a test track, where new cars were driven before they left the building. So today, in Turin, you can walk out onto the old track, look over the city and the Alps, and go inside to find a small, perfect group of paintings sitting on top of a car factory. I cannot think of a better summary of the man. The engineer and the connoisseur lived in the same house, and it is a house you can still visit.

The same eye that could see the sense of a boxy little Panda chose Canaletto for the wall. That is not a contradiction. It is one faculty, applied honestly, to whatever is in front of it.

Five details worth stealing

Everything above is biography, and biography is only useful if you can carry something out of it. Here is what I would take.

The collar. Agnelli wore the button-down shirt, an American sports shirt originally, which Brooks Brothers had made popular, and he wore it with a formal suit and a silk tie. Often he left the collar points unbuttoned. The result is a collar with a soft, curved roll instead of a stiff frame around the neck, and the whole outfit loses its sternness without losing its shape. To get the same effect you need a shirt in a proper oxford cloth with no fused stiffening, and a collar cut long enough to roll. Without that roll, an unbuttoned collar simply looks like a mistake. Buy the shirt first, and the buttons can wait.

The tie. He was famously relaxed about it. The knot was a little off centre, the narrow end sometimes longer than the wide one, the whole thing tucked into a shirt front or laid over a knitted sweater. There is a practical reason: a tie on a boat deck or a helicopter pad has ideas of its own. For you, a knitted silk tie or a grenadine is the easy way in, because the texture takes the polish off a formal suit and the tie hangs quietly. The rule is that the knot itself must be deliberate. Loose at the bottom is charming, and loose at the collar is just untidy.

The shoulder. This is the most important item on the list and the least visible. A soft shoulder, with little padding and a light lining or none at all, is what lets a jacket move with you in a car seat or an aircraft seat. There is a test worth doing in any shop: sit down, reach forward as if for a seatbelt, then lift both arms. If the jacket drags across your back or the collar lifts away from your neck, it was built for a photograph. A good unstructured jacket, in hopsack or a hard-twisted wool that shakes off creases, is one of the few pieces of clothing that will serve a business trip and a long lunch on the same day.

The sleeve. Agnelli often left one or two buttons open at the cuff of his jacket. Working buttonholes at the sleeve used to be the mark of made-to-measure tailoring, and the open buttons were a quiet way of saying so. They also let the cuff give a little around the wrist and the watch. Most off-the-rack jackets have sewn-shut buttons, but a good tailor can often open them for a small fee. Do it only if the rest of the jacket deserves the attention.

The shoe. This is where he changed the most. He wore suede shoes with double-breasted suits, and at some point the soft driving moccasin joined them, the famous Tod's Gommino with its 133 rubber pebbles across the sole, created by Diego Della Valle in the late 1970s. It was designed for the feel of a car pedal, and Agnelli wore it in places nobody thought to look for a loafer. Today the suede loafer is the natural hybrid between an office shoe and a weekend shoe. One honest warning: the little pebbles wear down on pavement, and rain is not a friend. It is a shoe for travelling and lunch, not for a long commute on wet streets.

The mistakes people make with Agnelli

The most common one is the literal copy. Putting your watch over your cuff because Agnelli did is like wearing a diving suit because Cousteau looked wonderful in one. He did it because a specific cuff hurt a specific wrist, and because his day did not leave him time to fuss. If yours is a cuff that never bothered you, the watch belongs where it has always been, and nobody will think less of you. The gesture is charming only because the reason behind it was real.

The second mistake is taking the looseness without the tailoring. An unbuttoned collar on a badly fitting shirt is not sprezzatura, it is simply badly fitting. A soft jacket that is too big does not look Italian, it looks borrowed. Agnelli could break the rules because he knew them extremely well, and every departure sat on a base of excellent construction.

The third is thinking it was rebellion. He wore ties, wore suits, wore flannel and polished tailoring. There was no rejection of the tradition. He carried it a little further in the direction of the human body.

A fourth, smaller mistake is to borrow his necessities as if they were his choices. The boots with the suit belonged to a man with a damaged leg, and unless you have one, they are a costume. Wear walking boots in the mountains, where they are at home. If you need support for a foot or an ankle, then by all means do what he did: choose the sturdy thing, and wear it as though you had chosen it freely.

If there is one principle to take from him, it is this: dress so that you can forget what you are wearing. Nobody in a photograph of Agnelli looks as if he is thinking about his clothes. He is looking at the horizon, at a friend, at the sea. The clothes have done their work quietly and gone off duty, which is the highest compliment a piece of clothing can receive.

What it costs

Some of this is very expensive. A Caraceni suit is a serious purchase, and so are the Patek Philippe world-time watch and the Porsche Design chronograph that, according to accounts of his collection, he wore on different days for different reasons. The reports of his watch drawer are wonderful in themselves: a diver's watch for the ski slope, a chronograph for the boat, and a digital Pulsar which, the story goes, he became fond of after seeing Roger Moore wear one in Live and Let Die.

But almost nothing that made him look at ease requires money. A well-cut oxford shirt, a soft jacket that fits, a knitted tie and a pair of suede loafers are all within reach of a person with ordinary means, and the most valuable ingredient, a good fit, is bought with a modest alteration bill. What was expensive in his life was the tailoring. What made him look effortless was knowing what to ask for, and that costs nothing at all.

Which brings me back to the silver Panda. If the richest man in Italy could look at one of the cheapest cars in Europe and see something worth owning eleven times, you can probably afford to trust your own eye a little more, and the price tag a little less.

Ease as a form of manners

There is one more thing I would like to say about comfort, because it is easy to hear "dress for comfort" as an argument for laziness. It isn't. A man who is not fighting his clothes is free to pay attention to other people. He can turn to talk, lean across a table, carry someone's bag, help a woman into a boat, get out of a car without a struggle. His ease is a kind of generosity, because it means the people around him do not have to watch him being uncomfortable.

Look at it from the other side. The stiff, over-built, over-starched man is always slightly at war with his surroundings, and the people near him can feel it. The great hosts, the great guests, the people who make a room feel easier when they walk into it, are almost never in clothes that make them think about themselves. I suspect that Agnelli's ease, whatever else was going on behind it, was a form of good manners before it was a form of style.

A last look at the wrist

Next time you see one of those photographs, look at the wrist again. That watch is not a statement. It is the sign of a man who decided, one morning, that his clothes were there to serve him and not the other way round, and who was confident enough to let the rest of us see the result. That is an old idea in Italy, nearly five hundred years old. It still works, and it is still open to anyone who is willing to notice what actually bothers them.

If you enjoyed this, Vedlen arrives every week: one quiet look at what living with class meant, where it can still be found, and how to bring a little of it into an ordinary Thursday.