By Christina Binkley
Fifteen years ago, on a trip to Aspen with his girlfriend, Edoardo Zegna met his future father-in-law and gained a newfound love for the mountain town that would prove auspicious. What struck the Italian fashion scion upon first arriving, though, was the feeling of the place.
“The silence and the vastness of Aspen are the most impressive things,” says Edoardo, a fourth-generation scion of the Zegna fashion house, who grew up surrounded by the Alps in Lugano, Switzerland. “And despite being so high in altitude, you still have so many trees here. At that altitude in Europe, you have no trees.”
Trees have been on his mind a lot lately: Last summer, his family’s Italian fashion house—known for its luxurious fabrics and expert tailoring—announced a conservation initiative to preserve forests, promote biodiversity, and reimagine green spaces throughout Aspen.
The program is the first step in globalizing a local effort that began quite literally in Zegna’s backyard more than 100 years ago. Nestled in the Italian Alps surrounding Trivero, where Edoardo’s great-grandfather Ermenegildo Zegna established his namesake brand in 1910, is the family’s 38.6-square-mile nature preserve, Oasi Zegna. In 1929, the patriarch began planting some 500,000 trees on this vast swath of land, turning the barren mountainside into a thriving forestland that’s open to the public.
Four generations later, Ermenegildo’s efforts are being enhanced and implemented in and around Aspen. Zegna’s sweeping environmental initiatives include a noteworthy partnership with the U.S. Forest Service and Aspen Skiing Company. Zegna will facilitate planting 160,000 native trees in areas devastated by 2018’s Lake Christine wildfire.
One reason Edoardo says he’s excited about bringing his family’s environmental vision to Aspen is the opportunity to engage with a community of influential thought leaders—people who have the ability to make outsized impacts. “It’s an educational opportunity to expand a story into something that is bigger than just donating trees,” he says. “Hopefully it’s something we can continue in a very affluent place where people can be even more sensible about what can happen in the future, and how to help the future be better.”
The Zegna initiatives extend to supporting prescribed burns to mitigate wildfires, in partnership with the Roaring Fork Wildfire Collaborative and the Aspen Wildfire Foundation. Controlled burns bolster biodiversity and soil and habitat health and are expected to regenerate hundreds of thousands of aspen trees. Another project involves working with the city to combat the Douglas-fir bark beetle, which is threatening trees across Aspen Mountain. Zegna also sponsored weekly public “Know Your Trees” hikes over the summer along with the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies (ACES), one of the city’s leading environmental education groups. And at the Saturday farmers market—which Edoardo says is “the most beautiful farmers market you can think of”— Zegna sponsored an ACES naturalist to spread awareness through interactive programming such as scavenger hunts and community talks.
Perhaps it’s serendipity that Aspen was originally settled by 19th-century Italian immigrants who brought fruit trees from the old country while helping establish Aspen as a mining town. Zegna’s initiatives also include a forest garden that’s part of a farm co-op and education center that intends to protect those heirloom fruit trees, creating a meaningful tie between Aspen and Edoardo’s family’s roots in Trivero.
For Edoardo, all of this is an opportunity to improve upon the efforts his great-grandfather initiated nearly a century ago—before conservationists had even learned about the importance of biodiversity and native plants. It isn’t just a legacy; it’s an evolution.
“The trees that my great-grandfather planted were probably not the right trees to plant all over,” he says. “There was no science that told him what biodiversity was supposed to be or that global warming was going to change a lot of the world.”
But, he notes, this new effort “is a 360-degree approach that we are doing in Aspen, bridging the private with the public in an amazing way.”