When Alice Etro was a little girl, she used to spend after-school hours with her father, Kean Etro, creative director of Etro men’s wear, playing with fabric samples in the design studio of the fashion brand that her grandfather Gimmo started in 1968. She’d create garments from off-cuts for her dolls and play with the tubes from the rolls of cloth.

“I loved it all,” she said. She remembers the thrill of attending a runway show, and the walk-through alone with her parents. “I wanted to be him,” she added, of her designer father. Expectations were she would follow in his footsteps and join the family firm, just as he and his three siblings had followed their parents.