MILAN 

Nino Cerruti, the Italian fashion designer credited with revolutionizing menswear in the 1960s and who gave Giorgio Armani his first fashion break, has died, Italian media reported Saturday. He was 91.

Cerruti died in northwestern Italy, where his family has operated a textile company since 1881, the Italian news agency LaPresse reported. The Italian daily Corriere said he had been hospitalized for hip surgery.

Cerutti inherited the family business, based in the city of Biella in the Piedmont region, at age 20 upon his father’s death in 1950. He launched his first menswear company, Hitman, in 1957 near Milan, dedicated to creating sartorial elegance on an industrial scale and becoming part of the nascent men’s ready-to-wear sector.

Armani was hired as a young talent at the Hitman factory in the mid-1960s.

Armani recalled Cerruti as a creative entrepreneur with “an acute eye, a true curiosity, the ability to dare,” adding that “his gentle way of being authoritative, even authoritarian” would be missed.

“Even if our contacts thinned with the years, I have always considered him one of the people who has had a real and positive influence on my life,” Armani said in a statement. “From him, I learned not only the taste for sartorial softness, but also the importance of a well-rounded vision, as a designer and as an entrepreneur.”