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The Italian entrepreneur and designer is being recognized with the Award for Distinguished Service in the Field of Fashion.

MILAN — For Brunello Cucinelli, personal relationships are the foundation of any business.

He believes that being selected as the recipient of the Neiman Marcus Award for Distinguished Service in the Field of Fashion is a consequence of the years of “human contact” with the store’s buyers.

In an interview at his Milan showroom, Cucinelli attributed the recognition to his commitment to making a yearly trip to Dallas as well as his steadfast support of Neiman Marcus Group through its financial troubles.

“Neiman Marcus helped me grow my business in the U.S and in the rest of the world, it’s a beautiful collaboration spanning more than two decades — I should be giving an award to them,” quipped Cucinelli, wearing his signature white corduroy pants, white shirt and blue blazer.

Cucinelli is being recognized by Neiman Marcus for his influence on luxury fashion and his social and environmental initiatives. The award will be given on March 4 in Paris during the city’s fashion week. Additional events are planned in Dallas in April and in Los Angeles in October.

This is the first award bestowed by Neiman Marcus since 2016, when the recipient was Carolina Herrera, preceded by Karl Lagerfeld in 2013. Before them, other awardees include Coco Chanel, Grace Kelly, Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Dior and Estée Lauder, among others.

It is inspired by the cultural heritage of Carrie Marcus Neiman and Stanley Marcus and by the Neiman Marcus Award created in 1938.

Cucinelli said he found out about the award from Neiman Marcus Group chief executive officer Geoffroy van Raemdonck, who called him last September. “I just couldn’t believe it,” said Cucinelli, who speaks French with the executive. “I was aware of this award but I would never have imagined I could be the recipient. And I know this is the result of all that we do together, the way we work, the human relationship we have forged, and my belief in human capitalism and the moral and economic dignity of work,” said Cucinelli.

It is not all about looking back, though. “We have long-term plans together,” he mused.

Neiman Marcus started to sell Cucinelli knitwear in the fall of 2000. Two years later, Karen Katz, former president and CEO, and Jim Gold, former president and chief merchandising officer, began to ask Cucinelli to deliver total looks for women.

Menswear followed around 2004 after Burt Tansky, former Neiman Marcus Group president and CEO, saw Cucinelli at Pitti Uomo. “He admired the way we presented the menswear collection at Pitti in Florence and also my personal style. He and his team felt it would be great to bring the men’s collection with that same presentation to their stores,” said Cucinelli.

At the moment, womenswear represents 70 percent of the business done with Neiman Marcus and Cucinelli believes “there is so much more potential in menswear” with the store.

In 2015, Cucinelli was asked to design exclusive collections for Neiman Marcus, kicking off with a “blue range,” followed by the Art of Travel, Safari, Spa and Dream of an Italian Summer.

Last summer, Cucinelli and Neiman Marcus created the Muse of the West collaboration, which paid tribute to the American West.

Marketing initiatives including a look book and a first-time video with Carolina Cucinelli, co-creative director and copresident of Brunello Cucinelli, and her sister Camilla, co-head of the designer brand’s women’s style team. It culminated with a dinner and fashion presentation for VIP customers and influencers spending a day at the 100-acre RoadRunner Ranch in Dallas on Oct. 13, mingling with Neiman’s executives, Carolina Cucinelli and ranch hands.

The exclusive collaborations continue, as Cucinelli will launch the Neiman Marcus Icons men’s and women’s collections for next spring to celebrate the awards. Each piece will have an exclusive label and will be sold in selected stores.

Cucinelli also spoke of his ongoing support of Neiman Marcus through its financial struggles, as it had to manage an overload of debt until it went bankrupt in 2020, was restructured and got new owners through an exchange of debt for equity, achieving a healthier balance sheet.

“I’ve always had a beautiful relationship with Neiman Marcus, but it’s become even better recently. I think this is because I understood how difficult it was for them and I was close to them in times of trouble,” said Cucinelli. “I realized that the debt was caused by a financial operation, it had nothing to do with the business because this is probably the most beautiful department store in the world. They are true luxury.”

The Neiman Marcus Group had been owned by Ares Management LLC and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, which together bought the business for $6 billion in 2013. With the bankruptcy, the major creditors — TPG Capital, Pimco and Davidson Kempner Capital Management — are the new owners.

“I have never asked for discounts, insurance on credit or absurd markdowns, and I think this also helped to cement our relationship. We delivered as usual, behaved normally. We simply could not believe in the most beautiful store, we were sure someone would buy it. It’s a path we walked and continue to walk together,” explained Cucinelli.

Neiman’s is part of the Neiman Marcus Group, which includes Bergdorf Goodman as well as Horchow and a stake in Fashionphile. Farfetch has a minority equity stake in NMG.

Cucinelli has repeatedly voiced his belief in the wholesale and multibrand channel as a soundboard and an inspiration for the brand’s own retail network.

Also, Cucinelli every year in April prior to the pandemic would travel to Dallas with his team to meet the Neiman Marcus management. “I think it’s a sign of respect and I always bring back with me indications about the American culture. These trips help me to educate myself.”

The exchange is a two-way street. In 2018, Cucinelli invited 50 Neiman Marcus associates to spend four days in Solomeo, the medieval hamlet he restored and that is home to his headquarters, so that they could see firsthand the company but especially his commitment to the territory, his restoration projects, and how the profits from their business were contributing to make these projects become a reality.

“It was important for me that they would have a chance to breathe the atmosphere from the town and meet the employees,” said Cucinelli.

Today, Cucinelli is present in about 36 Neiman’s doors with the women’s collection and 27 with menswear, addition to the online business.

In 2005, he opened a door in San Francisco, which helped to reach out to the all-important Silicon Valley customer, a strong cluster for Cucinelli.

The team of Gold and Katz decided to give more important spaces to Cucinelli, he noted, with hard shops in premium positions, often near Chanel. “This was an important step in growing the business and being able to present the collection in a complete way.”

Cucinelli has fond memories of his first trip to the U.S. in 1986, walking around New York at sunset, “fascinated by the city, stopping to see the skyline from the Verrazzano bridge like a kid. I was convinced that, to be successful, you have to be well-known in the U.S.”

He remembered the late German retailer and fashion entrepreneur Albert Eickhoff, who helped him connect with the American market. In the U.S., Cucinelli started selling a few pieces in 1986 in stores such as Louis of Boston, Maxfield, Ikram and Alan Bilzerian and Alan Austin in Los Angeles.

He also did not forget the retailers that have helped him along the way, such as Peter Rizzo, Robert Burke, Ron Frasch, Joe Boitano and Yuki Kasuda, the men’s buying team at Bergdorf Goodman that believed in his men’s aesthetic and helped to showcase the product as a total-look lifestyle brand.

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The drug from Eisai and Biogen slowed cognitive decline in study volunteers, but many had brain bleeds, swelling or other side effects

Researchers released new details from a study of a closely watched drug for Alzheimer’s disease on Tuesday, shedding more light on the drug’s risks and benefits as U.S. health regulators weigh approving it.

Eisai Co. and Biogen Inc.’s drug, called lecanemab, slowed cognitive decline by 27% compared with a placebo over 18 months in a study of more than 1,700 people with early-stage Alzheimer’s, researchers reported in the New England Journal of Medicine on Tuesday.

The drug’s effect was moderate, and was associated with swelling and bleeding in the brain, the researchers said. They recommended further, longer study of the drug.

Some 17.3% of patients taking lecanemab had signs of brain bleeding, compared with 9% in the placebo group. Brain swelling occurred in 12.6% of people getting the drug, versus 1.7% who got placebos.

The study data have been eagerly anticipated by Alzheimer’s researchers since Eisai disclosed high-level results in September, raising the hopes of doctors and patients that a new treatment proven to help Alzheimer’s patients is on the horizon.

The companies have asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to conditionally approve lecanemab based on an earlier study showing that the drug reduced levels of a protein in the brain called amyloid associated with Alzheimer’s. The agency is expected to make a decision by Jan. 6.

Eisai, which is leading the development of lecanemab, has said it plans to seek full approval using the new study data.

Some doctors said the latest data are likely good enough to support approval because the drug met the goals of the study, but questioned whether the drug’s effectiveness is strong enough to outweigh its potential harms for real-world use.

“No one yet knows whether the benefit will be clinically meaningful. This may take years to determine, and the debate is likely to continue,” said Samuel Gandy, professor of neurology and psychiatry at New York’s Mount Sinai.

Dr. Gandy and other doctors also raised concerns about recent reports of patients who died while taking lecanemab as part of ongoing testing. An Eisai spokeswoman said that the two patients who died had other significant medical problems and that the deaths couldn’t be attributed to lecanemab.

Alzheimer’s is a progressive disease that robs patients of their memories and the ability to carry out everyday tasks. Some six million people in the U.S. and tens of millions more worldwide have the condition.

Drugmakers have struggled to find drugs that slow Alzheimer’s march. Only a few medicines are approved in the U.S., and they mostly treat the symptoms.

Last year, the FDA approved another Alzheimer’s drug from Biogen and Eisai, but many doctors raised questions about its effectiveness, and Medicare and other health insurers balked at paying for it. In May, Biogen said it would effectively stop marketing the drug, called Aduhelm.

Like Aduhelm, lecanemab was designed by researchers to reduce amyloid in the brain. Amyloid has long been associated with Alzheimer’s disease, though there is still no consensus on whether removing it will slow the disease.

The latest data come from a late stage, or Phase 3, study of 1,795 people ages 50 to 90 years with early Alzheimer’s who got either lecanemab or a placebo and were followed for 18 months.

Researchers measured patients’ clinical decline using an 18-point scale in which higher numbers indicate worse disease. Patients had an average score of about 3.2 when the study started, and were considered to have mild cognitive impairment or mild dementia.

Over the course of the study, placebo patients’ disease severity increased by 1.66 points on average, or 0.45 point more than patients who took lecanemab and whose scores increased by 1.21 points.

The difference amounted to a 27% slower decline over 18 months, but may not amount to a noticeable difference in patients’ cognitive function, said Michael Greicius, medical director of Stanford University’s Center for Memory Disorders.

More than one-quarter of lecanemab patients had negative reactions to the drug infusion, compared with 7.4% of patients in the placebo group.

The infusion-related side effects, in addition to the brain bleeding and swelling, may have tipped off some patients and their caregivers that they were receiving the drug and not placebos, which could potentially bias the study results, said Dr. Greicius.

“It’s not a benign therapy,” said Dr. Greicius. Even if the results withstand statistical analysis correcting for potential bias, “we’re still stuck with weighing this pretty borderline difference over 18 months with a drug that causes brain swelling in 12% of patients,” he said.

Modular reactors can deliver power with lower costs and construction risks than large, conventional plants

Big has been beautiful in the nuclear industry. For decades, the size of nuclear reactors has steadily increased, with each new plant able to generate ever greater amounts of electricity.

Britain’s first commercial reactor, at Calder Hall in Cumbria, was capable of generating 50 megawatts in the 1950s; Sizewell B, the power plant in Suffolk on England’s east coast that started operating in 1995, currently generates 1,200MW or 1.2 gigawatt.

But the future may be much smaller. Dozens of companies are working on a new generation of reactors that, they promise, can deliver nuclear power with less cost and risk. These smaller plants will, on average, generate between 50MW and 300MW of power, compared with the 1,000MW-plus from a conventional reactor. They will also draw on modular manufacturing techniques that reduce the construction risks encountered with larger reactors.

And nuclear power is now firmly back on the agenda, amid new fears for energy security following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ever-greater need to reduce global carbon emissions.

In Germany, chancellor Olaf Scholz decreed in October that all three of the country’s remaining nuclear plants would continue operating until mid-April 2023. The country had been due to shut down the plants by December 31, under plans drawn up by then-chancellor Angela Merkel following Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011. France, meanwhile, is considering ambitious plans to build new reactors.

However, with large reactor projects still facing financial and construction problems — in the UK, the new 3.2GW Hinkley Point C plant in Somerset has been hit by delays and cost overruns — analysts believe the time may be right for small modular reactors (SMRs). 

Beyond the provision of baseload electricity, SMRs can be used to produce green hydrogen or a combination of heat and power in remote locations. They can also be used to power large industrial sites or data centres.

One of their biggest selling points is that they can be largely factory-built, in modules. “It tries to avoid a bunch of the problems associated with large nuclear,” explains Philip Meier, partner at LEK Consulting. “The flat-pack [approach] gives you predictability, [with] construction on site, which reduces the financing costs. You should also be able to march down the learning curve as they will be largely pre-designed.” 

Small modular reactors could also prove affordable to nations unable to fund large nuclear. Their smaller size means that there is “less demand for space and for cooling water”, says Vince Zabielski, partner in the nuclear energy practice at law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. They also involve “smaller emergency planning zones compared to large traditional reactors, meaning there are far more suitable building sites for SMRs”.

Government support for SMRs — most of which will not be commercial until the mid-2030s — has increased substantially in the past two years, running well into the billions of US dollars. That is 10 times more support than was available a few years ago, according to the International Energy Agency.

Some 70 designs are at different stages of development globally, the IEA reports. However, analysts warn that private capital will be essential, too, and regulatory certainty will be required to attract it. Higher costs for building the first of these new types of reactor will also be a key challenge.

“We are at a bit of a tipping point here,” says Florian Funke, partner at LEK Consulting. “But it also requires a regulatory framework and government incentives for these developers to come in and develop their propositions

further and get them to a commercialised level.”

In the UK, the government is looking at a funding model known as the regulated asset base (RAB), which has been used for other infrastructure projects, such as Heathrow airport’s Terminal 5. Under this model, consumers will contribute upfront to the cost of nuclear projects during the construction phase.

This would give developers “some certainty”, says Meier. “You need to get to a point where, through the benefit of repetition, [investors have] certainty that these are an attractive, investable solution,” he argues.

Progress in the west is being led by the UK, the US, Canada and France, all of which are pursuing SMRs for use in their domestic markets, as well as a new source of exports.

NuScale, an SMR developer based in the US, received approval for the design of its integrated pressurised water reactor from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission in October.

In the UK, FTSE 100 group Rolls-Royce is leading a private consortium to build a fleet of mini reactors, each capable of generating 470MW of electricity, at operational and mothballed nuclear sites. The consortium has been aided by more than £200mn of government funding.

Another company looking to build reactors in the UK and France is start-up Newcleo. This company, which is backed by Exor, the holding company of Italy’s Agnelli family, uses a “lead-cooled fast reactor” that can run on waste produced by conventional nuclear plants — so it does not require mined uranium. The company wants to build a fleet of 200MW reactors in the UK, says chief executive Stefano Buono.

Theranos and FTX show a broad failure by investors to ask enough questions before handing over cash

It’s been a lousy month for the reputation of professional investing.

The collapse of FTX revealed that everyone from racy hedge funds to staid pension and sovereign wealth funds had been throwing money at a cryptocurrency exchange with weaker financial controls than Enron.

Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced to 11 years in prison for Theranos, a fraudulent blood-testing scheme that deceived Oracle founder Larry Ellison and media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Shares in tech companies that went public during the 2020-21 Spac frenzy are down sharply, and many crypto firms are teetering. BlockFi declared bankruptcy on Monday despite its claim of being “backed by the best” including SoFi, Tiger Global and Peter Thiel.

Doesn’t anyone do due diligence any more? The boring process of checking that potential investments can live up to their promises has fallen completely by the wayside. Due diligence once meant sending bankers to check that a mining company really had a working gold mine, hiring accountants to scour the books and asking lawyers to identify contracts that could prove troublesome in a bankruptcy.

These days, it is hard to know what due diligence actually means. Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, which put $95mn into FTX, insists that its professionals “conduct robust due diligence on all private investments”. Tiger Global, which tossed in $38mn, pays outside consultants including Bain & Co to do the work. Yet both missed what FTX’s new chief has described as a “complete failure of corporate controls”. Sequoia Capital, which handed FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried $214mn even though he played video games during his pitch to them, has walked a fine line. It issued a rare apology and promised tougher standards in the future, while insisting that it did the proper checks.

Veteran Silicon Valley dealmakers say there has been a gradual erosion of standards, as venture capitalists stopped trying to select and nurture the smartest entrepreneurs and started spraying cash around. The VC model has always assumed most fledgling companies fail but investors were compensated for those losses by getting in early on a few big successes.

However, decades of easy money and a lack of decent yields from safer alternatives mean this approach has spread from early investment rounds involving a few million dollars to gigantic deals involving billions.

As more apparently successful companies stayed private for longer, investors’ fear of missing out on the next Amazon or Google grew. That left them vulnerable to hucksters. Investors started picking companies based on who else was part of the funding round rather than on whether the entrepreneur’s business plan made sense.

The longer interest rates stayed low, the worse the problem became as institutional investors allocated more and more money to private investment funds. Flush with heaps of “dry powder”, big players such as SoftBank, Tiger Global and Sequoia boasted of the speed at which they could deploy capital. That put pressure on rivals to call off their lawyers and accountants. Many agreed to invest with little or no protection for their money. Bankman-Fried refused to put investor representatives on the FTX board and used two little known auditing firms.

Even when investors did insist on doing diligence, the hands-on work usually fell to the youngest lawyers, consultants and bankers. Today’s 20-somethings have no meaningful downturn experience so were less experienced at judging the adequacy of controls and clauses that only matter when money starts to run out.

And run out it has. Venture capital funding in the third quarter dropped 53 per cent year on year, according to Crunchbase. With interest rates and bond yields rising, investors no longer have to take wild bets to get a decent return. Volatile markets have reminded us that the valuations don’t always go up, even for winners: Google and Amazon share prices are down by more than one-third since January.

Investors who want to restore standards should start with the financials. The FTX fiasco provides a reason to insist on proper audits that delve into the way companies are spending their money and fully disclose related-party transactions. Oddities in the cash flow then give potential funders strong justification to raise governance concerns.

Some touchy founders will object, and some visionaries will struggle to meet the higher bar. But the best new companies will survive. They might even soar higher if they no longer face competition from mediocrities kept alive by prodigal investors.