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On Sunday evening on the Umbrian hilltop that Brunello Cucinelli calls home, the menswear mogul hosted a 70th birthday party of epic proportions. It was a milestone moment in more ways than one: his brand recently announced its best sales figures in its 40 years, with revenues set to hit the $1 billion mark in 2023. So there was much more than cake in store for the some 500 friends, clients, and celebs who were invited to Solomeo, the medieval hamlet that Cucinelli has spent decades restoring with a benevolent, well-manicured hand. Like a fashion show. A lengthy philosophical speech. A mountain of food and barrels of wine. And a chance to see Solomeo, the town that’s achieved a mythic status in the menswear world. Cucinelli calls it the “Hamlet of Cashmere and Harmony.”

One guest of honor, Martha Stewart, was practically bowled over by the cashmere kingpin’s beige-hued world. “It’s very inspiring, and it actually makes me wonder: what have we been doing with our lives, really?” she told me. “I mean, I know I've done a lot, but he's done more.”

Stewart, swaddled in a sparkly caftan, was sitting with Cucinelli at a large dinner table festooned with wildflowers and plates of perfectly marbled prosciutto. I could sense that the woman who knows a thing or two about good taste and hospitality wasn’t really joking. We were about to have a meal catered by Da Vittorio, a restaurant outside Bergamo that serves rustic Italian cuisine and has three Michelin stars. Under a soaring tent, every single guest—seriously—had adhered to a strict dress code of rustic tones. “Shades of white, panama, light grey, and beige” read the invite. (Panama is the color of the hat, basically—I had to ask.) From afar, it looked a bit like a gathering of the world’s most rich- and relaxed-looking cult.

Solomeo, where Cucinelli’s wife was born and raised, is practically engineered to make you consider life’s big questions. It’s not just the enormous bust of Emperor Hadrian that guards the town’s amphitheater, or the quotes by Socrates and Papa Francesco that adorn walls around the town. For many menswear enthusiasts, the town (pop: around 400) is a Mecca of quiet luxury, the seat of Cucinelli’s cashmere empire and the source of his creative drive. It is also where his ethos of humanistic capitalism has taken root; almost every resident of the town works for Brunello Cucinelli, where they are paid solid wages, encouraged to read great books, and sustained with three-course lunches and chill work hours.

Real Cucinelli heads will tell you that there’s more to the brand’s flaxen blazers and plush sweaters than the gorgeous fabrics and highly considered design details. A certain soulfulness. A secret sauce that sets them apart from the other stealth wealth brands. Earlier, when the village was bathed in golden light, I toured the town’s renovated 13th-century church and gazed from perfectly manicured piazzas at Cucinelli’s vineyards in the valley below. Hardly a leaf on an olive tree was out of place. “It doesn’t look like this for your benefit,” noted a Cucinelli employee as we walked by a cat lounging in a sunbeam beneath a lemon tree. “It is always like this.”

It was Stewart’s first time in Solomeo, but other guests had been long enamored with it. As we began floating toward the town’s Cucinelli-funded amphitheater, Nirav Tolia, the co-founder of the tech company Nextdoor, told me he’s been to Solomeo dozens, “maybe even a hundred” times.

“It’s funny,” said Tolia, a loyal Cucinelli client who brought Jeff Bezos and other tech titans to the town a few years back. “I came here five or six times in consecutive years before I even met Brunello. I loved the story behind all of this, but had no idea that I could meet the guy who did it. I never even thought about that. I just thought, I want to come here and I want to see inspiration.”

As guests took their seats in the amphitheater, swallows swooped through the dusky sky. As Hadrian looked on, models began walking down the aisle wearing a cashmere-heavy collection of greatest hits from the brand’s archives. Brunello Cucinelli presentations usually feature hunky but relatively low-key models. But here was Mark Vanderloo—one-half of the inspiration behind Zoolander, and one of the biggest male supermodels of the ’90s—leading the procession in a panama suit, with the likes of Lucky Blue Smith, Cara Taylor, and Tyson Beckford following.

“I feel Italian right now,” Beckford told me later, showing off a light gray suit in a classic Brunello Cucinelli cut: nipped waist, tapered trousers. He summed up the precise appeal of the brand’s eleganza aesthetic. “I mean, this is beautiful. I feel great. I don’t look really like a businessman, I’m still hip, I’m cool. I feel proper but athletic.”

The main event, though, wasn’t really about clothes at all. As Cucinelli took the stage to thunderous applause, he wound up an absolute humdinger of a speech. Cucinelli loves to talk, and peppers even the most mundane conversations with references to the philosophers he’s been reading since his teenage years, which contributes to the depth of the narrative he’s built around his brand. (In June in Milan, I asked him for some insights into his Spring collection. He ended up explaining that we should try to “shape harmony with creation.”)

In his birthday speech, conducted in Italian for nearly 25 minutes with no notes or teleprompters, Cucinelli spoke of his origins as the son of a poor farmer who didn’t have so much as running water in his house. He spoke of visiting his father on his deathbed, and of the beauty of the night sky. He said that he wanted to view the evening as a “birthday to gratitude.” He offered advice to the next generation, the “sentinels of the new world” who would need to govern technology like AI with humanity. He quoted Hadrian, Confucius, Seneca, Dante, St. Benedict, and the Formula 1 driver Ayrton Senna. He thanked the dozens of journalists in attendance for being there. He told us that he had worked on the speech for three days without eating or sleeping. He has my vote for president of anything—or at least mayor of Solomeo.

“To go from no running water to this?” said a seatmate as the models and Patrick Dempsey led a standing ovation. “That’s some next level shit.”

“I really wish I could have understood what he was saying,” said James Turlington who, as a model in the presentation, didn’t get to wear a translation headset like the rest of us. He could sense he missed a big one. “I read Brunello’s book. It was so fire.”

What did Stewart make of the speech? “I listened to every word,” she said, adding that she admired the fact that, unlike some fashion designers, Cucinelli isn’t shy about where he came from. “He certainly respects his past,” she said. “He has humble beginnings. He doesn't hide it. It's very nice. And he's a charming, smart and well-meaning person.”

As bottles of red wine from his vineyards flowed, Cucinelli was on the move, working his way through tables stocked with friends of the brand like Jonathan Bailey, Vanessa Kirby, and Eva Herzigova. Most Cucinelli clients will never visit Solomeo, or listen to his speeches, or read his recently-published paper on the ethics of artificial intelligence. (Tolia told me it was widely passed around in Silicon Valley.) And it’s certainly easy to see the whole thing as a bit performative: the spit-shined medieval hamlet, the billionaire baron courting big tech with the help of St. Benedict and quarter-zips. But Cucinelli is so earnest, and much more influential than he gets credit for. His longstanding commitment to humanistic capitalism is nominally the aim of practically the entire tech sector, which is full of Cucinelli devotees. And plenty of smaller brands look to his example, even if they’re not going to buy up a town anytime soon. “What's so impressive is the way he started the company and why he started the company is just becoming more and more relevant,” said Tolia. “And I think that trend will continue.” A New Yorker who helped launch a downtown sunglasses brand recently told me she and her co-founder discussed Brunello Cucinelli as a test case for how to build a thriving business.

As the hour grew later, Cucinelli was still making the rounds, seemingly determined to double-kiss every cheek in attendance. Earlier, I asked Tolia how Solomeo had changed since his first visit way back in 2006. The answer, I think, is key to Brunello Cucinelli’s hot streak. “It’s just like the brand,” Tolia told me. “Solomeo looked the same, but it was just on a smaller scale. And his company now has the same values, the same bedrock, the same foundation. It’s just much bigger now. It’s just touching more people.”

Originally Appeared on GQ