Hugo Boss Biography

Hugo Ferdinand Boss (8 July 1885 – 9 August 1948) was a German fashion designer and businessman. He was the founder of the clothing company Hugo Boss.

Early life

Boss was born in Metzingen, in the Kingdom of Wrttemberg, to Luise (ne Mnzenmayer) and Heinrich Boss, the youngest of five children. He did an apprenticeship as a merchant, completed military service from 1903 to 1905 and worked in a weaving mill in Konstanz. He then took over as the heir to his parents' lingerie shop in Metzingen in 1908. In that year he also married Anna Katharina Freysinger with whom he had a daughter. In 1914 he was mobilised into the army and he served through World War I with the rank of corporal.

Hugo Boss company

He founded his own clothing company in Metzingen in 1923 and then a factory in 1924 (initially with two partners). The company produced shirts and jackets and then work clothing, sportswear and raincoats. In the 1930s it produced uniforms for the SA, the SS, the Hitler Youth, the postal service, rail employees and later the Wehrmacht.

Support of Nazism

Boss joined the Nazi Party in 1931, two years before Hitler came to power. By the third quarter of 1932, the all-black SS uniform (to replace the SA brown shirts) was designed by SS-Oberfhrer Prof. Karl Diebitsch and Walter Heck (graphic designer). The Hugo Boss company produced these black uniforms along with the brown SA shirts and the black-and-brown uniforms of the Hitler Youth. Some workers are acknowledged to have been French and Polish prisoners of war forced into labour. In 1999, US lawyers acting on behalf of Holocaust survivors started legal proceedings against the Hugo Boss company over the use of slave labour during the war. The misuse of 140 Polish and 40 French forced workers led to an apology by the company.

After World War II, Boss was fined for his support of Nazism and was not allowed to vote. He died of a tooth abscess in 1948.