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Nino Cerruti - one of the great Italian designers and fashion entrepreneurs - has died aged 91.

Reports say he passed away in hospital in Piedmont where he had checked in for a hip operation.

He always insisted on trying on his own creations first. Many of them were kept at the textile factory his grandfather founded in the town of Biella in 1881.

"I have always dressed the same person, myself," he once said, according to AFP news agency.

With his experience in producing excellent fabrics at his family's textile mill, Cerruti went into the clothing business in the late 1950s.

He opened his first boutique in Paris in 1967.

When he asked male and female models to walk down the catwalk in the same clothes, he revolutionised fashion, AFP notes.

In the '80s, he branched out into Hollywood, designing clothes for stars including Jack Nicholson, Michael Douglas, Sharon Stone, Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks.

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