Hugo Boss (fashion designer)

Hugo Ferdinand Boss (8 July 1885 – 9 August 1948) was the founder of the clothing company Hugo Boss.

Early life
Boss was born in Metzingen, in the Kingdom of Württemberg, to Luise (née Münzenmayer) 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 enlisted in 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-Oberführer Prof. Karl Diebitsch and Walter Heck (graphic designer). 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.

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.

Boss' apology
The misuse of 140 Polish and 40 French forced workers led to an apology, as Boss told to the book, Hugo Boss, 1924–1945: The History of a Clothing Factory During the Weimar Republic and Third Reich, to account for his actions.