Big Boss

Sälzer's own route to the ringmaster's role tonight is somewhat surprising. Born nearby, the son of solid farming stock, he was always more interested in fashion than in fertilizer. "I can't explain this. There was no one in my family like this. I have checked back several generations," he says. Sälzer's résumé includes four years with hair-care giant Schwarzkopf. "Hair care is very close to fashion," says Sälzer, the father of four sons. "For women, it is the only thing you can change. I would not say I was fashionable, but at Schwarzkopf, we worked a lot with Vivienne Westwood."

At Hugo Boss, Sälzer doesn't collaborate with famous-name designers like Westwood, and some see the lack of a star like John Galliano or Marc Jacobs as a disadvantage because the brand may seem amorphous and harder for a consumer to pin down. On the plus side, shareholders need not fret about atrophying taste or succession. While the company name dates back to the 1920s, the foundations for today's business were put in place at the end of the '60s, when brothers Uwe and Jochen Holy started to manufacture menswear under their grandfather's name. By 1985, Hugo Boss was listed on the German stock exchange, and today it is part of V.F.G. International N.V. (Valentino Fashion Group S.p.A., named for Valentino Garavani), which is majority-controlled by private-equity firm Permira.

These days the company enforces strict ethical, social and environmental standards in its own factories and in those of its 48 producing partners worldwide. And, as LVMH and Prada do, it plays up its contemporary-art chops. Hugo Boss donates one of the world's richest contemporary-art prizes, the biennial Hugo Boss Prize, worth $100,000 this year. The company also is a major sponsor of the Berlin International Film Festival and, in sports, has a long-standing relationship with Formula One racing.

It is now 3 a.m., and the man who began his day playing on the company soccer team says it is time to leave. Despite the festivities taking place around him, Sälzer knows the caricature of a German is one of boring efficiency, "so we have to both exceed the cliché and be even more creative. We do much more than anyone else to excite our own people so they take [that energy back] to Mexico or Sydney or wherever they go," he beams. After all, he points out, every man has a suit, a shirt, a tie. Any company can have a show. "But we try to get our own people excited through a show of the best standard, where the food is good and the drinks are O.K. too, and we do it here in Metzingen, in the middle of nowhere."