Deanna Ferretti Veroni: An archive is for education, not inspiration

What 50 years of making fashion's most important knitwear taught AZ Academy mentor Deanna Ferretti Veroni about value and longevity.

By Giorgia Feroldi

We need new roadmaps in fashion. Leaving school with a mountain of debt and a dream is a strategy few designers can rely upon in 2026. As fees at prestigious design schools continue to climb, we’ve partnered with AZ Academy, a free Milan-based fashion course born out of the late Alber Elbaz’s AZ Factory – his brand turned fashion incubator – and overseen by Richemont, Creative Academy and Accademia Costume & Moda (ACM), to democratise access to fashion business education and a roster of esteemed industry figures.

If you take an hour’s train from Milan, followed by a 20-minute drive southeast of Reggio Emilia, past flat farmland and industrial sheds, you’ll reach one of the most significant fashion archives in Europe. Or should we say fashion library, the word Deanna Ferretti Veroni prefers: “A museum is still,” she tells me, “This is alive.”

Deanna built Miss Deanna, a knitwear company, from a home workshop in the late ‘50s. By 1971, she had repositioned herself not as a designer but as a technical partner to designers, a deliberate choice she describes as the best of her career. From that point until the company’s closure in 2004, Miss Deanna produced knitwear for Kenzo, Krizia, Armani, Versace, Valentino, Margiela, and many others. Rather than filling orders, she was developing yarns, inventing techniques, building the infrastructure of an entire industrial district around her needs, and choosing her clients with a gallerist’s rule: no two identities could overlap.

As a mentor within the AZ Academy network – through her longstanding partnership with Accademia Costume & Moda and the Creative Knitwear Design MA she runs on-site with her daughter Sonia Veroni – Deanna still works with the people building their first collections, looking for manufacturers, trying to figure out whether their brand is viable. Her perspective comes from the other side of the table, and from a career that proves the most enduring way to work in fashion doesn’t necessarily require your name on the door.

When I visit, Deanna’s black Cecilie Bahnsen Mary Janes (sculptural neoprene flats with floral straps) squeak across the rubber floor mats as she walks me through the compound. The site is 15,000 square metres of former factory space that has kept its original interiors. For lunch, you still sit at the same table where Kenzo, Valentino and Margiela sat when they came for week-long working sessions, with food arriving via the service elevator from the kitchen upstairs as there were no restaurants nearby at the time.

Upstairs, a full theatre opens up behind closed doors, built by Koki Fregni, a set designer for sales presentations: people would come from all over the world to discover new products. All of it is still here and still arranged as it was, although racks of archival matter have occupied most of the space. The garments – over 50,000 – are organised by designer, decade, and technique across the network of halls. The research library contains over 20,000 fashion magazines dating back to the early 20th century, and book shelves filed by subject: animals (Krizia’s obsession), cinema, botany, graphic design, foreign literature to name a few. And drawers upon drawers of stitch samples and studies covering six decades, all available to consult.

You ran your own collections from the late 50s until 1971, then made a deliberate choice to stop designing and reposition yourself as a technical partner to designers. For someone starting out today, that sounds like a step backward. What did it feel like at the time?

It felt like clarity. I could make beautiful things, but something was missing: vision, culture, whatever you want to call it. I wasn’t going to become a great designer, and rather than spend my life being a decent one, I decided to put my technique at the service of people who had what I lacked. I worked more, not less. But when you start from a single thread and you’re building something in conversation with a person whose imagination you don’t have, it’s extraordinary. My project was always their project. The lesson, if there is one, is that you have to be ruthlessly honest about what you’re good at and what you’re not. Fashion tells you that the only valid ambition is to be a designer with your name on the label. That’s not true, I did this for 50 years and never felt second to anyone.

Your first major collaboration was Kenzo, virtually unknown when you met in 1971. What did that partnership teach you about the economics of supporting a young designer?

That it costs you before it pays you. Kenzo opened everything for me, from colour to proportion, but commercially the first seasons of any new designer are a loss. Sample costs alone don’t break even for four to six seasons, you need to wait and see. Do buyers reorder? Does the product sell through, or does it sit? With Kenzo I could absorb that because I had larger licenses covering the risk. That’s the structure that allowed me to take chances on young talent. For someone starting a brand today, the equivalent question is: who is funding your experiments? If the answer is nobody, you need a plan for surviving those first seasons, and you need to be realistic about the timeline. Everyone wants everything immediately, but that’s not how it works.

You’ve said that Margiela changed your entire way of thinking. How did that collaboration begin?

I’d found a pullover in a Paris shop made from stockings, cut and reassembled. I kept researching until I found his name. Then one day the phone rings: it was Jenny Meirens, his partner. They wanted to visit. I let them talk, then pulled out the piece I’d been studying, and his face dropped: he couldn’t believe I already knew the work. From that moment, everything I knew about knitwear got turned inside out. He wanted wrinkles that stayed wrinkled, holes that looked like mice had eaten through them, and his great obsession: a sweater that kept the shape of the body after you took it off. The entire production process had to be reinvented. My team was used to pressing, finishing, perfecting every piece – now I was telling them: don’t iron it, leave the threads hanging. It wasn’t just a technical challenge, it was a psychological one, as you had to change the mindset of an entire factory floor.

The body-imprint sweater has become one of Margiela’s most iconic pieces. How did you actually solve it?

Knitwear falls, it doesn’t hold shape. I thought it was impossible for a long time. Then at a flea market I found a knitted hat that was rigid. I unravelled it, sent fibres to two spinning mills for analysis: it was a nylon the French had used for industrial flooring, nearly discontinued. We got what was left of the stock. The discovery was that dry heat made it rigid, so I put the piece over a wooden mannequin Martin had sent from Paris, carved to exact proportions, and we drove to a factory in Carpi that made car license plates. They had industrial furnaces. The workers said it would have burned. Nevertheless, I wanted to try. The knitwear hardened around the form, the mannequin got scorched but the piece held. The solution came from outside fashion: a flea market hat, a flooring fibre, and a license plate factory – if you only look within your own industry, you’ll only ever find what already exists.

In the mid-80s, you backed two young creatives with no fashion background – Luca Coelli and Sam Rey – and gave them full access to your infrastructure under a label called Pour Toi. It ran from 1984 to 1989 with major success, then it died. Why?

Because they were the project, not me. One was a graphic designer and the other made mosaics, neither could draw a garment. But the ideas they brought were extraordinary, and my job was to make those ideas real, the same way I did for Kenzo or anyone else. Anna Piaggi championed them, we got seven colour pages in American Vogue for free. Then the relationship between them broke down – these things happen, it’s like a band – and I had a choice: find new creatives and keep the name, or stop. I stopped, Pour Toi was never mine to continue. It was a specific combination of people, and once that combination didn’t exist anymore, neither did the project. You can have the infrastructure, the funding and the press, but if the people aren’t right, none of it holds.

You didn’t emerge from Milan or Paris, you built everything from Reggio Emilia, inside a specific knitwear district. How much of what you achieved depended on that geography, and is that model still viable for someone starting out today?

Everything I did was possible because of where I was. The spinning mills were here, the dye houses, the finishing plants, the mechanics who could modify a machine at short notice. When I needed a fibre analysed, I drove 20 minutes. When Kenzo needed a new jacquard technique, I could find the engineer down the road. The district wasn’t only convenience, it was speed: you could prototype, test, fail, and try again in the time it would take to send a sample to another country and wait for it to come back. Is it still viable? Partially. The district has shrunk, many of the small suppliers are gone, but the principle is the same: proximity to your production chain makes you faster, more precise, and more creative. If you’re a young designer and you want to understand how your product is made, don’t sit in an office sending emails to factories. Go and stand next to the machine, that’s where the ideas come from.

Miss Deanna closed in 2004, after more than 40 years. What can a young designer learn from the way it ended?

That a business can be dependent on a single person, and that’s both its strength and its fatal weakness. I lost my son in a car accident, I couldn’t go on. When Armani heard, we received telegrams. But because the entire operation was built around my knowledge and relationships, it couldn’t survive without me. Some designers we’d worked with couldn’t recover either: Lawrence Steele’s collections were held together commercially by our knitwear, Neil Barrett was a similar story. The infrastructure disappears, and the brands it supports disappear with it. What I’d say to someone building something now is to think about what happens if you’re not there. To build systems, not just relationships, and document what you know. If all the knowledge lives in one person’s head, the business is only as durable as that person.

Through the CKM Master at Modateca – run by your daughter Sonia in partnership with Accademia Costume & Moda – and more recently through AZ Academy’s mentoring programme, you work directly with young designers. What do you find yourself telling them that they don’t expect to hear?

That they don’t know how to look. They arrive with mood boards, with Pinterest folders and references, but they haven’t trained their eye on the real thing. When I put an actual garment in their hands and ask them how it’s made, most of them can’t tell me. They see the surface, but not the construction nor the weight, or the way the yarn behaves. That’s what the archive is for: education rather than inspiration. You learn proportion by holding the piece, not by looking at a screen, and proportion is the single most underestimated skill. A young designer sends a drawing to a factory and expects the result to match what’s in their head, but they haven’t specified scale, haven’t thought about how a motif sits on a body versus on a page, or haven’t considered weight. Give the same sketch to three manufacturers and you’ll get three completely different products, but that’s not the factory’s fault. That’s a communication failure, and it’s the most fixable problem in the industry.

The other thing is patience. Sonia always says it: there’s a point in the programme where every student feels lost, the ones who push through are the ones who make it. The same applies to building a brand. Everyone wants to launch, show and sell right now, but you won’t know whether your business is real for at least two years. Does the buyer come back? Does the product sell through? If you’ve burned your resources in the first season trying to look bigger than you are, you won’t be around to find out. Slow down, be specific, and learn the language of the people who make your work, as manufacturers aren’t interested in your mood board. They want to know: what yarn, what gauge, what weight, what finish. If you can speak that language, you’ll get what you want. If you can’t, you’ll get what fast fashion sells for small prices.

“Think about what happens if you’re not there. Build systems, not just relationships, and document what you know. If all the knowledge lives in one person’s head, the business is only as durable as that person.”

After 50 years of choosing which designers to work with and turning many away, what made you decide someone was worth the investment?

Identity. I could tell within a few minutes whether a designer had something of their own or was assembling references from other people’s work. It’s not about whether they’re famous, or whether they have money, or whether the collection is commercially safe – it’s about whether there’s a point of view that I haven’t seen before. When Kenzo came, the way he used colour was like nothing I knew. When the Pour Toi duo arrived, they couldn’t draw a garment, but the ideas were extraordinary. Margiela wanted me to unlearn everything I’d spent 30 years perfecting. In each case, the signal was the same: this person sees something I don’t see. The other thing, and it is maybe less romantic, is commitment. I needed to know that someone would show up, season after season, and do the work. Talent means nothing if the person disappears after one collection, the designers I invested in were the ones who came back. They came to the factory, they sat with the technicians, they understood that making a garment is a conversation, not an order. If someone sent a sketch and expected me to figure out the rest, I wasn’t interested. If someone came here and wanted to learn how the machine worked, I’d give them everything I had.