How to speak the language of factories

Four Italian manufacturers – technical fabrics, embroidery, knitwear, silk – on what it actually takes to work with them.

By Giorgia Feroldi

Patronage, in Italian, has a first name. Mecenatismo descends from Gaius Maecenas, the Roman who kept Virgil and Horace fed while they wrote, and the word never turned abstract in the language: a mecenate is still anyone who pays for talent before the market does. Fashion owes more to the practice than it likes to admit, although there is less of it than there once was. Margins are thinner, minimums higher, and the big groups often directly buy their suppliers. The industry’s visible patronage today carries sponsors’ names: prizes, grants, incubators, awards. The older kind lives in the provincial factories, and it is larger than anyone bothers to measure. Fashion is the supply chain, as Lupo Lanzara of Accademia Costume & Moda put it when we spoke to him earlier this year – which means the manufacturers determine, day by day, who gets to become a designer at all. Each of them spends money on designers who cannot pay, but none of them calls it generosity. Techniques invented for a designer with no budget resurface, seasons later, in front of the paying clients, and the small brand that survives becomes the client that orders volumes. We asked four of them how they decide, and what they wish young designers knew before reaching out.

Graziano Ricami

Graziano Ricami sits in Capodipiano, a hamlet of Venarotta in the province of Ascoli Piceno, where Graziano Giordani founded it in the 1980s. He had started out as a technician, servicing the first large embroidery looms to arrive from Japan in the Marche and Abruzzo regions, and from there built a company that embroiders for the biggest maisons of the fashion business. Despite the success, it remains a family operation, with his wife and two sons alongside him. One of them, Adriano Giordani, who heads the research and development department, spoke with us. Earlier in his career, he worked with Haider Ackermann at a point when the industry had turned its back on the designer. He also remembers visiting Alexandre Mattiussi when AMI Paris was, in his words, “30 square metres of parquet on the edge of Paris.”

Asked whether a project has ever been too small to take on, he refuses the premise. “With young designers, it has to be absolute patronage. I don’t believe it’s even right to speak in economic terms there. We have an obligation to nurture the system that helped us grow: through the opportunity you give one designer to emerge, great benefits can flow to a system that puts many people to work.” The selection happens on other grounds, he continues: “What I look for is a passion that has to come through, the will to try to do something different with your life. The rest can be built.” He extends the logic to hiring: the person currently giving him the most satisfaction in product development studied Slavic philology.

Technical knowledge, he argues, can even get in the way. “It can be a bias, almost a constraint on something that needs to be born. When I’m with designers, there’s maximum freedom of expression: I want feedback based on what they know, not on what can or can’t be done. 40 years of accumulated know-how can deduce its way to many things, but not to the thing nobody has imagined yet.” His single non-negotiable, though, is time: “We work in embellishment, a more demanding word than embroidery, because it gives meaning to what’s around it. The process isn’t slow the way carving a David out of stone is slow. But it needs to be understood, and designers caught in the frenzy of collection rhythms lose sight of it. That is the mistake people fall into most often.”