“Roman Style.” The original inscription that marked the 7,250 square meter brick building when it was inaugurated in 1959 has disappeared. A Brioni logo now replaces it. But to describe the factory, the nickname has stuck: among themselves, employees and managers sometimes talk about the factory “Roman Style”, while two additional buildings, a handful of kilometers away, are named “Novel Fashion” And “Roman Look”.
You have to drive a good three hours from Rome, where the Brioni tailor was founded in 1945, to reach Penne, a town in Abruzzo with 12,000 inhabitants, where the house has had its impeccable suits and exquisite knits made for more than six decades. -gentle. Only the shirts are made elsewhere, in Curno, in Lombardy. Before its ready-to-wear is sold in its fifty-two boutiques or presented at Milan fashion week – like its fall-winter 2024 collection revealed on January 13 – the manufacturing process takes place here, right in the middle of a dry and ocher landscape where olive trees grow.
Jacket, coat, pants… it all starts with the transition to tribunal (court). It is on this machine, also called specula (the observatory), that the fabrics are stretched (85% Italian, the others being English, Japanese or Spanish) in order to be inspected by an employee, responsible for identifying the defects to be ruled out during cutting: holes, stains, scratches…
Confronted with a Piacenza cashmere, named after the famous northern weaver of La Botte founded in 1733, the worker points out, here, an irregularity in thickness; there, a tiny bit of dirt. Once examined, explains Angelo Petrucci, head master tailor and head of product design, “the fabrics go through a complete ironing then rest for one or two days, to prevent them from shrinking during assembly”, the more or less humid environment tends to make them unstable.
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You can then start cutting. On large tables, the lines are drawn using chalk on the fabric, to the nearest millimeter, according to standard measurements for ready-to-wear, or custom-made for special orders. The material, most often a mixture of wool, cashmere and silk, can be cut with scissors with a confident gesture. As we move between the tables, cutters are busy working on signature fabrics, like this “symphony of blues” from the 1960s with a pointillist pattern, or the “peacock revolution” from 1951, which agglomerates, on a green background, lemon yellow and cerulean blue peacock feathers.
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