Featured in La Provincia: sustainable, natural materials
Daniele Orlandi was interviewed by La Provincia, Como's daily newspaper, for a feature on sartorial craftsmanship and sustainability published on 1 November 2021. Journalist Daniela Mambretti explored how Orlandi sources his materials, tracing fabrics back to specific mills, farms and family businesses across Italy and abroad.
About the interview
The piece opens on Orlandi's core aim: garments made with the utmost respect for people, materials and the environment. It revisits his path into fashion — years of medical studies set aside to train as a fashion designer with a focus on sustainability, before deciding to open his own atelier in native Como.
Much of the article is a material-by-material account of where his fabrics come from. For winter, Orlandi favours undyed wool left in its natural colour: a soft, brown yak wool from a Biella mill that has developed its own green product line, and a Tyrolean felted wool hand-woven by an artisan who produces only a few metres of it each year. His search has taken him abroad too — to a historic English producer, founded in the 1800s, for a "naturals" wool line free of chemicals and dye that has become hard to find on the market, and to an Austrian producer of a fine, lightweight loden. For summer, he describes organic cottons from a Como-area supplier and linens from a family-run Tuscan business active since the 1700s, woven into jacquard patterns typical of its regional textile tradition — the same fabric he also uses, in a heavier weight, for a line of bags finished with top of the range zippers and washi paper woven tapes, a nod to Japanese craftsmanship he holds dear. As Orlandi put it to the paper:
"Mi piace conoscere la storia di tutti i miei fornitori" — I like to know the history of all my suppliers.
The article also touches on his approach to fit: garments designed to be comfortable yet refined, for women moving between very different roles in the same day — from the school run to the office to an evening out — with details like a detachable, button-fastened collar that lets a kimono-inspired jacket become an oversize cardigan or a coatigan.
Source
La Provincia, Como daily newspaper — "Persone e imprese, L'artigianato tessile" section, p. VIII, Monday 1 November 2021. Interview by Daniela Mambretti. [Link to digital newsstand]