Word: silke
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...more than the next It handbag. I remember visiting Yves Saint Laurent's studio for an haute couture preview when the designer himself was still working, fitting dresses on models. Saint Laurent and his aide-de-camp Loulou de La Falaise were yanking huge bolts of color-saturated Abraham silk down from the shelves and spinning out a fantasy scene of a hot summer day in New Orleans circa 1860, complete with big taffeta skirts and wide-brimmed hats. It was as if the fabric were speaking to him?and so vividly that even the model looked...
...spelling of Lindsay Lohan's name once had to know how to spell the names of the famous fabric houses: Ratti, Bucol, Gandini, Clerici, Guigou, Mantero and, of course, Abraham, the Swiss fabric house owned by Gustav Zumsteg, the late, great textile designer who invented the stiffly finished silk gazar that gave shape to Balenciaga's gowns and who also collaborated with Saint Laurent, Coco Chanel and Hubert de Givenchy...
...sure, fabric can't talk or cause a scandal or convulse the blogosphere. And maybe there is something fusty and old hat in caring too much about the provenance of a silk shantung or getting all weak-kneed about a suit made of cellophane-backed wool. But the art of couture glamour is ultimately about the connoisseurship of material, and there have always been designers who knew this and obsessively attended to the fabric of fashion...
This is Prada's hallmark: irreverence mixed with industry. Her love of fabric dates back to her childhood and her family history: her mother was originally from the Como region of northern Italy where the silk textile factories are located. "I had silk in my hands all the time," Prada says, "the finest silk made with the thin threads of silk?a quality no longer available...
Indeed, Italy's mills?from the silk manufacturers of Como to the wool and sportswear producers of Tuscany and the cashmere and menswear fabric mills of Biella?are Europe's largest producers of luxury textiles. And, along with the Japanese, Italians are considered among the greatest fabric innovators. "They innovate by constantly looking outside their industry for ideas," says Angelo Uslenghi, a Milan-based textile cool hunter. "There is not much new you can do to yarns and weaves, but you can look outside the textile industry at other industries such as fine jewelry where they use techniques like filigree...