The Rake, Spring 2013

Loom with view: Zegna’s ‘Lanificio’ (wool mill) was founded in Trivero, in the Alpine foothills near Biella, in 1910 by Ermenegildo Zegna.

He was just 18 at the time.

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In the Beginning Part II… Last issue, the rake journeyed to a remote corner of rural Tasmania to explore the wool farm on which the raw materials for Zegna’s fine suiting are harvested.

So, what happens next in the production process? We followed the wool's 10,000-mile journey to the menswear giant’s mill in Trivero, northern Italy, to find out. words and photographs by sam tinson

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The spinning machines in the worsted section of the factory are silent during the summer months. Opposite page, clockwise from top left: Laura Zegna, granddaughter of Ermenegildo and head of the Oasi Zegna conservation project; coils of wool yarn ready for combing; a worker tends to spinning machines; skilled hands prepare yarn for warping; the warping machine; yarn on the combing machine.

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t’s the final day of Milan Fashion Week, and the piazzas and pavement cafes of the most elegantly attired city in Italy are littered with gorgeous people in various states of dishevelment. Buyers, brand reps and style bloggers nurse hangovers and tepid cappuccinos as they prod disconsolately at their overworked BlackBerries, while off-duty models dressed in carefully chosen civvies hang around in decorous huddles swapping lip gloss and complaining about how much their feet hurt. The party is clearly over, and for the casual observer newly arrived in town, it’s a curiously alienating experience — something akin to turning up late at a tribal gathering only to find the ceremony done, the sacrifices made, the congregation spent and the high priests departed.

But even as the prosecco corks are being swept up in the Quadrilatero d’Oro, just a short drive away in Trivero — a terracotta-roofed town nestled in the foothills of the Piedmont Alps — the business of creating next year’s catwalk sensations is already well underway. Trivero is home to the Zegna Wool Mill, the industrial heart of the Zegna brand and the source of some of the finest luxury fabrics and menswear in the world. Known to the locals simply as ‘Il Lanificio’, the mill’s clattering looms are a world away from the glamour of Fashion Week. Yet, this sprawling ’30s factory should be considered hallowed ground for anyone who really cares about clothes.

The Zegna name is woven into the fabric of international fashion, like silk thread through a bespoke suit. From its humble beginnings in 1910, when Ermenegildo Zegna, the son of a Trivero watchmaker, founded a small weaving business with his brothers Edoardo and Mario, the company has grown to become a worldwide, deservedly lauded fashion brand. In doing so, it has 222

accomplished the impressive feat of achieving global recognition while managing to retain the core values of a family business now in its third generation. Ermenegildo passed away in 1966 at the age of 74, but the tenets on which he founded the brand — uncompromising production standards, industry-leading innovation and harnessing the finest-quality raw materials available — have been faithfully upheld.

Currently at the helm is Ermenegildo’s grandson, Paolo Zegna, under whose leadership the company has consolidated its position not just as a supplier to the world’s top fashion houses — pick a major label and there’s a good chance it uses Zegna fabric — but also as a luxury menswear brand in its own right.

The company currently boasts some 600 boutiques around the world. Ermenegildo, who fought a hard battle with wholesalers to establish the Zegna trademark as a guarantee of quality — in the ’30s, it was uncommon to advertise a fabric’s origin — would be happy to know that his legacy is in safe hands.

Trivero has long been an important centre for the Italian wool industry; the painted frescoes that decorate the mill’s entrance hall hark back to a time when weaving was done by hand and wool buyers plied their trade in codpieces and capes. What hasn’t changed, though, is the raw material. Below the frescoes are wooden crates brimming with raw washed wool from around the world: oily hanks of Australian merino; ringlets of South African kid mohair — its springiness and resistance to wrinkles makes it ideal for travel suits, says our guide — and Mongolian cashmere so soft, it’s like plunging your hand into a snow cloud.

One of the first things our guide discusses is the difference between the two classifications of wool fabric: woollen and worsted. For the uninitiated, the term ‘woollen’ is used to refer to

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Clockwise from top-left: yarn cones; vintage wood boxes in the yarn store; finished wool fabrics ready for shipping; yarn on the loom; Vicuna, one of the softest and most expensive wool fabrics available; a carding machine brushes wool fibres; one of Ermenegildo Zegna’s personal notebooks, showing fabric weaves; a fabric sample book from the Zegna archives.

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The strange mechanical alchemy by which simple yarn is transformed, inch by intricate inch, into shimmering reams of fabric — complete with patterns so precise it’s hard to believe you’re looking at what actually sprouted from ovine skin — could hold you spellbound for hours.

a heavier weight designed for winter wear, spun with a loose weave and using shorter wool so the fibres bristle outwards. Woollen cloth has a soft, fuzzy appearance and good insulating qualities, and is used to make flannels, felts and other cold-climate fabrics.

By contrast, the worsted process begins with wool that has been through several additional combing processes to separate the fibres into long, fine strands. Zegna’s worsted yarn is so fine that up to 150km of thread can be made from 1kg of wool; the woollen process yields about 60–70km. The worsted yarn is spun with a tighter twist and the fibres run parallel, producing a cooler, more lightweight fabric with a smooth finish that holds a crease well — perfect for sharp, easy-to-wear summer suits.

At the time of The Rake’s visit, the mill is geared up for this year’s summer collections, so the vast industrial looms dedicated to weaving woollen yarns are offline. There’s a ghostly air about this part of the factory: silent machines lit only by the winter sun filtering through dusty windows; surplus yarn frozen on the looms in great translucent veils. One is starkly reminded of just how much the fashion industry operates in obedience to the seasons.

Further down the corridor, the worsted section of the factory is a very different story. As we swing through the huge double doors, our guide hands us earplugs — the noise of several dozen state-of-the-art industrial looms firing on all cylinders would otherwise be deafening. The spindles move back and forth with mesmerising speed — too fast, in fact, for the naked eye to see anything but a blur — while the fabric itself emerges with painstaking slowness, destined for the catwalks and boutiques of the world’s fashion hubs. The strange mechanical alchemy by which simple yarn is transformed, inch by intricate inch, into shimmering reams of fabric — complete with patterns so precise it’s hard to believe you’re looking at what actually sprouted from ovine skin — could hold you spellbound for hours.

Speed, of course, is not high on the list of priorities when

you have quality standards as high as those at Zegna. It can take as long as six months to create an Ermenegildo Zegna suit, including three months to prepare the fabric, and the same period again to put it together. Suits from Zegna’s bespoke collections are personalised with the customer’s name not just on the buttons, but also woven discreetly into the fabric itself, along the selvage on the inside seam.

All industries must move with the times, and by using cuttingedge machinery, Zegna is able to create high-performance fabrics and incredibly complex weaves that would be impossible to reproduce using traditional methods. Some things can’t be improved on, though, and the company’s long history of wool production makes for some surprising anachronisms on the factory floor. It’s hard to believe that natural thistle — picked locally from the hills around Trivero — is still used to comb yarn, but there they are by the barrel-load, complete with wool fibres clinging to their spines.

At the other end of the technological scale are the banks of robot-like machines whose job is to regularise the yarn as it goes onto the bobbins. Their gleaming surfaces and blinking LEDs are seemingly transplanted straight out of the set of a sci-fi film, as are the robotised air blowers that move slowly up and down the room on rails, blowing cool air onto the yarn. The whole area is also humidity-controlled: the fine clouds of water vapour sprayed from the ceiling are designed to reduce static electricity in the fibres, making them easier to work with. I can’t help wondering what Ermenegildo himself would make of all this, if he were here to see it; though as one of the industry’s great innovators himself, it’s safe to say his approval is likely.

While technology and human ingenuity play major roles in the manufacture of fabric at Zegna, perhaps the most vital contribution is provided by Mother Nature. Thanks to its position on southern slopes of the Alps, Trivero is blessed with a plentiful 225

A name you’ll not see on any fabric in the world bar that of the finest quality possible.

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Classic collections from previous decades on display in the Zegna Museum. Right: Ermenegildo’s personal travelling accessories showcase the company founder’s sartorial nous.

supply of the cleanest, softest natural water in Europe. The water used in the fabric-dyeing and finishing process at the Zegna Wool Mill has a boiling residue of just 3mg/L, meaning that yarn stays as soft as when it was first plucked from the lamb. “Our water is everything,” says our guide. “It doesn’t matter if you use the finest wool in the world — if it’s washed in the wrong sort of water, it won’t feel soft.”

There are over 30 different steps in the finishing process of Zegna’s worsted fabric, and all of them — from the combination of natural plant extracts used to colour chemical-free cashmere to the precise temperature of the water used to wash it — are kept a closely guarded company secret. You can be certain, though, that none of them is designed to save time, effort or, indeed, cost. A Zegna coat made from precious vicuña wool can cost over USD30,000, which seems expensive until you learn that the vicuña, a breed of llama, lives in the wild 4,000m up in the Peruvian Andes and yields just 200g of wool every three years — that is, provided that you can catch it first.

It goes without saying that the founder of a company prepared to wait three years for 200g of wool would himself exhibit something of a discriminating nature, and sure enough, the documents and personal effects of the late Ermenegildo Zegna reveal a man of exacting passions and impeccable taste.

They are displayed at the Zegna museum, a small but perfectly formed collection housed in the magnificent Casa Zegna, the villa adjacent to the factory where three generations of the Zegna family have lived and worked. Perhaps the most fascinating exhibits are Ermenegildo’s business diaries, in which he recorded — volume after volume and in tiny, neat script — every aspect of business at the mill, from the colours and weaves of new fabric designs to customer accounts and the changing costs of Mongolian wool.

Zegna’s care and attention to detail extended not just to his business, but also to the people whose lives it impacted. In Trivero, he is celebrated for providing the isolated community

with facilities such as an indoor gymnasium, swimming baths and a maternity ward, as well as for building a 15km road — the Panoramica Zegna — to improve access to the mountain for his workers and their families. He reforested the mountainside with 500,000 conifers and hundreds of rhododendron bushes, creating a protected nature reserve, the Oasi Zegna, which today is managed by his granddaughter, Laura Zegna. “My grandfather had a strong attachment to this village and wanted to give to this little community not just jobs but other things too,” she tells The Rake. “When we celebrated the centennial here [in 2010], there were retired local people who remembered him, and they were crying. They perceived him not just as the boss, but as someone who really changed the community and the landscape for the better.” The conservation of the landscape around the mill serves another purpose, too: each year, the colours of the changing seasons influence the designs chosen for the Zegna fabric collections.

“The designers’ section of the mill has windows facing the mountain,” says Laura. “In spring, they are the first ones who see the first green on the trees; in autumn, they are the first to see the yellows and reds and browns. Even in the canteen, you can see the mountain in front of you. The mill has a relationship with the land around it: the water, the thistles we use to comb the fibres, the natural dyes we use. So when I drive down the Panoramica Zegna and I see a beautiful sunset, I just think about [my] grandfather, and I say, ‘Grandpa, thank you for this!’ because it’s really something fantastic.”

It is a comforting thought, as we head back down the mountain and prepare to return once more to the hustle and bustle of Milan, that the style universe — the runway shows, the after-parties, the cover shoots, the glitz and glamour — is just as much defined by things as simple and earthly as a designer watching through a window, taking in the sight of a forest turning gradually from green to gold.

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