5 Italian Textile Archives Every Creative Should Explore

In the archive, fabric loses the air of an artifact and returns to being a working tool. It is observed, compared, touched when possible, read through its codes, its tests, its variations. Browsing through these materials, the archive appears for what it really is: a reserve of ideas, techniques and details from which to start again in order to design something new. Here are 5 Italian archives every creative should explore.

The first journey starts in Bologna, with the Renzo Brandone Fund of Fashion Research Italy. Here are preserved 30,000 textile designs handmade on paper and fabric, all digitized. It is not only a collection of graphic motifs, but a repertoire of eras, styles and design possibilities. From the archive emerge dark-toned devoré fabrics, velvets crossed by transparencies, surfaces that seem engraved and that build the design through subtraction. The fabric becomes depth, light, movement. Alongside these more scenographic examples, the space also opens to a more tactile research: alcantara-effect suedes with animalier references, printed viscoses with water colors, viscose velvets, velvet grounds lit up by gold and red glitter powders.

Still inside Fashion Research Italy, the Emmanuel Schvili Fund tells another way of understanding the archive: no longer only textile design, but brand memory. Embroidery sketches, collection moodboards, finished garments and communication materials restore the identity of a Bolognese company linked to shirting and leisurewear. The most interesting detail is the possibility of reconstructing, through these materials, the history of the cartoon-themed embroideries that made the brand recognizable in the Nineties.

In Como, the Archivio Ratti does not have the romantic form of a storage space, but that of a productive organism of memory. The numbers give its scale: 2,500 square meters, 600,000 fabrics and scarves, 120,000 drawings and sketches, hundreds of thousands of digitized images, 14,000 volumes and strike-offs. But its identity does not lie only in quantity. It lies in the stratification of a silk culture: scarves and printed silks, jacquards and jacquard tweeds, yarn-dyed fabrics, plains, sample books, color trials, manual drawings and industrial patterns. Born with the company and grown together with its imagery, the archive preserves Ratti production from 1945 to today and acquisitions dating from the Thirties to the Eighties.

The Archivio Manteco, inaugurated in 2018 in Montemurlo, in the province of Prato, inside a historic spinning mill/restored ancient spinning factory, places wool and its evolution at the center. It preserves over 100,000 fabric samples from 1943 to today, combining the physical heritage with a digital archive designed for quick and detailed consultation. Among the symbolic materials stands out Bibye®, an openable double fabric in carded wool, recognizable for its diagonal weave and developed over time in different finishes, weights and compositions. Alongside the versions in MWool® and ReviWool®, more precious blends arrive such as cashmere and Tencel. The collaboration with Liberty, created for the 150th anniversary of the London maison, adds another piece: historic prints are brought onto wool, for the first time, and acquire depth thanks to melange grounds. With Vita, instead, the archive looks at durability and circularity through MWool®, regenerated wool fiber designed to resist, last and re-enter the cycle.

In Florence, the Antico Setificio Fiorentino preserves the history of silk through tools, drawings and still-active processes. In its historical archive are kept Renaissance damasks, silk and linen brocatelles, eighteenth-century lampas fabrics, ermisino, Florentine saie and filaticci. Ermisino, a pure silk taffeta with an iridescent effect, maintains that luminosity which made it suitable for clothing and which Roberto Capucci used for his sculptural dresses. Filaticcio, born in Lucca from the use of silk waste, instead preserves a more rustic and Tuscan hand feel. Among the most precious details are the eighteenth-century vertical warping machine made from a design by Leonardo da Vinci and the Jacquard punched-card system.