These Five Italian Textile Crafts Deserve To Return To Fashion’s Radar
From Soprarizzo Velvet To Puncetto Valsesiano, certain rare forms of knowledge can become contemporary tools for giving products greater depth
di Alessia Caliendo
8 May 2026
In Italy there are textile crafts that fashion should start looking at closely again. Because inside a hand-carved velvet, a silk weave or a lace built knot by knot there is much more than a technique: there is a precise way of thinking about product, time and quality. And it is precisely from this knowledge, often left at the margins of the contemporary narrative, that fashion can derive new directions for materials, surfaces and details.
Venetian soprarizzo velvet is the most spectacular case. The pattern emerges from the surface thanks to the alternation between looped pile and cut pile. Every millimeter carved by hand creates a soft, luminous, almost architectural bas-relief. It is the fabric of slowness, the one that reminds luxury how much value a production growing by only a few centimeters per day can have.
In Lorsica, in Liguria, lampasso tells another story: that of the small centers that fueled the magnificence of Genoese palaces. Here the pattern is born from the interweaving of different warps and wefts, with motifs coming from ancient repertoires and family archives. It is a valuable lesson for the present: innovation can also start from a peripheral area, when it preserves technique, memory and productive capacity.
Puncetto valsesiano instead works through subtraction. Needle, thread, tight knots, solids and voids. The effect comes through accumulation, with a very fine geometry that decorated linen, shirts and aprons of traditional costume. In an era dominated by surface, puncetto shows the strength of a small, repeated, identity-defining detail.
In Bologna, Aemilia Ars transforms lace into a cultural project. Born between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it combines applied arts, refined design, women’s work and Liberty style. Its solids and voids resemble windows, rose windows and friezes. More than lace, it is a way of thinking about decoration as the architecture of thread.
Finally there is Ars Canusina, born in Reggio Emilia in the 1930s from the vision of Maria Bertolani Del Rio. The Romanesque motifs of the Matilda area move from stone to embroidery, from monument to object. Here heritage is preserved and becomes a productive grammar, transforming local memory into an applied language.
These crafts speak to today’s fashion because they offer what the market seeks most insistently: recognizability, narrative, expertise and a material capable of holding memory. For the supply chain, recovering them also means opening new paths of collaboration between archives, manufacturers, schools and brands. Not out of nostalgia, but as a project.
