The Casentino Wool Store Jacket
LAUNCHING 12TH NOVEMBER AT 10:00AM (UK TIME)
The Arno is still a young river when it reaches Stia, a small town at the head of the Casentino valley where wool has been worked into cloth for more than six centuries. Casentino Wool dates back to the 14th century, when it was a coarse and dependable cloth for shepherds and anyone else whose working day carried on regardless of the weather.
We went out to Tessilnova and the farmland that surrounds it to shoot a campaign for our new Casentino Wool Jacket, and to understand how the cloth came to be what it is. We had been working on the jacket with Claudio and Sara for three years by then, which sounds like a long time until you set it against the seven centuries the cloth has spent keeping people warm in these hills. Our conversations with them kept drifting back to the old wool mill in Stia where Claudio's father learned to weave, so it seemed only right to go and see the work for ourselves, and they showed us around the family business with their dachshund in tow.
Unlike many wool fabrics, Casentino Wool is nowhere near finished when it leaves the loom. It still has thirteen finishing stages ahead of it, and we followed the cloth through all of them. It is first needled and felted, which locks the fibres together until the weave closes and compacts. Next comes the raising, as a machine drags across the surface and pulls the loose hair upward until the fibres stand.
The cloth is then worked into the ricciolo, its signature looped and nubbled curl, which sits over the base cloth like a second skin. Much of this is still done by hand and judged by eye, by people who learned it from people who learned it before them, and the process has changed less over the centuries than you might expect.
Having seen it all in order, we understand the curl rather differently now, because it gives the cloth a double surface that does a real job. The looped nap and the dense layer beneath it hold warmth and still let the wearer breathe. Tuscan shepherds relied on all of that to get through mountain winters, whereas most of us will be asking it to get us to the local shop and back for a pint of milk, yet the cloth performs with just the same intent.
As the sun went down, we went out to meet Lorenzo, the sheep farmer who supplies the wool that goes into our jackets, and walked his fields while the light turned the hills gold.
After parading the fields and taken in the golden hills, we were welcomed to Lorenzo’s home where we were met with a special batch of his home made delicacies, his personal batch of cheeses and cured meats that are prized by the locals, along with the loving Nonna Miranda who presented a rolling pin just as tall as herself and over 100 years old.
Fingers prints and markings from moments past, previous generations that have came and gone, there’s something special about this region; memory and heritage preserved to build a better future.
We shot the campaign inside the factory and out on the farmland around it, because the pictures from Tessilnova show where the cloth comes from and the ones from the fields show what it was always for.
Our Casentino Wool Store Jackets are made using authentic pure Casentino Wool, finished with real water buffalo horn buttons and come with a limited process booklet offering an in-depth look at the story behind the product, the fabric, and the people keeping it going.
