The coveted ‘Made in Italy’ label faces increasing scrutiny and existential challenges, from supply chain scrutiny and evolving EU regulations to climate change and threats to heritage craft. This article is part of a new series where we unpack what these pressures mean for the future, and sustainability, of luxury fashion. Read more here.
Last November, the Italian city of Prato was hit by severe floods, causing delays to luxury fashion production and raising alarm bells for the future of ‘Made in Italy’ manufacturing.
Beste Group, whose HQ sits directly on the bank of the Bisenzio river in nearby Cantagallo, was among affected suppliers. The company had just purchased a new machine — worth around €7 million — the month prior, which was destroyed by the floods. It was only insured for 60 per cent of the price, so replacing it cost the company several million euros. On top of that, the waist-high water brought production to a standstill for three weeks. “Imagine 300 workers here sweeping away water,” says marketing and communication manager Duccio Brachi as he shows me around. “It was a very difficult period for us.”
After I visited Beste Group in October, I went to see the nearby Manteco wool mill. Torrential rain was beating down on the factory roof as we wandered around, and we needed umbrellas to walk between buildings. The same flood that halted Beste’s production washed away several million euros worth of Manteco yarns and fabrics. “People lost their homes, and some factories had to close,” says head of communications Mattia Trovato.
Extreme weather events like this have become a fixture in the Italian news cycle in recent years. According to the environmental watchdog Legambiente, Italy faced 170 per cent more floods and rivers overflowing in 2023 compared to the year prior, record temperatures in urban areas rose by 150 per cent, landslides caused by heavy rainfall grew by 64 per cent, sea storms increased by 44 per cent and hail damage was up 34.5 per cent. And then, there are the wildfires and tornadoes. Few countries face such a wide array of extreme weather events.
“The climate in Italy is as unique as the culture,” says Gregor Leckebusch, professor of meteorology and climatology at the University of Birmingham and UK Met Office joint chair in the Met Office Academic Partnership to advance weather and climate science. For fashion and textile companies, the risks vary depending on the region. Northern Italy is at higher risk of thunder and hail storms, which are increasing in both frequency and intensity, he explains. Meanwhile, parts of northern and central Italy are more vulnerable to flooding, and the south has seen a rise in so-called ‘medicanes’, a form of hurricane or typhoon formed over the warmer Mediterranean waters.
If brands want to comply with incoming EU regulations, they need suppliers on board. But Italian suppliers say the top-down push for change is thwarting progress and eroding trust.
It’s not just Italy’s climate that’s affecting local production. Climate change-related weather events in key sourcing countries are having a ripple effect on Made in Italy, making it more difficult to source raw materials while raising prices.
There is no clear blueprint for how brands and suppliers should map and mitigate against these climate shocks, which can span from raw material sourcing and fabric production to garment manufacturing and consumer demand. The need to develop one is increasingly urgent.
High-quality fabrics at risk
From November 2023 to May 2024, Mongolia experienced its harshest cold spell in 50 years, according to Unicef. Continuous blizzards and severe cold threatened the livelihoods of Mongolia’s nomadic herders, and livestock loss exceeded seven million. As a result, cashmere harvests were either delayed or seriously reduced, and raw cashmere prices from the region have increased between 11 and 18 per cent, per the Sustainable Fibre Alliance.
On the other side of the world, back in Italy, Piacenza Group (the company behind cashmere producer Piacenza 1733) is feeling the squeeze. Owner Ettore Piacenza says that this year’s cashmere production is down 10 per cent. It’s not just cashmere, either. Piacenza adds that Australian wool production has been hit by droughts, and Peru’s alpaca production has dwindled. “Not necessarily because of climate change, but because of changing customs, whereby less people are willing to live at 4,000 metres in the Andes and new generations are moving to big cities,” he says.
Natural fibres have always been less predictable than synthetics, but climate change is making them even harder to control, says Albini Group sustainability and innovation manager Giorgia Carissimi. She tells me about sea island cotton, which the company sources from Jamaica and Barbados, and has a total annual production of just 150 bales. While Albini doesn’t own the cotton fields, it does work directly with the growers, which enables Carissimi and her team to understand and anticipate climate risks. “Growing something natural is never easy. Sometimes we lose the harvest.”
It’s not just the availability and price of raw materials that is affected, but the quality, too. Many of the Made in Italy suppliers I meet are obsessive about their work, and with good reason. Even the most subtle shifts in atmosphere can alter the quality of their output, which is what incentivises brands to pay a premium for local production.
Walking around Prato-based fabric producer Lanificio Cangioli 1859, company president Vincenzo Cangioli explains that even small changes in local rainfall can change the efficacy of dye recipes and therefore fabric production. “If we get a lot of rain, the content of the water changes; so it reacts differently with the chemicals, and the recipes won’t work the same.”
The northern region of Biella is known for producing high-quality fabrics, largely because it rains so much. But two years ago, the region faced an unprecedented drought, and companies had to install water-saving features. Fabric producer Reda reduced its water consumption and invested in a large water tank to hold reserves, says company CEO Ercole Botto Poala, but the impact was still visible in its finished products. “If you go into the archive and find the same design from 100 years ago, you will see that today’s version has less weight because the conditions have changed.”
Others are trying to offer alternatives. Manteco has been making recycled wool since World War II, when its founder Enzo Anacleto Mantellassi noticed that raw materials were in short supply, but high-quality, discarded military garments were plentiful. Today, recycled wool represents about 45 per cent of Manteco’s business, but the company is hoping to increase this percentage as climate change wreaks havoc on raw material supplies. After all, virgin raw material extraction isn’t just vulnerable to climate change, it’s actively contributing to it. But Europe has plenty of textile waste just waiting to be repurposed.
“Recently, we also started working on recycled cashmere, because there is a crisis among cashmere producers,” says Trovato. “When you produce cashmere, you have to comb the goats. The problem is that fast fashion has increased demand for cashmere, so nomads have started combing the goats twice a year. But the animals need the cashmere to resist the cold, which is getting worse. The recycled fibres are a solution to reduce the demand for virgin fibres and to allow virgin fibres to be produced in the best way possible.”
Adapting to a new reality
To protect themselves against the effects of climate change at home, and to limit their own climate impacts in the process, suppliers are coming up with reinforcements.
Buildings can be adapted to minimise climate risks, says Alberto Candiani, the fourth-generation owner of Candiani Denim. Candiani had to think about this sooner than most. Four decades after the company was founded, in the small town of Robecchetto con Induno, the local area was transformed into a nature reserve, to protect the river and the surrounding environment from the potential climate risks of increasing industrialisation. Candiani’s owners had to invest in curbing their impact to avoid relocation. The reserve — Parco del Ticino — amounts to more than 20,000 hectares of protected land, with strict rules to protect local biodiversity and wildlife. The weaving and inspection room, for example, is now split over two levels. Each is built on concrete stilts, forming a ‘floating island’ designed to minimise the noise and vibrations from looms, which were interfering with local cranes laying eggs.
Some damages are unavoidable, though, and might even undermine the potential of widespread sustainability solutions. Candiani says he halted plans to invest in solar panels after hail storms became more common, and insurers raised prices or retracted policies. “Biella looks like Oklahoma in May and June now — we have twisters and hail. I’ve had to fix my car three times this year alone from the damages.” The inconsistency is the scariest part, he adds. Milan, where Candiani lives, floods three or four times a month from spring to early autumn, and often it’s unexpected. “We call them ‘water bombs’, because they come out of nowhere. It’s bad.”
In Olgiate Comasco, Tessitura Taiana Virgilio is facing similar issues. President Claudio Taiana says severe hail storms used to occur once a decade. Now, they happen four or five times each summer. Last year, the textile company’s buildings suffered three separate climate-related damages. One cost €100,000 in repairs and another saw a month’s worth of rainfall in just 30 minutes. Tessitura Taiana Virgilio now has to pay €30,000 per year for its natural risk insurance, for the same policy that cost just €12,000 the year before.
Manteco co-CEO Marco Mantellassi says the company prefers repurposing existing buildings to constructing new ones, but estimates that fitting an old building with temperature regulation and climate protection features costs three to four times as much. Indeed, climate mitigation and adaptation can be expensive, and suppliers rarely have the same high margins as their brand clients, adds Elisa Niemtzow, VP of consumer sectors and global membership at business network and consultancy firm Business for Social Responsibility (BSR).
“Brands should be helping their suppliers understand their risks and dependencies, and invest in solutions,” she says. “The more we can mutualise those solutions as an industry, the better. It makes sense for brands reliant on small, family-run suppliers — who make up the bulk of Made in Italy, but are more fragile to climate shocks — to club together.”
Even if brands aren’t in a position to co-invest, they can support in other ways, Niemtzow continues. “Drive awareness among brand employees that climate shocks will become more frequent and more intense. Demonstrate flexibility if something happens to one of your suppliers. Don’t shut down orders or ask for discounts, but be nimble with financing and lead times. Acknowledge that these events could be existentially threatening for suppliers. And use your power as a brand to help de-risk the investments your suppliers are making.”
Anticipating shocks
Back in 2015, luxury conglomerate Kering partnered with BSR on an agenda-setting report about the implications of climate change for luxury fashion, focusing on six key raw materials: cashmere, cotton, beef and calf leather, sheep and lamb leather, silk and vicuña. The potential risks included transport and delivery disruption, resource scarcity and challenges with social change. The potential solutions included investing in raw material resilience, preparing operations for a low-emissions future and leveraging luxury’s cultural sway to make climate action “irresistible”. Almost a decade later, the industry has largely failed to act — and climate risks are growing.
Mapping climate risks is a huge undertaking, even for the most well-resourced brands and suppliers, says Leckebusch. You would need to consider raw materials sources, transportation and delivery routes, production facilities, working conditions and the potential for heat stress or changes in productivity, as well as heightened insurance and shifts in consumer demand for certain products or fabrics. It might be possible for brands to work with local weather specialists to downscale global climate models, but most of the simulations that exist have blind spots and a high margin for variability, he explains. Firstly, natural shifts intersect with anthropogenic climate change (shifts caused or worsened by human activities). Secondly, the severity of these shifts can depend on what kind of climate action is taken in the meantime. “It’s less of a meteorological question, and more a question of political will.”
So, what might a broad blueprint for how to anticipate and adapt to climate risks include? It would start with tracing the supply chain, which many brands have already begun as regulations loom. Then, brands would need to form tighter and more trusting relationships with suppliers, to understand the challenges and risks from the people that know best. In some cases, it might be prudent to diversify sourcing and production, so that one area suffering climate risks won’t affect the entire supply, says Leckebusch. The potential changes are sprawling. “Growing seasons might change, harvests might be destroyed by extreme weather events, and the quality and quantity of raw materials might be affected. Changes are not always linear — but that doesn’t mean they’re not happening.”
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