Weight
From 180 g/m four-ply for an August wedding to 460 g/m whipcord for a northern winter. Weight is the first thing a cutter eliminates; everything else follows.
Cloth Archive
Fourteen thousand swatches, alphabetised by hand.
A working reference, not a catalogue. Every bolt, sample, and discontinued length the studio has kept since 1968 — kept on the same shelves, in the same folders, and consulted before every commission.
Book Your ConsultationHow to use this page
The four questions a cutter asks first.
A commission begins long before shears touch cloth. The first conversation is always the same: when will it be worn, where will it be worn, what weight is appropriate, and what hand do you remember. The filters below mirror that conversation.
Season
Spring/Summer and Autumn/Winter are not marketing seasons here — they describe a cloth's weave, openness, and lining behaviour. We keep them separate on the shelf.
Mill
Four mills anchor the archive: Loro Piana, Holland & Sherry, Drago, and Dormeuil. Each is kept by weight family so a cutter can locate a familiar face in under a minute.
Composition
Wool, wool-and-mohair, wool-silk-linen blends, cotton and linen for shirts, rare cashmere flannels for the colder commissions. Composition governs drape and crease recovery.
On curation
A cutter's tool, not a warehouse.
The archive exists for one reason: to give the next commission a wider vocabulary than the last one. We keep cloths we have used, cloths we have been offered, and cloths we have chosen to remember — including bolts that have been discontinued for thirty years. A swatch on a shelf is a decision a future commission might thank us for. We have never ordered a swatch because it would photograph well; we have cut from swatches that were already a decade old when the studio moved into this building.
Cloths are filed by mill, then by weight, then by season. There is no other taxonomy here. A client who returns after eleven years will find his 2014 Holland & Sherry chalkstripe exactly where he remembers it.
The mills we keep
Four houses, fourteen thousand swatches.
We do not carry every cloth these mills produce — we carry the cloths they produce that we would actually cut from. A note on what is kept from each, and why.
Loro Piana
Quarona & Rogna, full weight families
We keep the entire Loro Piana worsted and wool-and-mohair catalogue, including the Tasmanian Super 150s and the Zeland 14-micron flannels that the mill itself no longer runs as a permanent line. The Australian bale cloths are cut within four weeks of arrival.
Holland & Sherry
London Shrunk, since 1972
The oldest folders in the archive. Our 1972 Holland & Sherry swatch books — foxed, hand-annotated by Vettor Pisani Sr. — are still used when a client asks for a true London Shrunk worsted in a weight we no longer cut every season.
Drago
Biella flannels & frescoes
Drago supplies the bulk of our high-twist summer cloths and the soft Biella flannels that clients return to commission after commission. We keep the entire weight ladder from 220 g/m up, plus dead-stock samples from the 1990s.
Dormeuil
Amadeus, Tonik, dead-stock
We keep the Dormeuil Amadeus and Tonik series as a parallel track for clients who ask for a heavier English drape than the Italian mills provide. A small drawer of discontinued Dormeuil cloths — including a 1980s mohair-silk blend — remains on the shelf for special commissions.
14,000
Swatches on the shelf, in 240 hand-labelled folders.
38 kg
The total weight of the archive in cloth and cardboard.
4
Mills anchored in the collection: Loro Piana, Holland & Sherry, Drago, Dormeuil.
1968
The year the oldest folders in the archive were cut. Every swatch remains accessible.
A private appointment
The cloth is seen, touched, and chosen in Padua.
Browse this page for a sense of what we keep. To commission, the swatches are pulled from the shelf, held against the light, and discussed across the cutting table during a private consultation.