The weight of a single thread.
On the seventy-eight hours that build the Origin Trench.
May 2026 · By the Atelier
It begins, as everything in our maison begins, with cloth. The Origin Trench is cut from triple-A grade double-face cashmere woven on antique looms in Biella - a town in the foothills of the Italian Alps where the same families have been making the world's finest wool for six hundred years.
The cloth arrives in Milan in folded lengths of fourteen metres, wrapped in waxed paper and tied with hemp twine. From this, a single Origin Trench will be cut.
The cutting itself takes a master cutter four hours. The pattern is laid out by hand on a single piece of brown paper, weighted at the corners with iron weights cast in our workshop in 1947. There is no laser, no computerised cutting bed; only chalk, and a pair of shears that have been sharpened every Tuesday morning for thirty-two years.
The hand that finishes is the hand that began.
From the cutting table, the trench passes to a single tailor. He - and at our atelier, today, it is always a he, though we have begun training the next generation, who are mostly women - works on the trench, and only the trench, for the next seventy-eight hours of his working life.
The seams are felled by hand. The lapels are pick-stitched with a single-needle machine that predates the maison. The buttonholes are finished with a horsehair gimp, hand-twisted, in twelve passes of silk thread that take a full hour each. The horn buttons are sewn with twenty-two crossings of waxed linen.
And then the trench rests. It is hung in the atelier for fourteen days, on a wooden form, in a room that is kept at fifteen degrees and forty per cent humidity. The cashmere settles. The seams find their final tension. Only after these two weeks is the trench passed to the registry - given its number, hand-stamped on the inner label, recorded in the maison archive against the name of the woman or man who will wear it for the rest of her or his life.
This is the work of seventy-eight hours. It is the work of one tailor, one pair of shears, one form, one fortnight of stillness.
This is the weight of a single thread.