The making of Wool Fleece.

07.10.2026

We have worked with Wool Fleece for years. Known in Italy as lana cotta, it is one of those fabrics that has become so familiar within the collection that it is easy to take for granted. Soft, warm and surprisingly lightweight, we have used it across countless styles and colourways. A recent visit to the mill in Prato that produces it reminded us just how unusual it really is.

Left: Virgin wool arrives at the mill as raw fleece. Right: The warehouse where raw materials are received and sent on to the next stage in the process.

Like most people, we assumed we understood the process. Wool arrives, is spun into yarn, knitted into fabric and finished. Simple enough. The reality turned out to be something entirely different.

Above: The dye house where wool fibres are dyed in vats, and the machines in background are where the fibres are dried after dyeing.

Left: The dyed fibres are aerated before the carding process begins. Right: One of the carding machines, essentially a big mechanical comb.

After washing and dyeing, the wool is drawn through a series of carding machines. Fibres travel overhead through a network of ducts that criss-cross the factory ceiling, moving from one process to the next almost as if carried by their own weather system. Fine metal teeth repeatedly open, clean and align the fibres, blending colours together along the way.

Above: Slivers of wool. One “bale” is approximately 1.8km of sliver and weighs around 20kg.

Then comes the sliver.

Soft, airy ropes of wool nearly two kilometres long emerge from the machinery and are coiled into enormous bundles. Standing next to them, they look less like a textile in progress and more like oversized nautical rope. You can lift them with one hand yet they contain enough fibre to create metres and metres of fabric.

This was the point where we expected to see spinning.

Instead, the sliver headed somewhere far more interesting.

Large circular machines tower over the factory floor, fed directly from the bundles below. Multiple colours enter at once, twisting upwards towards a mechanism that is largely hidden from view. Watching it work is fascinating and slightly frustrating in equal measure because you can never quite see exactly what is happening inside. More than once we found ourselves wanting to cut the machine in half just to understand it.

The process isn't knitting in the way we know it.

Above: The slivers are slowly fed into the knitting machines.

Rather than being spun into yarn first, the wool fibres are blown through a recycled polyester mesh using air pressure. The fabric is built directly from the carded fibre itself. It is an approach that feels both highly technical and oddly improbable, particularly when you are standing beneath tonnes of machinery trying to work out where one process ends and the next begins.

What makes the story even better is how it started.

Above: an order of Wool Fleece in between stages of the finishing process.

The technique was originally developed to produce imitation sheepskin fleece for boot linings. During production, a malfunction caused fibres to blow back into the structure of the fabric rather than remain fully tufted on the surface. Instead of creating fleece, it produced a cleaner, smoother finish. What looked like a mistake became an opportunity and eventually evolved into the fabric we know today.

Left: The Fleece is finished to width with steam on flat bed of pins. Right: A final quality check is done by hand, pulling out any imperfections.

From there, the final character of the cloth is shaped through finishing. Steam, tumbling, brushing, pressing and washing all influence the surface. Some finishes create a soft, bobbled fleece effect. Others produce a flatter, cleaner appearance. It is here that lana cotta, literally "cooked wool", develops the distinctive handle that has made it a favourite of ours.

Above: A member of our team was wearing the same Fleece we saw finished and ready to be rolled.

Seeing the process in person left us with a renewed appreciation for the fabric. Not because it confirmed what we thought we knew, but because it didn't. For a material we have worked with for so long, Wool Fleece still managed to surprise us.