The mill and the makers behind some of our favourite fabrics.

11.09.2026

Earlier this year, we travelled to Prato, Italy, to see how some of our favourite fabrics, including Recycled Italian Tweed, are made.

You might think fabric is made in a mill. As it turns out, it takes a whole town.

Mannelli is a small family-run mill founded in 1975 by three brothers. They built the mill and, just in front of it, three houses for their families. Today, the business is run by the next generation, Alessandro and his cousin Ilaria, alongside a team of just eight people.

But to understand what Mannelli does, you need to look beyond the mill.

Prato has been a centre for wool and textile production for generations. People here have a long history of taking wool, that already exists as fabrics or garments and breaking it back down into fibre and re-spinning into new yarns.

Long before we talked about circularity, it was simply what people here did.

That approach still sits at the heart of fabrics like our Recycled Italian Tweed. Recovered fibres are sorted and blended, turning what already exists into the starting point for something new.

At Mannelli, getting that blend right is a skill that requires an experienced eye.

Rodolfo, although now retired, knows colour, his skill and years of experience are used to assess the fibres and work out how to reach the colour they need from the raw materials available and write the recipe. It is knowledge built up over years, and the kind that is increasingly difficult to replace.

There are traces of that accumulated knowledge everywhere at Mannelli.

Alessandro’s sister works amongst an enormous archive of swatches and samples collected over the years. Keeping all of it takes up a surprising amount of space, but Mannelli sees it as a necessary investment. An old reference can be found, reconsidered and made useful again.

The thing that struck us most during our time in Prato was when the sorted fibres leave the mill.

The spinner is somewhere else. So is the warper. The weaving happens somewhere else again, and the finishing, too.

Rather than one large operation doing everything under one roof, there is a network of small, specialist businesses spread across the town, each responsible for its part.

At the weaver we visited, there were four looms, and a cat...

Preparing one of those looms for a new fabric takes around two hours. For our relatively small run of 300 metres, the weaving itself takes about a day and a half.

From there, the cloth moves on again to be finished and checked for one final time. A person looks over every metre by hand, finding loose fibres and spotting imperfections before the cloth is ready to leave Prato.

There are quicker and cheaper ways of making fabric. That reality is visible here too. Businesses that once bought significant quantities from Prato have moved production elsewhere, and many of the specialist skills that remain are becoming harder to pass on. 

But what we found was not a place standing still.

Machines sit alongside hands. Old fibres become new cloth. An archive of past ideas helps make the next one. Knowledge moves between generations, and fabric moves from one specialist to another.

It is an interconnected way of making things that becomes difficult to appreciate when all you see is the finished cloth.

We came to Prato to visit a mill.
Instead, it took us all over town.
Because making a fabric like Italian Tweed takes more than a mill.
It takes Prato.