Dalle Piane Cashmere
Our factory
A knitted piece is good or ordinary long before a machine is switched on. It is decided when the yarn is chosen.
It starts with the yarn
We don't spin the yarn: we buy it from mills that do nothing else, companies with one trade and one trade only, which is exactly why they do it better than anyone. But knowing which yarn to buy is a trade in itself, and in this family we learned it from the start.
Before the knitting factory there was a spinning mill: grandfather Valter's, where wool became yarn and cones. That is where the eye comes from, the one that still looks a cone over before it is ordered — and the reason we sometimes turn down one that on paper would be perfect.
We don't work in pure cashmere alone: depending on the piece we choose a cashmere blend, cotton, or wool and cashmere. And we prefer two-ply yarns, which are more stable in the wash and pill less. The point is not to take the most precious yarn every time, but the right one for the piece we have in mind.
Knitting
A piece is knitted in panels: front, back, sleeves, trims, collars, each one worked separately on flat knitting machines.
The panels are then set aside and left to rest for a full day, so the knit can pull back to its natural size after the tension of the machine. It is a day in which nothing happens, and it is needed: a piece made up straight away would keep moving later, on the person wearing it.
Then the hands take over
Setting up a linking machine is work for an artist. The first panel goes onto a crown of needles, stitch by stitch, with a patience nobody has in a hurry; it is evened up; then the second one follows. One stitch at a time, down the whole length of the seam.
It is the slowest stage of the whole process, and the one no machine has yet learned to do on its own. When the linking is done well, the seam cannot be felt under your fingers and whoever wears the piece never thinks about it. When it is done badly, they feel it every time they put it on. It is one of those things you notice only when they are missing.
Washing and pressing
Every piece goes through milling, a wash that opens the fiber and gives cashmere the hand it has when it reaches you. It is the one stage we don't do ourselves: we send it to a specialist laundry, also in the district.
The final pressing settles everything that came before it: this is where the piece takes the shape it will keep. Then the check, and the bagging.
Everything stays in the district
The work happens in our own factory or in the workshops of the Prato textile district, a few miles from us. This is not a way of saving money, it is the opposite: Prato has worked wool since 1200 and those skills stayed here. The person who links, the person who presses, the person who washes does that one thing, and has done it for a lifetime, often for more than one generation.
Having the workshop twenty minutes down the road means we can stop in while the work is under way, see a piece half finished, and fix it then instead of afterward. Two thousand miles away, all you can do is accept or reject a piece once it is done.
What 100% Made in Italy means
Our pieces are certified Tfashion 100% Made in Italy, the supply chain certification issued by Unioncamere, the association of the Italian chambers of commerce. It certifies the work: that the piece is designed and made in Italy, stage by stage, and not simply sewn or labeled here at the end of a road that started somewhere else.
Raw cashmere comes from the high plateaus of Asia, as all the cashmere in the world does. What is Italian is the piece: the design, the knitting, the linking, the finishing. We would rather say it ourselves, plainly, than leave you to work it out.
It is a distinction you cannot see on a label, and it is the whole difference between an Italian brand and an Italian garment. We choose the yarn and we make the piece, and every pair of hands that touches it works within a few miles of here.
Three generations, one trade
From grandfather Valter's spinning mill to the knitting factory that opened in 1988, to the brand started in 2001, the Dondini family has done the same thing for three generations: take a thread and make something worth keeping. The machines change, the pieces change, the way they are sold changes. The trade does not.
100% Made in Italy
Yarn we select, knitted in our own factory in Prato. Our Factory