The Friendly Fabric

Who hasn’t had a pair of jeans as a best friend? The kind that were with you at your first concert, that you were wearing every other day during the interrail trip, that brought you luck in your high school exams and that ripped and fell apart but that you could never throw away? What about denim shirts, with the multitudes of different styles that you found impossible to be without?

An item of clothing in denim becomes, in time, not just something you are attached to, but also a habit you can’t give up. Since adolescence, denim clothing was the first much-loved item, and one of the items we are least likely to give up on at any age.

For this reason, our shop in Lucca has always had a collection in which jeans are the absolute protagonists, and now we’ve decided to include a specially dedicated section in our website to this incredible fabric, and its numerous representations.

You can find tailored trousers and jackets created by the Franco Montanelli brand with an Ermenegildo Zegna fabric, that we can tailor-make to measure with all the customizations you might wish for.

We also have two models of trousers in different shades by the Rota di Parma firm, a genuine example of the best made in Italy brands, available up to a size 62.

We also have a series of shirts in different kinds of denim, some directly made by us in Lucca, others created by the Sonrisa shirt factory in Bergamo, a company with whom we have collaborated over the years and our trusted partner and guarantor of high-quality products.

And just to let you know that we’ve thought about absolutely everything, we can even offer the Mojito Denim di Scarpa, a shoe made with elasticated fabric with orange stretch laces, of an unparalleled comfort that you can wear anywhere.

Come and take a look!

Over the year, this section dedicated to jeans will be constantly updated with new offers to let you make… new friends to take everywhere with you!

Fun facts

The fabric that has historically paved the way for the famous blue jeans finds its roots in the XV century, in an Italian town called Chieri, where a particularly resistant blue fustian was fabricated then exported to the rest of the world from the ships that moored in the port of Genoa. Here it was used for the ship sails and to cover merchant goods: the bleu de Gênes seems to be the famous blu di Genova that evolved into the English blue jeans.

There is still an open conflict with the French, who attribute the fabric’s origin to that used for the sailors’ trousers in Nîmes, a city that at the time was in direct competition with Chieri in the production of fabric. The word denim is in fact a direct descendant of the French De Nîmes.

Either way, it seems certain that Genoa gave life to the transformation of the fabric into trousers and uniforms for its sailors, who could then move easily without concern for their clothes. Jeans travelled to America from the port of the Ligurian capital, and there their story evolved to becoming the famous item of clothing that we know today.

It was Levi Strauss who established the Levi’s Strauss & Co. in San Francisco in 1853, seizing the moment in which California was being populated by gold diggers in need of coveralls and aprons.

Finally, it was a Nevada-based tailor, Jacob Davis, who reinforced the seams and pockets with copper rivets to make the trousers even more resistant. Davis was overwhelmed by requests and turned to Strauss who accepted the financing of the patent and obtained exclusivity in the production of what will become one of the luckiest items of clothing in history.

Here in Italy, merit goes largely to Elio Fiorucci for having introduced jeans as symbols of fashion, casual and comfortable wear. After opening his first store in Milan in 1967, where the London fashion revolution of the time was landing on our shores, in just a few years denim had become an item of clothing for everyone, not just for workmen.

He later had the genius idea to create a womenswear line. In the 70’s, jeans were still only made for men. After a trip to Ibiza, in which he saw some girls jump into the sea so that their clothes might have a skinnier fit, he had the innovative idea to create a skinny denim designed for women. This is how the inimitable Fiorucci jeans were born, a symbol of fashion freedom and breaking away from old patterns.