Saved Silk

Mantero, one of Italy’s most prestigious silk houses, has been producing luxury fabrics for Europe’s top couture houses for over a century. The family-run company, founded on the shores of Lake Como in 1902, traditionally burned any unused fabric to protect its exclusive designs, and each year tens of thousands of meters of silk would go up in flames. That wasteful practice is now over, as Mantero teams up with Paris’s ecologically minded concept store Merci to create jewelry, clothes and home accessories made from silk remnants. The collection, La Soie Sauvée des Flammes (silk saved from the flames), created by the Italian label forte_forte, went on sale at Merci in early October.

Merci 111 blvd Beaumarchais, 3rd, 01.42.77.00.33. website

Originally published in the September 2010 issue of France Today.