In a small workshop in Venice lies an historic world the place treasured velvets are woven with talent and endurance.
The top product is shipped to the wealthy and highly effective: from the White Home to the Kremlin, from the Vatican to style homes, and the villas of Hollywood stars.
Of the roughly 6,000 looms utilized by weavers within the sixteenth century within the lagoon metropolis, right this moment solely 18 stay.
They're operated by seven expert artisans, the final custodians of an historic artwork.
The origins of the textile custom
"(Velvet weaving) was one of the crucial vital financial actions (in Venice) and folks got here to Venice from all around the world to purchase velvets. Then, clearly, there was a decline on this manufacturing, however it was vital to protect this excellence as a result of if information just isn't handed on, it's misplaced, and an important inventive and cultural heritage is misplaced," says CEO of Tessitura Bevilacqua, Alberto Bevilacqua.
Venice is famed not just for its architects, sculptors, painters and writers, but additionally for its textile artisans, who previously produced materials which can be inimitable for high quality and refinement.
Between the thirteenth and 18th centuries the velvet produced within the lagoon was used to take advantage of luxurious garments for European the Aristocracy.
Manufacturing of velvet, alongside silk, started in Venice because of some 300 artisans (weavers, spinners, and dyers) who fled the Tuscan metropolis of Lucca for political causes.
By the sixteenth century, the dear materials produced in Venice had develop into crucial supply of wealth for town of canals.
However the galloping industrialisation of the Nineteenth century shortly erased centuries of custom. It was not till in direction of the top of the century that Europeans began recovering the know-how of the traditional ornamental arts, together with weaving.
Maintaining the craft alive
In 1875, Luigi Bevilacqua dusted off the previous looms. Six generations later, his firm continues to jealously safeguard the secrets and techniques of this historic craft.
It's under no circumstances a easy artwork kind, requiring plenty of time, endurance and bodily effort.
"To arrange a loom for weaving takes a number of months, generally even a 12 months. For instance, after we made this material for the Kremlin, we labored for a 12 months earlier than we did it," explains Bevilacqua.
When the Russian authorities commissioned them to make this material to upholster some chairs within the Kremlin, the Bevilacqua weaving mill did not know if it could make it.
The sample was a French design from almost 300 years in the past, however the loom used to provide it had been out of motion for 50 years.
So the weaving technicians needed to modify one of many looms, and it took six months simply to arrange the machine, punch playing cards and thread spools.
The weaving itself was additionally significantly advanced, as a result of it was the one case wherein two weavers labored on the identical loom on the identical time.
Usually, just one weaver works on every material, setting the loom in keeping with their energy, the size of their arm and the strain they want for the threads.
A modern-day innovation to the standard wood loom
The looms could date again to the 18th century, however they work right this moment because of an Nineteenth-century invention.
It is a machine that, like an ancestor of the fashionable pc, reads the punched playing cards, noting the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions in a type of secret code that the loom makes use of as a map to make a design.
Guide weaving, nevertheless, requires a collection of advanced operations that enhance manufacturing instances.
First the punched playing cards are ready, and hundreds of them are wanted as a result of every one represents half a millimetre of the design, which is typically as a lot as 1.5 metres lengthy.
Then there are about 15 threads of silk that should be hooked up to the loom. Not more than 20 cm could be woven every day for essentially the most treasured and complex velvets.
However it's exactly the complexity of the work behind every material and the ultimate results of the best workmanship that has meant that for the final 70 years requests have continued to return in from all around the world.
The luxurious standing of handwoven Venetian velvet
Along with the Kremlin in Moscow, the White Home in Washington, orders are available in from celebrities and royal palaces all over the world, the Vatican, the Quirinale (residence of the Italian president) and excessive finish style homes.
A chunk of tiger velvet crafted by Tessitura Bevilacqua was used to upholster chairs in singer Mariah Carey's mansion.
Giulia Incipini has been working at Tessitura Bevilacqua for seven years.
"That is bodily work, so the development and preparation of the loom in addition to the weaving are all performed by hand, all bodily and all performed by us," she says.
Not all the things she works on could be proven off: she makes positive to maintain out of view a velvet they've been weaving in latest weeks for a well-known Italian style home, a design that's nonetheless "high secret".
Incipini spends hours weaving within the workshop utilizing her complete physique as if she have been a grasp puppeteer.
Preserving such an historic custom can imply sweat and frustration, significantly when the machine jams, otherwise you get misplaced within the labyrinth of hundreds of threads.
So a craft that's a whole bunch of years previous remains to be a luxurious market within the twenty first century.
Try the video above to se how the luxurious Venetian velvet being made
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