Italy and India have each spent centuries refining the handmade. At mid-day on 17 October, inside The Taj Palace in Delhi, I watched the two traditions share a single runway.
Eccellenza: The Artisans of Italian Style was the title on the invitation, and the cast was small and deliberate: three Italian houses, three distinct temperaments, one shared conviction that a thing made slowly gathers a depth of its own. Avant Toi brought knitwear that behaves like painting. LeoDean brought a wardrobe cut for the water’s edge. UnbreakIT brought prints that began life as artworks. Together they gave Delhi a vivid, many-voiced portrait of contemporary Italian fashionHow the Italian Trade Agency and FDCI Brought Italy to Delhi
Every good runway rests on quiet logistics, and this one deserves a line of credit. The Italian Trade Agency (ITA), the government body that helps Italian small and medium businesses grow abroad, brought the three labels to Delhi in collaboration with Confartigianato, the association of Italian artisan enterprises, and the Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI). The Embassy of Italy joined the effort and Camera Showroom Milano lent its support. Antonietta Baccanari, the Italian Trade Commissioner, described the agency as proud to present the showcase and thanked her ITA team for making the collaboration happen.
FDCI gave Eccellenza a place of honour. Lakmé Fashion Week x FDCI ran in Delhi from 13 to 18 October, and the council listed the Italian showcase among its own initiatives for the edition. Alongside it stood The Fifth Season, a story of Ladakhi craft presented by the Union Territory’s Department of Industries and Commerce, a Moscow Fashion Week exchange, and First Cut, the council’s platform with Pearl Academy for emerging talent. In that company the Italian houses read as one chapter in a larger conversation between craft cultures, with Delhi as host and Italy as guest.
The approach carries a track record. ITA serves as main trade partner of Dubai Fashion Week, where an Italian Day with Confartigianato alongside showcased six Italian houses last September. Delhi now joins that map, and for three mostly family-run labels it meant a direct introduction to Indian buyers, editors and audiences.
Avant Toi: a Genoese family, a paintbrush and a pinch of salt
Avant Toi is an Italian luxury fashion and knitwear brand founded in 1994 in Genoa, Italy.
The story of Avant Toi starts with a woman and a gifted knitting machine. Lia Gambetta founded Liapull in post-war Genoa and built it, one yarn at a time, from mohair and wool towards cashmere and silk. Genoa itself helped: the city has been known for centuries for cashmere finishing, credited to the purity of its water. Her children, Mirko and Fiorella Ghignone, launched Avant Toi in 1994 from the family’s hilltop workshop above the port. Fiorella steers finance and sales. Mirko, a painter at heart, brought action painting to luxury knitwear and has been treating cashmere as a canvas ever since. His own summary is brief and complete: Avant Toi “wouldn’t exist without art.”
On the Delhi runway, the Spring/Summer 2027 collection, Traces of Memory, followed the ancient Salt Roads that link the Ligurian coast and Provence through sea and Alps. The clothes arrived softly, and from my seat the surfaces read like brushwork: washes of colour, edges that blurred into one another. Raw-cut fabrics, woven structures and basketry-inspired cashmere gauzes carried the mark of the hand, and salt itself plays a part in dyeing the cashmere and silk.
Two pieces stay with me. The first is a salt-dyed cashmere knit in the pale tones of vaniglia and sughero, its surface weathered in the most flattering way, as if it had spent a summer on a boat deck. The second is a silk look printed with a deliberately time-worn Toile de Jouy, the pastoral scenes faded like a memory, finished with floral raffia embroidery. Around them the palette travelled on to flamingo, pervinca, garden and vetro, a nod to the glasswork of Émile Gallé. Every garment is worked individually by hand, and the variation from look to look proved it.
LeoDean: from deck to dinner
Designer Oliver di Leoean
LeoDean changed the tempo. Where Avant Toi invited close looking, Between Land and Water celebrated movement. The label has salt in its own story: it grew from a love of sailing, the kind passed down from grandparents, and from a wish for clothes that could travel from the deck of a boat to the table at dinner. Its pieces are made in Italy, and the showcase presented the brand under the leadership of Olivia and Natalia Beach.
The collection is cut for women who explore without pause, and its wardrobe follows the day from city to coast, from boat to lunch, from sunlit afternoon to late dinner. Fluid volumes rose and settled with each step like water finding its level. A sheer layer in an aquatic shade showed transparency at its most graceful, recalling wet fabric against skin with suggestion in place of show. A black piece in a fluid fabric closed the idea with evening poise. Prints and textures borrowed from reflections on water, shadows across skin and the markings of rock and vegetation, and the palette ran through black, mineral neutrals, sun-faded tones and aquatic blues. The label lets material carry the message in place of a logo, and every piece looked made to be worn for years.
UnbreakIT: the artist who came from the dance floor
UnbreakIT closed the trio with Dall’Alba alla Notte, “from dawn to night,” and the finale felt like a day settling into dusk. The house has an unexpected pedigree. Its founder, Silvano Negri, born in Monza in 1964, spent the nineties in the world of Vans, Atlantis snowboards and Volcom, then created merchandise for the Pacha club before launching his own label in Milan in 2007. He built it around ideas of time, cycles and renewal, and printed those ideas onto cloth. Giorgia Both joined in 2010 and today leads the label’s design as principal designer, with her daughters Lara and Mila part of the creative family.
Giorgia di- UNBREAKIT
That artistic upbringing shows in the clothes. Giorgia describes fashion at UnbreakIT as “an extension of art and individuality,” and each collection begins with a print that tells a story drawn from cities, cinema, music and art. This one follows a single day with the sea at its heart. A printed silk dress opened the story in luminous sand and rippling blue, the fabric catching the light as it glided past. Later looks in fluid jersey fell soft and easy in the deeper, more intimate colours of night, with the sky filling with stars across the print. Lightness and strength share one garment here, and every woman can claim her own hour of the day. Everything is made in Italy, from locally sourced materials, by local artisans.
The Italian Trade Agency regards India as a natural audience, and the room agreed. A country that grew up around embroidered hems, block prints and the pride of a thing made by someone’s hands recognises craft on sight. The agency describes Eccellenza as the pinnacle of authentic Made in Italy high fashion, with premium craft and quality executed flawlessly, and all three designers carried the soul of Italian design to Delhi. The encounter felt like a reunion between old friends.
When the lights came up, what stayed with me was a feeling more than any single look: a salt-dyed knit from Liguria and a hand-worked textile from Delhi are, at heart, the same love letter to patience. The runway simply gave them a place to meet. Somewhere between the sea and the city, two old craft traditions discovered they already spoke the same language.
About the Italian Trade Agency
The Italian Trade Agency is the Italian government body that supports the international business development of Italian companies and promotes foreign investment in Italy. Through a modern organisation and an extensive network of overseas offices, it provides information, assistance, consulting, promotion and training to Italian small and medium-sized businesses, and it works to advance the excellence of Made in Italy around the world.
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Italy and India have each spent centuries refining the handmade. At mid-day on 17 October, inside The Taj Palace in Delhi, I watched the two traditions share a single runway.
Eccellenza: The Artisans of Italian Style was the title on the invitation, and the cast was small and deliberate: three Italian houses, three distinct temperaments, one shared conviction that a thing made slowly gathers a depth of its own. Avant Toi brought knitwear that behaves like painting. LeoDean brought a wardrobe cut for the water’s edge. UnbreakIT brought prints that began life as artworks. Together they gave Delhi a vivid, many-voiced portrait of contemporary Italian fashionHow the Italian Trade Agency and FDCI Brought Italy to Delhi
Every good runway rests on quiet logistics, and this one deserves a line of credit. The Italian Trade Agency (ITA), the government body that helps Italian small and medium businesses grow abroad, brought the three labels to Delhi in collaboration with Confartigianato, the association of Italian artisan enterprises, and the Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI). The Embassy of Italy joined the effort and Camera Showroom Milano lent its support. Antonietta Baccanari, the Italian Trade Commissioner, described the agency as proud to present the showcase and thanked her ITA team for making the collaboration happen.
FDCI gave Eccellenza a place of honour. Lakmé Fashion Week x FDCI ran in Delhi from 13 to 18 October, and the council listed the Italian showcase among its own initiatives for the edition. Alongside it stood The Fifth Season, a story of Ladakhi craft presented by the Union Territory’s Department of Industries and Commerce, a Moscow Fashion Week exchange, and First Cut, the council’s platform with Pearl Academy for emerging talent. In that company the Italian houses read as one chapter in a larger conversation between craft cultures, with Delhi as host and Italy as guest.
The approach carries a track record. ITA serves as main trade partner of Dubai Fashion Week, where an Italian Day with Confartigianato alongside showcased six Italian houses last September. Delhi now joins that map, and for three mostly family-run labels it meant a direct introduction to Indian buyers, editors and audiences.
Avant Toi: a Genoese family, a paintbrush and a pinch of salt
Avant Toi is an Italian luxury fashion and knitwear brand founded in 1994 in Genoa, Italy.
The story of Avant Toi starts with a woman and a gifted knitting machine. Lia Gambetta founded Liapull in post-war Genoa and built it, one yarn at a time, from mohair and wool towards cashmere and silk. Genoa itself helped: the city has been known for centuries for cashmere finishing, credited to the purity of its water. Her children, Mirko and Fiorella Ghignone, launched Avant Toi in 1994 from the family’s hilltop workshop above the port. Fiorella steers finance and sales. Mirko, a painter at heart, brought action painting to luxury knitwear and has been treating cashmere as a canvas ever since. His own summary is brief and complete: Avant Toi “wouldn’t exist without art.”
On the Delhi runway, the Spring/Summer 2027 collection, Traces of Memory, followed the ancient Salt Roads that link the Ligurian coast and Provence through sea and Alps. The clothes arrived softly, and from my seat the surfaces read like brushwork: washes of colour, edges that blurred into one another. Raw-cut fabrics, woven structures and basketry-inspired cashmere gauzes carried the mark of the hand, and salt itself plays a part in dyeing the cashmere and silk.
Two pieces stay with me. The first is a salt-dyed cashmere knit in the pale tones of vaniglia and sughero, its surface weathered in the most flattering way, as if it had spent a summer on a boat deck. The second is a silk look printed with a deliberately time-worn Toile de Jouy, the pastoral scenes faded like a memory, finished with floral raffia embroidery. Around them the palette travelled on to flamingo, pervinca, garden and vetro, a nod to the glasswork of Émile Gallé. Every garment is worked individually by hand, and the variation from look to look proved it.
LeoDean: from deck to dinner
Designer Oliver di Leoean
LeoDean changed the tempo. Where Avant Toi invited close looking, Between Land and Water celebrated movement. The label has salt in its own story: it grew from a love of sailing, the kind passed down from grandparents, and from a wish for clothes that could travel from the deck of a boat to the table at dinner. Its pieces are made in Italy, and the showcase presented the brand under the leadership of Olivia and Natalia Beach.
The collection is cut for women who explore without pause, and its wardrobe follows the day from city to coast, from boat to lunch, from sunlit afternoon to late dinner. Fluid volumes rose and settled with each step like water finding its level. A sheer layer in an aquatic shade showed transparency at its most graceful, recalling wet fabric against skin with suggestion in place of show. A black piece in a fluid fabric closed the idea with evening poise. Prints and textures borrowed from reflections on water, shadows across skin and the markings of rock and vegetation, and the palette ran through black, mineral neutrals, sun-faded tones and aquatic blues. The label lets material carry the message in place of a logo, and every piece looked made to be worn for years.
UnbreakIT: the artist who came from the dance floor
UnbreakIT closed the trio with Dall’Alba alla Notte, “from dawn to night,” and the finale felt like a day settling into dusk. The house has an unexpected pedigree. Its founder, Silvano Negri, born in Monza in 1964, spent the nineties in the world of Vans, Atlantis snowboards and Volcom, then created merchandise for the Pacha club before launching his own label in Milan in 2007. He built it around ideas of time, cycles and renewal, and printed those ideas onto cloth. Giorgia Both joined in 2010 and today leads the label’s design as principal designer, with her daughters Lara and Mila part of the creative family.
Giorgia di- UNBREAKIT
That artistic upbringing shows in the clothes. Giorgia describes fashion at UnbreakIT as “an extension of art and individuality,” and each collection begins with a print that tells a story drawn from cities, cinema, music and art. This one follows a single day with the sea at its heart. A printed silk dress opened the story in luminous sand and rippling blue, the fabric catching the light as it glided past. Later looks in fluid jersey fell soft and easy in the deeper, more intimate colours of night, with the sky filling with stars across the print. Lightness and strength share one garment here, and every woman can claim her own hour of the day. Everything is made in Italy, from locally sourced materials, by local artisans.
The Italian Trade Agency regards India as a natural audience, and the room agreed. A country that grew up around embroidered hems, block prints and the pride of a thing made by someone’s hands recognises craft on sight. The agency describes Eccellenza as the pinnacle of authentic Made in Italy high fashion, with premium craft and quality executed flawlessly, and all three designers carried the soul of Italian design to Delhi. The encounter felt like a reunion between old friends.
When the lights came up, what stayed with me was a feeling more than any single look: a salt-dyed knit from Liguria and a hand-worked textile from Delhi are, at heart, the same love letter to patience. The runway simply gave them a place to meet. Somewhere between the sea and the city, two old craft traditions discovered they already spoke the same language.
About the Italian Trade Agency
The Italian Trade Agency is the Italian government body that supports the international business development of Italian companies and promotes foreign investment in Italy. Through a modern organisation and an extensive network of overseas offices, it provides information, assistance, consulting, promotion and training to Italian small and medium-sized businesses, and it works to advance the excellence of Made in Italy around the world.
TO BE CONTINUED, FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY.
This is where the surface ends and the reporting begins.
The complete piece, the full archive, and access to The French Press Circle. Reporting answerable only to its readers.
Already a subscriber ?
Login
Read these on the house, with our compliments.
A selection from the current issue, open to all readers. Read them in full. The rest is one decision away.