Upholstery offcuts, leftover furnishing fabrics and small pieces of leather. A choice that comes from home and family tradition, long before it became a strategy.
In an upholstery workshop, once a job is finished, there are always pieces of fabric left over: too small for a sofa, but far too beautiful to throw away. Chiara grew up in an upholstery workshop like this in Lecco, and her grandmother used those leftover pieces to make accessories. Le Ciabattine started there: with a family habit, not with a fashionable word.
What we reuse
Three things in particular. First, upholstery fabric offcuts, with their dense weaves and colours that work beautifully on our ciabattine: velvets, jacquards and heavyweight linens. Then there are end-of-roll remnants from textile manufacturers: a few metres that are not enough for mass production but are perfect for us to create a small series of ten or twenty pairs. And finally, small pieces of leather left over from leather-goods production, which are more than enough to create one of our uppers.
What does this mean for the customer?
Two things. The first is that some variations exist only for a limited number of pairs: once the fabric is gone, it is gone. If you choose a green jacquard upper this year, chances are you will not find the exact same one next year. The second is that furnishing fabrics are designed to last, they are more resistant to rubbing and light than most clothing fabrics, so an upper made this way ages beautifully.
What we don’t do
We do not give this choice grand labels and we do not calculate the emissions we have supposedly saved, because we could not do so honestly. We reuse fabrics because they cost less than new raw materials, because they are beautiful and because throwing them away seems wasteful to us. The beechwood comes from Italian clog manufacturers, the production is carried out by hand and every pair is made only after the order is placed. So, apart from seasonal collections, we do not produce unsold stock. We leave the rest for the people who wear them to judge.
If you have a fabric of your own
From time to time, a customer brings us a piece of fabric that means something to her: an old curtain from her home, a remnant bought while travelling, or another special piece of material, and asks us to turn it into a pair. If the fabric can withstand the production process, we do it. Send us a photo and we will let you know whether it can be used.