Como Silk: The Industry That Supplies the World's Fashion Houses
The relationship between Como and silk is not incidental to the lake's identity — it is its principal economic fact for the past three centuries. Como produces approximately 70% of Europe's luxury silk fabric and is the primary supplier for the haute couture and premium ready-to-wear industries globally. Every major French and Italian fashion house — Hermès, Gucci, Valentino, Fendi, Louis Vuitton, Dior — sources fabric from Como mills. The rolls of silk that become the season's scarves, linings, ties, and printed panel garments are printed, woven, and finished in the textile mills of the Lario valley, in an industry that has occupied the shores of the lake since the fifteenth century.
The History of Como Silk
Silk production came to Como in the late fifteenth century, introduced by the Sforza duchy of Milan under Ludovico il Moro — the same patron of Leonardo da Vinci — as part of a deliberate programme to develop the Lombardy textile economy. The mulberry plantations required to feed silkworms were established throughout the Lario basin and the Po plain, and the weaving mills were concentrated around Como, Lecco, and the Brianza hills. By the eighteenth century, Como was the most significant silk-producing centre in Italy and one of the most important in Europe. The decline of domestic sericulture in the twentieth century, as cheaper Asian raw silk became economically dominant, shifted Como from raw-to-finished production to specialised fabric processing and printing — the segment of the market that requires the technical expertise and quality control that Asian mills have not replicated at equivalent level.
What the Como Mills Do
Contemporary Como silk production occupies the segment of transformation of raw Asian silk into finished luxury fabric through the processes of weaving, dyeing, printing, and finishing that require both specialised machinery and accumulated craft knowledge. The printing of silk scarves, in particular, involves screen-printing processes with between fifteen and forty-five separate colour applications per design; the colour matching and print registration precision required for a fashion house's seasonal collection is a level of technical specificity that the Como mills — and their craftspeople, who train for years — deliver at a standard that cannot be replicated industrially elsewhere.
The design side of the industry is as significant as the production side. Several Como mills employ in-house design studios that create the original patterns for the season's collections. The Setificio di Como — the textile design school founded in 1868, still functioning on the same campus — trains the next generation of designers and technicians in a curriculum that has remained essentially unchanged in its fundamentals since the nineteenth century.
The Atelier Visit
Several Como silk enterprises receive visitors in their atelier and mill spaces by private arrangement. The experience — watching the screen-printing process, seeing the design archive (which in some mills runs back decades and represents a significant archive of textile design history), handling the unfinished fabric before and after its finishing processes — is a specific form of access to a craft industry that operates largely out of sight. The mills are in the towns around Como — Grandate, Guanzate, Lurago Marinone — not on the lakefront, and the visit requires a car. The forty-five minutes between a lake-view terrace and a printing mill produces one of the more unexpected combinations available in the Lake Como area, and one that is not available through any standard tourism channel.
