By Oliver Harry, Founder and Creative Director, Ghini Como, Argegno, Lake Como
Quick facts: why Como silk is luxurious
- The Province of Como produces 80% of Europe's luxury silk and 95% of Italy's silk, supplying the workshops of Hermès, Chanel, Prada, Armani, Versace, Valentino and Yves Saint Laurent, among others
- A single complex Como silk scarf design requires between 30 and 35 individual printing screens, each applied in sequence with the registration precision necessary for adjacent colours to align at their borders, a technical standard that mass production facilities do not match
- Alpine water drawn from the Lake Como watershed is exceptionally low in dissolved minerals, and Como's dye houses have calibrated their colour chemistry to its specific properties over generations, producing colour depth and stability that harder water sources cannot replicate
- The Como district employs more than 20,000 workers across nearly 1,000 companies within a geographically contained area, creating a concentration of specialist knowledge in weaving, colour chemistry, screen preparation and hand finishing that cannot be transferred quickly to a new facility
- Como's Technical Institute for silk manufacturing was established in 1866 and has trained specialist artisans continuously for over 150 years, making it one of the longest running vocational education programmes in the European textile industry
The Province of Como produces 80% of Europe's luxury silk, and has done so continuously since the fourteenth century. It is an astonishing legacy which is all the more compelling when you visit Lake Como today.
Spend any time relaxing on its tranquil water, drinking in the majestic mountain views or sip a Negroni in a lake-side cafe and you would have no idea that Como is a booming textile hub.
Six hundred years of unbroken silk production in a single geographic district creates something that cannot be manufactured quickly or imported cheaply: accumulated craft knowledge of extraordinary depth, distributed across generations of weavers, dye chemists and finishers who have spent their working lives refining a process that their parents and grandparents also spent their working lives refining.
The silk that leaves Como carries that inheritance in its structure, its colour and its handle, and it is why the buying departments of Hermès, Chanel, Prada and Valentino have sourced from this district for generations rather than from the considerably cheaper alternatives available elsewhere.
Six centuries in one place
Como did not become the centre of the world's luxury silk industry by accident or by marketing.
The Visconti family began encouraging the cultivation of mulberry trees around the lake in the fourteenth century, and Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan who also commissioned The Last Supper, formalised and dramatically expanded that effort in the fifteenth.
By the time the industrial revolution arrived, the region had already accumulated four centuries of unbroken silk craft knowledge, and mechanisation changed the scale of production without displacing the expertise underneath it.
That expertise, passed down through families and formalised since 1866 through Como's dedicated silk technical institute, represents something that cannot be acquired quickly or replicated cheaply.
The particular intimacy between skilled hands and silk fibre, the ability to recognise quality through touch, to anticipate how a given batch of yarn will behave at the loom, to read a length of finished fabric and understand where in the process a problem originated, is knowledge that was built through accumulated failure and correction across generations. It lives in the professional memory of the district rather than in any manual or machine setting.
What the water actually does
One of the less romantic but more consequential reasons for Como silk's exceptional colour quality is chemistry. The Alpine streams that feed into Lake Como carry water of unusual softness, meaning it is exceptionally low in dissolved calcium and magnesium carbonates, the minerals that make water hard.
This is crucial because those minerals interfere with the chemical bonding between dye molecules and silk fibroin, the protein that gives silk its structure, producing colours that are marginally but perceptibly duller, less saturated and less stable under light and washing than the same dyes applied in soft water.
Como's dye houses have been calibrating their colour chemistry to the specific mineral properties of this water for hundreds of years.
The depth and luminosity that characterise well made Como silk is the result of a process developed in unison with a specific water source over a very long time. The equipment used in that process can be purchased and installed elsewhere. After all, the lake can't be moved.
A district that thinks together
Perhaps the least visible but most significant advantage Como holds over every other silk producing region is the density of its knowledge ecosystem.
More than 20,000 specialist workers across nearly 1,000 companies operate within a geographically compact area, including weavers, dye chemists, finishers and the technical institute that has been training them all for over 150 years.
The practical consequence of this concentration is that when a problem arises anywhere in the production process, the expertise required to solve it is almost always available within the district, often within a short drive.
This matters more than it might initially seem.
Luxury silk production is a process with many variables, and the difference between a good result and an exceptional one frequently comes down to the ability to make small, informed corrections at precisely the right moment.
I experienced this community spirit first hand when producing my first line of silk scarves in Como. It was nearing Christmas, when the silk mills are working flat out to meet sky-high demand from the various household names that source their silk from Como.
I was concerned that we weren't going to have our scarves made in time to meet the seasonal rush, but when I raised this with my supplier, she gave a wry smile. She explained that in Como, everyone helps everyone. If they couldn't meet demand that day, then their competitors would step in and help. The reputation of Como silk would always overrule any individual rivalries.
This informal efficiency is only possible when the collective standards of every silk mill is incredibly high - as well as their levels of shared trust.
In a district where the relevant expertise is distributed across hundreds of companies and thousands of experienced workers, those corrections happen quickly and accurately. In a facility attempting to replicate Como's output elsewhere, without that surrounding ecosystem, they take longer, cost more and are more likely to go wrong.
Made entirely in Como
Como's rich silk history is the reason why I chose to create Ghini Como.
As someone who lived on the lake, I was fascinated to discover its luxurious textile secret. I wanted to celebrate it, and work alongside some of the most respected silk mills in the world.
As a result, every Ghini Como scarf is woven, printed and finished within the Province of Como, by a family mill that has operated on the shores of this lake since 1899.
It has continued through two world wars, the full mechanisation of the industry and the sustained competitive pressure of Asian mass production, and it is still here, still producing silk of the same character and by the same accumulated methods.
The scarves it produces for Ghini are made in the same workshops, by the same hands, using the same processes as the silk that supplies the great fashion houses of Paris and Milan.
Oliver Harry is the Founder and Creative Director of Ghini Como, a luxury silk scarf brand that exclusively sources its silk from Como, Italy. He lives in Argegno on the western shore of Lake Como.
