Tessitura Taborelli: Know thy Textile Mill

This month we feature one of the largest textile weaving mills in Europe, Tessitura Taborelli, situated in a town outside of Como. We talk about sustainability beyond "Made in Italy."

Oct 21, 2025

This month, instead of a brand, I am featuring a fabric producer. I happened upon this company by chance. One day, as I was scrolling through Instagram, I saw a post from a local women’s club. They had visited an important textile mill, and in one of the photos was a man who I knew lived in my building. The next time I saw him, I struck up a conversation about his family business, and he invited me to visit the factory. That man is Andrea Taborelli, CEO of Tessitura Taborelli, one of the largest textile weaving mills in Europe. These are the pinch-me moments that make me feel lucky to live in Como.

I thought for a while on how to structure this post, because on the textile side there is so much to cover. Andrea has already invited me back to look at the fabric dying process, so for this post we will focus on the general understanding of the business, as well as sustainability within the industry of textile production. For the next visit, I will focus more on the dying process of yarns, as well as the yarns themselves. If you have further questions or interests, please leave a comment below👇 so that we can cover it next time.

On the factory floor of Tessitura Taborelli.

The History

Andrea Taborelli’s great grandfather started Tessitura Taborelli in 1895, as a factory to produce silk for umbrellas. This family company has been producing fabrics in silk for over 130 years! They then evolved to produce linings for fur jackets, using silk as well as other fibers, like viscose. When his father entered the company in the late 60s/early 70s, they started producing dyed yarn fabrics for women’s clothes, which make up more than 65% of their production. Today, they use a wide range of silky fibers, which can range from silk to viscose, nylon, polyester, and more. The company has five divisions: women’s fashion, upholstery, ties, linings, and scarves.

Taborelli is one of the largest textile weaving mills in Europe, producing millions of kilos of fabric every year on over 400 looms. It feels surreal to walk into their factory, knowing that it is where the raw materials for many of the luxury houses come from. And, on a personal note, you would never know that Andrea Taborelli makes them. He is a kind and humble person who holds sustainability close to his heart.

A beautiful jacquard fabric being loomed with art nouveau “liberty” vibes.

The Factory

When I visited the factory, Andrea was just finishing a meeting with a yarn twisting supplier from Belgium, who joined me on the tour. The sounds of the looms were almost deafening, so we had to wear ear plugs, and it became difficult to talk inside. I quickly snapped up what photos I could (please excuse the lighting). It was fascinating to see the fabrics taking shape, starting from threads, and slowly becoming beautiful patterns that would then go on to be manufactured. He asked me not to share some of the names of the brands that they were making fabric for, since those companies require confidentiality. I saw at least four fashion houses’ logos getting woven into printed jacquard fabric for scarves, as well as some unmistakable patterns.

A jacquard fabric in production. Take note of the strawberries in the design.

How it Works

The company has its own in-house textile designers, who design fabrics for each season. When I visited in September, they were in production for Fall/Winter of 2026. Taborelli sells both plain fabrics (without designs) that can be purchased and piece dyed or printed independently by the client, as well as woven jacquard fabrics (with designs). The fabrics are sold either as “greige”, a neutral color between gray and beige, or woven with pre-dyed yarns, respectively. The in-house designers work with “converters”, a technical term in the fashion industry for people who buy fabrics for brands. “Our customers are called ‘converters’ because they transform fabrics they buy with dying, printing and finishing, creating their own collection, targeted to their markets.” They are the go-between the textile mill and the brands, and help communicate which patterns, colors, and amounts the brand wants to order. The client might then buy a pattern from the mill for exclusivity. Taborelli doesn’t have minimums; they can produce as little as 10 centimeters of fabric or as much as hundreds of thousands of meters if needed. So they don’t have direct relationships with designers or brands, only with the converters.

Taborelli produces tweeds used by a beloved French fashion house.

Since the mill designs the majority of the fabrics, they produce at least 1,500 samples of fabrics per season and up to 3,000 per year. Their archives house tens of thousands of fabric samples, which are organized by color and pattern.

The client goes to the mill and chooses their fabric samples, which the mill provides along with a data sheet including information about the yarns used. Each yarn has a color card listing all available colors that specific yarn is available in. In 2024, the most common silk they were using was available in 40 different colors. They store more than 1,500,000 kilos of dyed yarns in a warehouse next door. But if a client wants a specific color, they have the capability to dye the yarn to the exact hue that the client wants. Taborelli has a collaboration with a yarn dying company 50 meters down the road, so they can adapt to the clients needs very quickly. Sustaining an industry is not just about one factory, but about all of the suppliers in an area that make the production of textiles possible.

Jacquard

Tessitura Taborelli specializes in jacquard fabrics, which is a sort of 3D process that requires human hands to finish. It cannot only be done by machines, and the people who work on the looms are highly specialized with years of experience.

Jacquard is the best fabric you can have. It’s like painting. It takes longer to make, but it’s also more sophisticated. We have produced jacquard since we were born in 1895. You can mix in different kinds of fibers, both in warp and weft. There could be 24,000 fibers in 1.5 meters.

It was fascinating to see all of the fabrics coming together on the factory floor, especially the jacquard. There was one whose beauty really stood out to me. It was for a luxury brand’s haute couture line, and featured a garden motif. I loved the inclusion of the grasshoppers and bugs, and the metallic threads woven in to make some of the flowers sparkly. It looked alive.

Jacquard looms were invented in France in the early 1800s by a man named Jean Marie Charles, who went by the name Jacquard. The effects achieved on these looms still use the French terms.

Fil Coupè

Taborelli also produces fil coupè fabrics, which is a jacquard technique that requires cutting raw edges around the design afterward. The pattern results in shapes that sort of emerge from the fabric, and the fringe created by the cutting the edges adds movement. This is beauty for beauty’s sake.

Chinè

Chinè is another technique of jacquard weaving where the yarn used in the warp is printed. The fabric is not printed, only the yarn used in the warp, which creates a sort of blurred edge effect on the design.

Cloquè

Cloquè is a jacquard technique in which some of the yarn has shrinkage, which creates a sort of puckered effect in the final product. These fabrics have lots of movement and texture, and are often used in haute couture.

All of these jacquard techniques are specialties of Taborelli.

Sciarperia/Scarves

One of our last stops on the tour was the scarf showroom, where dozens of scarves were on display. This is an important division of Taborelli, where they cater to a high end clientele. You can easily picture your brand replacing the “brand” in the demo.

A familiar motif, a demo scarf ready for your brand, the technical details, more samples

Sustainability

In the 90s, Andrea started eating only organic food. Since it became an important part of his life, he took it upon himself to make his company as sustainable as possible. “It was a part of my life. It’s my mentality, so I tried to also put that in my factory.” They were the first factory in Italy to get the GOTS certification for organic fabrics, and still to this day do a small production of naturally dyed organic cotton. He did this in 2008, before the market was asking for organic certifications. Today, they have over 12 certifications for their factory: 4 for processes and 8 for product. We spoke about synthetic fibers and if some are better than others. The answer is yes and no. It depends on a lot of things, especially the dying process. Taborelli has a partnership with a fabric dying company down the road where they dye all of their polyester (future post), and they also have the GRS certification, which means they only use recycled polyester and recycled nylon. In addition to the ecological sustainability factor, there is the socioeconomic aspect of sustainable fashion. Taborelli factory employees make a living wage and have workers’ rights, which is not always the case outside of Europe. The solar panels that line their roof provide 10% of energy needs.

Andrea is a forward thinking person, who is not afraid to adopt new technologies for the sake of transparency and sustainability. Taborelli integrated block chain technology into their production chain, which includes a QR code guaranteeing the traceability of the fabrics to the yarns, removing doubt for the clients as to the origins of the final product. I love when technology can complement tradition in this way, not changing the methods of producing beautiful things, but instead protecting their integrity.

Beyond Made in Italy: Challenges and Solutions

“85% of the fabric you find in Europe is coming from outside of Europe.” That is a crazy statistic. “When you see ‘Made in Italy’, you only know that the final product is made here. You know that it was sewn here, but you don’t know where the fabric is coming from. You cannot have that information with the label. Now in France, the big companies [companies that gross €100 million plus in revenues per year] have to give that information to the consumer, also where they weave the fabrics, and what I think is the most important thing to give to the consumer, is where they dyed and printed the fabrics, because dying and printing is the most impacting part of the process.”

European fabric producers are subject to a regulation called REACH. Before the passing of REACH, they were able to use over 130,000 different chemical products in textile production. Now, they are limited to 10% of that number, but countries outside of the EU are not. European factories are held to much higher, more expensive standards, but have to compete with fabrics produced much more cheaply and much less sustainably. Distributors and brands are supposed to guarantee that they are respecting the European law, but the reality is that less than 0.001% of product is checked upon arrival. In addition, there are thousands of chemicals to test for, so you would have to do a lot of tests just for one fabric. Testing all of the fabric entering the EU would be impossible. At the same time, European producers are regulated and checked much more diligently at their factories. Going back to the French law, the textile producers were able to force the government to hold large companies accountable for their supply chain. The EU allowed the French government to pass that law, but did not make all of the other countries adopt it. Now, fabric producers in other EU countries are pressuring to pass this law for all of Europe.

As a consumer, this is information we need to be asking ourselves when shopping. Where was the fabric dyed and woven? Where was the garment sewn? Most of the time, we are spending a lot of money on something that is not actually of value. This is not only important for the ecological impact that we have as consumers, but it is also crucial for protecting the know-how and skill of people working in factories, who are competing on an increasingly uneven playing field.

Lastly . . .

I like to ask the people I interview what their favorite product is that they make, since it might open our eyes to see something in a different light. Andrea told me, “I could give you the classical answer that I prefer the best sellers, but actually I’ll tell you that I have a preference for all the silk fabrics we produce, because they remember me our origin of silk umbrella fabric weavers, more than 130 years ago.” I look forward to learning more from him about sustainable yarns and fabrics on this Notes on Italian Style journey we have embarked on together.

NoIS Italian Fashion Vocabulary Lesson

Filiera: supply chain or industry. This month’s vocab word has a double meaning. Filo means string, yarn, or thread. So filiera makes one imagine the line of production in the supply chain. It also means spinneret, a piece of machinery that spins yarn. The fashion industry can be referred to as the filiera dell’abbigliamento, which in this case, includes the actual threads involved.

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