Discovering Brunello’s
Green stance

The Superzoom editing team recently spent a day amongst the looms at Brunello, the long-standing linings specialist founded in the eponymous small town outside Varese. The company’s home and headquarters is still the old Lombardy farmhouse where Giuseppe and Maria Ghiringhelli, the grandparents of current owner Elisabetta Gabri, set up the company in 1927. Since then, Brunello has grown exponentially, gaining particular renown for its technological innovation, being the world’s first company to make Jacquard fabrics with air jet looms, developed from the then-standard rapier looms. 

Passed down from one generation of women to the next, the vocation for innovation is carried forward with courage and forward-thinking by the current management, who introduce improvements to machinery, technologies and production innovations every year. One of these is BemBAZIN™, a trademark registered by Brunello and produced under a unique partnership with Asahi Kasei: versatile Cupro Bemberg™ fibre, made from cotton linters, is used alongside the finest cottons to produce an original Bazin, the traditional fabric used at African ceremonies, which has a distinctive shine, a bold colour range, and new original weaves… plus an exclusive dog rose fragrance! Superzoom also got the chance to see the company’s commitment to sustainability, ranging from its use of natural yarns such as hemp and nettle and certified artificial fibres to its installation of solar panels, which cover an entire production complex, and its focus on the working conditions of everyone on site.

In addition to manufacturing linings, the company’s core business, Brunello also makes outer and ceremony fabrics, with a vast archive of Jacquard designs that can be reproduced on its brand-new looms for an innovative, sustainable offering that boasts GRS, FSC, GOTS and OEKO-TEX® STANDARD 100 certifications. Finally, traceability is one of the distinguishing features of Brunello’s work: every material entering the company is tracked with a barcode that identifies each stage of the production chain and assigns a reference batch; in this way, every finished piece shows what loom it was made on and when, enabling any defects to be spotted and followed up quickly, saving costs and energy. As the sun went down, we left the village and drove past Varese lake, still enveloped in the scent of dog rose and dreaming of the exclusive fabrics lining our jackets with elegance and discretion, thanks to respectful and cutting-edge fashion.