Tela Genova

Tela Genova starts with a fabric, not a collection. As early as 1515, the blue cotton fabric appeared in Genoa, which later became jeans via the French term "Gênes" – denim, the cloth from Nîmes, only appeared centuries later and is still confused with it today. It was woven for sails and workwear, in natural tones, before indigo established itself as the defining blue. The world's oldest surviving jeans, Giuseppe Garibaldi's trousers, are still kept in the Museo del Risorgimento in Rome.

The Caucci family builds on this history. Alberto Caucci traded fabrics, his son Ugo founded the family's first clothing brand in 1976. Cristiano Caucci, who grew up in the family warehouse in the nineties, took over the Tela Genova brand, founded in 1982, in 2010 – and recognized in it the continuation of his own history.

Every design begins in the archive: old photographs of dockworkers, catalogues, preserved garments. This is how the Romolo, the brand's first pair of trousers, came into being – a semi-sartorial five-pocket trouser made of Japanese Kuroki selvedge denim, designed with the knowledge that the Genoese fabric outlasted the five-pocket construction by centuries. Only selvedge denim is used, in a production process that dates back to the time before industrial denim.

Frugality is not an afterthought, but a starting point: producing less, but creating pieces that last as long as they used to.