Who’s behind Knitwear production? Meet the people who actually make it.
January ‘26
My name is Maddalena, I’ve worked in knitwear for over thirty years. I run the quality control at my family’s knitwear factory, Reani e Zago in northern Italy. From the outside, fashion looks like creativity and runways. On our side, fashion is made of wash tests, shrinkage checks, drying times and prototypes that are knitted, washed and adjusted until they finally work.
Over the years, we have produced for both small labels as well as major brands, such as Chanel, Hermès, Loewe, Gucci. Knitwear is different from other types of textiles as it has a fundamental manual component in its production process.
Nowadays there’s talk about a fashion crisis, but the real stress happens much earlier - in the supply chain. There are too many steps between the idea and the finished product, and timelines and costs that no longer fit the rhythm of the market.
In the middle of that chain sits the prototype. This is where mistakes happen and where ideas prove whether they work or not. In the world of knitwear, if a prototype fails you throw the product away together with the yarn. If we could cut even one prototype round, this would make a huge difference: it shortens timelines, reduces waste and brings design closer to reality. Me and my team with many years of experience know how to predict and avoid extra rounds of production, but that kind of skill can’t be built quickly and needs time to be developed.
There’s also another important figure in our industry that only few people know about: the Programmer. Programmers work on CAD software, adjusting stitches and tensions so a design can run on a knitting machine. When a piece of product arrives to me, we check it together.
It’s an always-on dialogue between machine and human hand. Technology alone can’t do it, and experience alone can’t keep it up.
From my point of view, it would be interesting if artisans and manufacturers could have more visibility on the whole production and a shared value with fashion brands.
In the current Italian knitwear, the companies that are successful do one simple thing: they pay more. Not out of generosity, but because the real capital here isn’t machinery, it’s people. The Made in Italy is paying the price for the gap between perceived value and real value. The skills are there, among the manufacturers' workers, but the incentives to keep these talents aren’t enough. Fewer young people are willing to get manual jobs that require precision, patience and offer limited income and little recognition. Without new talent, family businesses struggle.
I believe we need to rethink the supply chain process: this means making fewer prototypes, and getting product design and production closer. We also need a better alignment between ideas and execution.
Studioforma points in that direction. It gives visibility to manufacturers on the whole process, and gives designers the possibility to work with the technical reality of their ideas. It brings together experience and designers’ new digital skills. That’s where value is created, and where it makes sense to share it.
