“Fashion is an education in beauty,” said Caterina Micolano, standing in the unbeautiful gray confines of the Bollate prison on the outskirts of Milan. The president of the Cooperativa Alice, Ms. Micolano oversees the organization’s sewing workshops that train prison inmates and former prisoners in Italian sartorial craft.
“The ‘Made in Italy’ method teaches you that to achieve beauty, you have to master a system of specific techniques,” she said, “to follow certain rules.” For the trainees, those rules can be a pathway to a degree of emancipation, even while they are still incarcerated, and to a career in a fashion industry desperately short of skilled artisans.
Italy, which created its role as the world’s leading luxury fashion manufacturer thanks to its craftspeople, is largely lacking a new generation trained in artisanal fabrication skills. Last year, the Confartigianato association of trade businesses estimated that the country already needed 55 percent more crafts practitioners than it had.
To illustrate Cooperativa Alice’s contribution to a solution, Ms. Micolano entered the sewing workshop in the women’s unit at Bollate, a large room with high windows crosshatched by iron bars. A pair of inmates employed by the program were sitting at a large worktable piled high with the cushion covers they had stitched from pieces of Moroccan rugs.
“We need this rigor,” said Antonietta, one of the inmates, showing off a ruffled tote bag of her own creation, as Elisabeth, the other, pulled out leather-trimmed toiletry kits that she had sewn. (Workshops in Europe often identify workers only by first names.)
“It does us good to hear, ‘Well done, ladies.’ It helps me live” — economically and emotionally, Antonietta added, her eyes tearing.
Wearing a polka-dotted button-down shirt, she waved a pair of fabric scissors around for emphasis as she spoke. Other inmates poked their heads in to see the visitors or milled around in the hall.
Cooperativa Alice was founded in Milan in 1992 to assist female inmates who, Ms. Micolano said, serve a doubly hard sentence in prison — “a place designed by men for men.” In addition to the Bollate program, the nonprofit organization operates a leather atelier at the nearby Monza jail, staffed by male inmates; a seamstress workshop for women fleeing violence and economic uncertainty, at the Vittoria Razzetti Institute in Brescia; and the Sartoria San Vittore, a seamstress shop in Milan that primarily employs women who have finished their prison sentences or are in day-release programs. Clients have ranged from Emporio Armani to the Italian judicial system, for which San Vittore has sewn more than 3,000 judge’s robes.
In the program, current and former inmates are treated with the professional esteem that is owed to proficient seamstresses, Ms. Micolano said, and are paid 1,350 euros ($1,497) a month, with at least three weeks of paid vacation and social security contributions — salaries and benefits similar to those offered in seamstress contracts across Italy, and funded by income from the organization’s sewing commissions.
Volunteer instructors, some from production houses working with Chanel and other premier fashion brands, lead six-month-long courses on the basics of sewing at Cooperativa Alice’s four locations and, for students who show dexterity and promise, additional courses in garment-making and leather craft.
Currently, Cooperativa Alice employs just the two Bollate inmates, although two others are in the training course, and, next month, the prison is opening a new workshop that could accommodate 10. There are a total of 10 other seamstresses and tailors working across its other sites — a small operation that says it has helped more than 450 women over the years.
“It will always be a microbusiness,” Ms. Micolano said, “but the idea is to test out a model that could be replicated in other prisons and institutions — anywhere people in need might find redemption in work that’s valued.”
A Rehabilitation Experiment
Italy’s prison system is chronically overcrowded. A recent report from the Center for Advanced Training in Investigation and Criminology Strategy in Rome states that more than 61,000 detainees are squeezed into spaces designed for 47,000, conditions that in 2013 the European Court of Human Rights already denounced as inhumane and degrading. This summer, spurred by a rising number of inmate suicides, Italian legislators approved a law to ease conditions, although prison welfare advocates said it would create little change.
The Bollate penitentiary opened in 2000 as an experiment in rehabilitation. Separated from the city by walls several stories high, the institution has a liberal, open-cell policy during daytime hours, allowing inmates to move freely within their concrete barracks — the brainchild of its progressive first director, Luigi Pagano. In addition to Cooperativa Alice’s sewing workshop, work opportunities offered to inmates include a plant nursery, teaching garden design and care on a stretch of green in the prison’s inner courtyard; chef and waiter jobs at the InGalera restaurant, which is in the prison but open to the public; and a call center run by a former inmate.
“The prison philosophy here is first and foremost about education and reintegration,” said Giorgio Leggieri, Bollate’s current director. “Work here isn’t obligatory,” he noted, adding, “nor is it underpaid or devoid of the rights workers have in free society — it’s indicative of the dignity of a person, and that changes the atmosphere here at Bollate. This is not a zoo.”
Critics, however, note that training and professional programs for inmates are continually underfunded, even though a 2022 study by the National Council for Economics and Labor in Italy showed that jobs reduced recidivism to less than 2 percent; without work, the reoffender rate was 70 percent. And despite the Italian Constitution’s pledges of social reintegration and employment for the incarcerated, the Antigone prison watchdog organization has reported that less than a third of Italy’s inmates find jobs after their release.
Expertise and Effort
At the San Vittore workshop in Milan, sunlight streamed in on a display case that stood in the entryway, filled with tote bags fabricated for Emporio Armani and Aspesi.
“Here, the women are eased back into life outside of prison,” Ms. Micolano said. “They have training, they have employment, and they have structure.” They also have the support of women, she added, who “know what it means to acquire these skills and do this work, who know what it’s like to be in prison.”
“The rule here is: If it’s anything less than perfect, you unstitch it, and you resew it,” Ms. Micolano said. She was wearing an example of the workshop’s expertise: a tailored cream silk shirt designed by Pina Gandolfi, a former fashion editor, with red piping, fabric-covered buttons and neatly notched pockets — details that require expertise that is rare even among Milan’s custom shirt makers today.
In the main workroom, which had a rainbow of thread spools pegged to the wall and a complaint box on the shelf, several seamstresses in black work aprons sat and sewed, chatting about the afternoon’s lunch and Sunday church above the whir of their machines. Edie, a former inmate taking her needle to a velvet collar, was hailed by the others as the “queen of judges’ robes,” which the women hand-stitch with pleats.
Miri, a beginner with pleats, nodded toward the judge’s robes hanging nearby that she had completed: “Like any job that you finish,” she said, “there’s a nice sense of satisfaction.”
The designer Francesca Rubino was visiting the San Vittore workshop to oversee the production of her Rubino Gaeta clothing line, being made from fabrics that factories had designated as waste. Ms. Rubino said she had sought “a fair-trade supply chain, and they guarantee that here.”
Cooperativa Alice has also spearheaded a two-year-old project called Ethicarei, overseeing a web of sewing workshops throughout Italy, each with its own programs combining craft with employment for prisoners and others in need. The initiative’s workshops have begun sewing for Gruppo Florence, a major fashion producer, since the Supply Chain Act, a European Union directive, recently came into effect in Italy. It makes businesses with more than 500 employees responsible for the environmental and social impact of their entire supply chain, sending fashion companies in pursuit of the kind of equitable and certified workshops that Ethicarei guarantees.
Ethicarei, which promotes itself as Italy’s first ethical-supplier network accredited by the World Fair Trade Organization, has attracted fashion industry power players into its leadership, including Micaela Le Divelec, a former chief executive at Ferragamo. The initiative’s objective is to “experiment with Cooperativa Alice’s model and replicate it in other prisons, but also beyond prisons,” Ms. Le Divelec said, noting that there are also plans for artisan educational opportunities in schools.
Ms. Micolano acknowledged that “Cooperativa Alice is small, but we hope the model will be copied all over Italy.”
As a whole, the country “isn’t training artisans, but needs artisans,” she said.
“This sort of program,” she continued, “should be in effect at prisons in Florence and Veneto — in all of the areas in Italy where fashion is produced.”
She paused, leaning against her desk. “It’s a long process,” she said, “but our concept is a testament to the dignity of meaningful work, and how that work can transform society.”
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