Milan's Quiet Fashion Week, and the Tuscan Workshops Behind the Cloth

Milan fashion week closed this week with the foreign press largely agreed on a single word: restraint. The Guardian's fashion desk noted that the Max Mara catwalk offered well-cut coats, sturdy block-heeled boots and capacious suede handbags, and that what it quite deliberately did not have was shock value. Prada, the same paper reported, built its collection around skirts rather than trousers or dresses, with Miuccia Prada and the Belgian designer Raf Simons working their familiar formula again.

For readers in Tuscany the interesting question is not what walked the runway but what it was made of. The region's leather tanneries and textile mills, clustered around Florence and the Arno valley, are the quiet industrial base beneath a good deal of Italian luxury output, and a season built on coats, suede and cut leather is a season that keeps those workshops busy.