Five coats,
five times one.
Pelèr is our winter: five coats named after the wind that wakes the winter mornings here, on the northern shore of Lake Garda. Each was cut and sewn on its own, from cloth chosen one length at a time.
Dress well to feel well.
Everything else comes after.
natuRa.Ely began when the two of us met. Betty cuts and sews; Raffaella, vegetarian all her life, finds the cloth and draws the garments alongside her. Fast fashion holds nothing for us: a single coat takes weeks of our hands, and that is exactly as it should be.
We work only in true fibres: hemp, nettle, bamboo, lotus, peace silk, pongé silk, linen, cotton, viscose, wool, alpaca and cashmere. We dye by hand, with leaves and roots and the water of this valley. It is how we work — and, in some measure, how we live.
Read our storyPelèr — the five pieces.
Pelèr N° I
Wool, cashmere and alpaca
Pelèr N° II
Wool and cashmere, camel
Pelèr N° III
Wool and cashmere, midnight blue
Pelèr N° IV
Wool and cashmere, taupe
Pelèr N° V
Merino wool, ecoprinted
Five coats, each existing once only, in the size written on its card.
All fiveOne afternoon to see the Pelèr coats.
On Friday 25 September, from 4.30pm, the five Pelèr coats are in our show-room in Arco: try them on, look closely, ask for an alteration.
Friday 25 September,
from 4.30pm
show-room in Arco (TN),
Via delle Monache 4
Twelve fibres.
One rule.
Hemp softens with the years. Nettle breathes like skin. Bamboo falls as lightly as water. Lotus comes from northern Vietnam and is hard to come by at all. Our silk is peace silk: the cocoon is never boiled with the moth still inside. Then linen, cotton, viscose, wool, alpaca and cashmere — each with its season, its way of sitting on the body, its way of growing old.
Silk dyed by hand,
with plants alone.
Walnut leaves give brown, madder root an old red, fresh indigo the blue of the river. The colours come up slowly in the vat, and no two linings are ever alike: plants do not repeat themselves.
Inside the dye studioOne cuts, one chooses.
Betty
The hands, the machine, the thread.
Betty is the one who turns a drawing into a garment. She has sewn by machine and by hand for more than twenty years, and every piece passes through her hands from the first cut to the last finish. A coat, she says, is like a house: without good seams it will not stand.
Raffaella
The eye, the plants, the search.
Raffaella has been vegetarian all her life and holds a deep bond with animals and with the land. She chooses every length of cloth that enters the atelier and draws the garments alongside Betty. She holds to one thing only: that no suffering, of any kind, stands behind a garment.