natuRa.Ely is a slow-fashion atelier in Arco, on Lake Garda. Since 2018 every garment has been cut and sewn here, in natural fibres dyed with leaves, roots and bark. We have no wish to be a fashion house — only a trade carried on by two people, with one stubborn idea: that dressing well should not send the real bill to somebody else, an animal, a river, or a person on the other side of the world.
Betty and Raffaella met at school: both of them nursery teachers. But Betty had always had sewing in her hands — evenings spent cutting, dyeing silk with plants, trying and trying again. With Raffaella beside her, that habit turned into a trade.
In 2018 came the small atelier on Lake Garda. No business plan: a tape measure, a sewing machine, a notebook of drawings.
And so it has stayed. Three collections a year, a handful of numbered pieces, customers who come back season after season. Growing fast holds no interest for us: we would rather sew well. One garment at a time, for as long as our hands hold out.
Wool, alpaca, cashmere and silk come from certified supply chains where the animals are looked after one by one. Our silk is peace silk: the moth is allowed to leave the cocoon, and only then is the thread taken. It costs more. To us it is worth it.
Every dye is a plant dye: leaves, roots, bark, fresh indigo. To fix the colour we use alum and natural tannins. Spent dye water goes onto our own vegetable beds, never into a river.
A well-sewn coat can live for decades, and some marks of time are only natural. If one day your garment is damaged, send it back to the atelier: we look at it and we mend it. Selling a garment, for us, is taking on an obligation — not closing a sale.
“Fast fashion is not thrift. It is a bill somebody else pays for us.”Raffaella
There is no design office and no workroom apart from it: there is one large table by the window, and the two of us.
Sewing, cutting, dyeing.
Every coat passes through her hands entire: from the first cut to the last finish, nothing is sent out to be done.
She knows linen asks for one stitch, wool another, silk another again. And she makes the colour herself: leaves, roots and bark turned into dye.
Fabric sourcing, drawing, shops.
Vegetarian all her life, she understood early that every purchase is a choice — about how one lives, and about who else gets to.
She finds the cloth one length at a time: she writes to the mills, asks for the certificates, goes to see for herself. Only if the chain convinces her does the fabric come into the atelier.
Then she draws with Betty, at the large table by the window, and takes the garments to the right shops — few of them, chosen as carefully as the cloth.
