The Hands Behind the Arrows

Paola Ricci threads a needle through industrial webbing at a cutting table in Orio al Serio, thirty kilometres from Milan. The material is stiffer than grosgrain, softer than seatbelt nylon. She has been sewing it for Off-White since 2016, when the brand's signature belt first moved from prototype to production. The needle breaks twice before she switches to a size sixteen.

"This is not fashion fabric," she says. "It doesn't forgive."

The Off-White industrial belt — two metres of screen-printed webbing, a brushed steel buckle, loose ends left to hang — has appeared on runways, red carpets, and pavement from Paris to Tokyo. It has been copied, counterfeited, and styled over everything from tailoring to pyjamas. But it begins here, in a third-floor atelier that smells faintly of machine oil, where Ricci and three other seamstresses cut, print, and finish each belt by hand.

She learned to sew at her grandmother's table in Bergamo. Curtains first, then her own school uniforms. At seventeen she apprenticed at a leather goods workshop that supplied Prada and Bottega Veneta. She spent eight years stitching bag gussets and reinforcing handle attachments before a former colleague introduced her to Off-White's production manager in 2015. The brand was three years old. Virgil Abloh was still splitting time between Milan and Chicago.

"He wanted something that looked unfinished," Ricci says. "Not raw, but industrial. Like it came from a factory, not a fashion house."

The first samples were actual safety harnesses, sourced from a supplier in Varese that made climbing equipment. Abloh sent them to the atelier with a note: replicate the weight, lose the certifications. Ricci and her team reverse-engineered the webbing structure, then found a mill in Lombardy that could weave polyester to the same 45-millimetre width. The screen-printing came later, after six rounds of samples in which the ink either cracked or bled.

"We tried everything," she says. "Plastisol, water-based, discharge. Nothing stuck properly until we switched to a hybrid ink and pre-treated the webbing with a flame pass."

The flame pass — a split-second exposure to open fire that burns off surface fibres and opens the weave — is still part of the process. Each length of webbing runs through a modified industrial lighter before it reaches the print bed. Ricci operates the lighter herself. She has burned three fingertips over the years, all on her left hand.

The belt's construction is deceptively simple. Two metres of webbing, printed with the words "OFF-WHITE" and a series of quotation marks in Helvetica. A steel buckle, powder-coated in black or silver. Two bar-tack stitches at the buckle attachment, twelve stitches per tack. The loose ends are not hemmed. They are cut with a hot knife, which seals the edge and prevents fraying.

Ricci can finish one belt in eleven minutes. On a good day, she completes twenty-eight. The atelier produces roughly four hundred belts per week during peak season, which runs from September through January. Each belt is inspected twice — once after printing, once after assembly. Reject rate hovers around eight per cent, mostly due to ink inconsistencies or misaligned stitching.

"People think it is easy because it looks simple," Ricci says. "But simple is harder. There is nowhere to hide a mistake."

She is forty-one now, compact and precise in her movements. She wears her own hair in a tight bun and keeps her nails cut short. On the day I visit, she is dressed in black jeans and a grey sweatshirt with no visible branding. The only Off-White piece in the room is a belt hanging from a hook near the cutting table. It is frayed at the edges, the print faded to a pale grey. She made it in 2017.

The atelier itself is small, fluorescent-lit, with four worktables and two industrial sewing machines. One wall is lined with rolls of webbing in black, yellow, and white. Another holds spools of thread, boxes of buckles, and a laminated sheet with assembly instructions in Italian and English. The instructions have not changed since 2016.

Ricci works alongside three other women: Giulia Moretti, who handles screen-printing; Alessandra Conti, who operates the second sewing station; and Marta Bellini, who manages quality control and packaging. All three trained in leather goods. All three were hired within six months of Ricci.

"We are not a big team," Ricci says. "But we know the product."

Moretti, the youngest at thirty-four, learned to screen-print at a textile studio in Brescia. She came to Off-White from a sportswear supplier that printed technical fabrics for Arc'teryx and Salomon. She prints each belt individually, by hand, using a single-colour screen and a rubber squeegee. The setup is manual, the registration marks are eyeballed. She can print forty belts in an hour if the ink is warm and the screen is clean.

"It is not fine art," she says. "But it is not careless either."

Conti, who sits at the second sewing station, worked for a decade at a bag manufacturer in Treviglio. She specialises in bar-tack stitching, the reinforced stitch used at stress points on luggage and military gear. Each bar-tack on an Off-White belt contains exactly twelve stitches, locked in a tight zigzag pattern. She sets the tension manually, adjusting for webbing thickness and buckle weight.

"If the tension is wrong, the buckle pulls," she says. "If it is too tight, the webbing puckers."

She has sewn an estimated thirty thousand belts since 2016. She does not own one herself.

Bellini, the eldest at forty-nine, inspects each finished belt under a daylight lamp. She checks for print alignment, stitch count, and edge sealing. Belts that pass inspection are rolled, tagged, and packed in Off-White's signature polythene bags. Belts that fail are set aside for rework or disposal. Nothing is sold as a second.

"People do not buy this belt because it is perfect," Bellini says. "But it has to be consistent."

The atelier's future is uncertain. Off-White's parent company, LVMH, acquired the brand outright in 2021, two years after Abloh's initial partnership. Since Abloh's death in November of that year, the label has operated under the creative direction of Ib Kamara, with increasing pressure to streamline production and reduce costs. The industrial belt remains in the collection, but order volumes have dropped by thirty per cent since 2022.

Ricci does not speculate about what comes next. She threads another needle, aligns another length of webbing, sets another buckle. The work is the same as it was in 2016. The hands are the same. The belt, for now, is still hers.