The Hands Behind the Arrows
Luca Benini is crouched beside a cutting table in Off-White's Milanese atelier, smoothing a length of cotton twill with the flat of his hand. The fabric is white. It will not stay that way. Benini has been with the house since 2016, back when Virgil Abloh was still running the brand from a rented studio in Via Ariberto, and his job — then and now — is to make the diagonal stripes land exactly where they need to.
"People think it's printed," he says, not looking up. "It's sewn."
The stripe is Off-White's most recognisable gesture. Four black lines, each about two centimetres wide, running from shoulder to hem at a forty-five-degree angle. It appears on hoodies, trousers, bags, and the occasional trench. It is, in the language of the house, both a signature and a structural device. And it is Benini's problem to solve.
He trained at the Istituto Marangoni in the early 2000s, worked briefly for Prada, then spent five years in a small tailoring workshop off Corso Buenos Aires. The work was traditional — two-piece suits, mostly, with the occasional wedding commission — and he left because he wanted to build something that did not involve vents and lapels. Abloh hired him to handle production on the first proper Off-White collection, Spring 2014, which included a white bomber jacket with the stripes applied by hand. Benini cut each one from bias tape, pinned it, and stitched it down with a straight stitch. It took six hours per jacket. They made twelve.
"Virgil wanted it to look industrial," Benini says. "But he also wanted it to move."
The stripe has since been refined. The house now uses a programmable sewing machine that can follow a diagonal line without a guide, but Benini still oversees every sample. The placement matters. On a hoodie, the stripes start at the left shoulder seam and terminate at the right hip, which means the angle shifts slightly depending on the size. A small needs a steeper rake than an extra-large, or the proportions collapse. Benini works this out on paper first, then on a muslin toile, then on the final garment. He does not use software.
"You can see it when it's wrong," he says. "The eye knows."
The woman who does the zips
Sara Lombardi handles hardware. She joined Off-White in 2018, after a decade at Slam Jam, where she managed product development for a rotating cast of streetwear labels. Her job at Off-White is to make sure every zip, rivet, and buckle behaves the way it is supposed to. This is harder than it sounds.
The house uses a custom zip pull — a small metal tag stamped with the Off-White logo and a red plastic tab that hangs from a short length of nylon cord. The pull is functional, but it is also a branding exercise, and it appears on nearly everything the house makes. Lombardi sources the components from three different suppliers: the metal tag from a manufacturer in Brescia, the plastic tab from a factory outside Bergamo, and the cord from a narrow-goods specialist in Como. She then sends all three to a workshop in Carpi, where they are assembled by hand and attached to YKK zips in whatever length the garment requires.
"We go through about forty thousand units a year," she says. "And every single one has to be the same red."
The red is Pantone 1788 C, which is close to but not identical to the red used in Off-White's logo. The difference is deliberate. Abloh wanted the hardware to feel slightly off, as though it had been pulled from a different context and repurposed. Lombardi's job is to make sure the off-ness remains consistent, which means she checks every batch against a physical swatch and rejects anything that skews too orange or too pink. She estimates she has sent back about fifteen per cent of all shipments.
"It's a small thing," she says. "But if the zip is wrong, the whole garment feels wrong."
The man who makes the belts
Matteo Graziano works in leather. He is based in a small workshop in the Porta Romana district, about twenty minutes south of Off-White's main studio, and he has been making the house's signature industrial belt since 2017. The belt is two metres long, made from seatbelt-grade webbing, and finished with a chrome-plated buckle and a rubberised Off-White logo. It is, by most measures, absurd. No one needs a belt that long. But it sells.
Graziano trained as a cobbler in the 1990s, working for a series of small ateliers that specialised in bespoke footwear. He moved into accessories in 2005, when a friend asked him to help develop a range of leather goods for a now-defunct Milanese brand. The work was technically straightforward — belts, wallets, cardholders — but it taught him how to think about hardware as structure. A good belt, he says, is not just a strap with a buckle. It is a system.
"The buckle has to lock without sliding," he says. "The webbing has to hold tension without stretching. And the whole thing has to feel like it could survive a car crash."
Off-White's industrial belt uses a military-spec buckle sourced from a supplier in Germany. The webbing is Italian, woven from polyester and nylon in a two-to-one ratio, which gives it enough stiffness to hold its shape but enough flex to thread through belt loops. Graziano cuts each belt to length, heat-seals the ends, and attaches the buckle with a bar-tack stitch that can withstand about two hundred kilograms of pull. He then adds the rubberised logo, which is screen-printed onto a small patch of nylon and sewn onto the belt about thirty centimetres from the buckle. The placement is specific. Too close to the buckle and it disappears into the waistband. Too far and it flaps.
"Virgil was very particular about the flap," Graziano says. "He wanted it to move, but not too much."
The belt has been reissued in several colourways — yellow, red, grey — but the construction remains the same. Graziano makes about five hundred units per season, all by hand, working from a small table in the back of his workshop. He does not use a sewing machine for the bar-tack stitch. He finds it more reliable to do it manually, with a heavy-duty needle and a pair of pliers.
"It takes longer," he says. "But it doesn't come apart."
What happens next
Off-White is now under the creative direction of Ib Kamara, who took over in 2023. The house is still based in Milan. The stripes are still sewn. The zips are still Pantone 1788 C. And the belt is still two metres long.
Benini, Lombardi, and Graziano are all still in place. They report to a production manager named Claudia Moretti, who joined the house in 2021 and oversees a team of about thirty artisans scattered across northern Italy. The work has become more systematised — there are now technical packs for every garment, with detailed instructions for placement, stitching, and finishing — but the fundamental process has not changed. The stripes are still positioned by eye. The zips are still checked by hand. And the belts are still bar-tacked one at a time.
"People think streetwear is fast," Moretti says. "But this stuff takes time."
The house is currently developing a new version of the industrial belt with a quick-release buckle, which Graziano describes as "a nightmare" to engineer. The buckle has to lock securely enough to hold the belt in place but release with a single pull, and it has to do this reliably across a range of sizes and tensions. He has been testing prototypes for six months.
"We'll get there," he says. "But it won't be quick."
Benini is working on a new placement for the diagonal stripes, this time on a tailored coat. The angle is shallower — closer to thirty degrees than forty-five — and the stripes run from the collar to the hem, which means they have to navigate the sleeve head and the waist suppression without breaking. He has made four toiles so far. None of them work.
"It's the same problem as always," he says. "The eye knows."
