The Hands Behind the Arrows

The pattern cutter stands at a wide table in Off-White's Milan atelier, a half-finished bomber laid flat before her. Silvia Moretti has been making this jacket, in one form or another, since 2019. The diagonal stripes that cross the sleeves — black grosgrain tape against technical nylon — must align at the shoulder seam within two millimetres. Any more and the graphic breaks. Any less and the sleeve won't move.

She cuts the tape by hand. A machine would be faster, but machines don't account for the way nylon stretches under tension or how the tape will sit once the garment is worn. Moretti learned this working for a parachute manufacturer outside Bergamo. She joined Off-White three years after Virgil Abloh's death, when the house was still sorting through what it meant to continue without him.

The bomber she's working on will appear in the Spring 2025 collection. It looks, at first glance, identical to the one that appeared in Spring 2018. The difference is in the shoulder construction. The new version uses a raglan sleeve with an internal stay tape that prevents the stripe from distorting when the wearer raises their arm. Moretti spent four months working that out.

"Virgil's pieces were about the idea first," she told Business of Fashion last year. "But the idea only works if the garment works."

Training Ground

Moretti trained at Istituto Marangoni in the early 2000s, then spent a decade in sportswear. She worked for a technical outerwear brand that supplied Italian ski teams, where she learned to build garments that had to perform under load. Pattern cutting for performance is different from cutting for fashion. A ski jacket has to articulate at the shoulder and elbow without adding bulk. The seams have to lie flat under a harness. The fabric has to stretch in one direction and hold firm in another.

When she arrived at Off-White, the house was still operating out of a shared studio in Milan's Porta Genova district. The design team was small. The atelier was smaller. Most of the production happened elsewhere — cut-and-sew facilities in Portugal, knitwear in Italy, graphic work farmed out to print houses across Europe. Moretti's job was to translate the design team's sketches into patterns that could be produced at scale without losing the graphic precision that defined the brand.

The diagonal stripe, Off-White's most recognisable motif, is harder to execute than it looks. The stripe has to read as continuous across seams, which means the pattern pieces have to be cut and aligned with the kind of exactness normally reserved for checks or plaids. A twill check is woven into the cloth. The stripe is applied after the fact. If the seam allowance is off by even a few millimetres, the stripe breaks and the whole garment reads as cheap.

Moretti developed a template system. Each pattern piece is marked with registration points that correspond to the stripe placement. The cutter uses these points to align the tape before it's sewn down. It's a simple solution, but it works. The bombers that leave the atelier now have stripes that align within a millimetre.

The Signature Piece

The bomber itself is a MA-1 silhouette, the same flight jacket the U.S. Air Force issued from the 1950s through the 1980s. Abloh used it because it was legible. Everyone knows what a bomber jacket is. The diagonal stripe and the zip-tie tag were enough to make it read as Off-White without altering the underlying form.

But the house's version is not a replica. The original MA-1 was made from nylon twill with a polyester filling and a knit collar, cuffs, and waistband. It was designed to be worn over a flight suit in an unpressurised cockpit. Off-White's version is made from a lighter nylon with no insulation and a slimmer cut through the body. The sleeves are longer. The ribbing is tighter. The zipper is a YKK Excella, the same hardware used on high-end luggage.

Moretti worked with a trim supplier in Lombardy to source the grosgrain tape. The original tape, used in the early collections, was a standard 25mm petersham ribbon. It worked, but it frayed at the edges and the colour wasn't consistent across dye lots. The new tape is a custom weave, 28mm wide, with a tighter thread count and a bonded edge that doesn't fray. The black is now a true black, not the slightly greenish cast that showed up under certain lights.

These are small changes. Most customers won't notice them. But they add up. The jacket that leaves the atelier now is more durable, more consistent, and easier to produce at scale than the one that debuted in 2018. It still looks like the same jacket.

The Next Chapter

Off-White's creative direction is now shared. Ibrahim Kamara, the British-Sierra Leonean stylist and editor, was appointed art and image director in 2023. Ib Kamara, as he's known, came from Dazed, where he spent years shaping the magazine's visual identity. His work is more concerned with narrative and atmosphere than with technical garment construction, which means the atelier has had to adapt.

Moretti now works more closely with the styling team. A jacket that looks right on a hanger doesn't always photograph well, and a jacket that photographs well doesn't always move the way a customer expects. The Spring 2025 collection included a version of the bomber with an oversized fit and dropped shoulders, styled with the sleeves pushed up to the elbow. It looked good in the lookbook. It didn't work in the fitting. The sleeves were too long, the shoulders too wide. The stripe broke when the fabric bunched.

Moretti rebuilt the pattern. The new version has a shorter sleeve and a narrower shoulder, but it's cut with enough ease that it still reads as oversized when styled the same way. The stripe now stays intact even when the sleeve is pushed up. It's a small fix, but it took three rounds of sampling to get right.

She's currently working on a version of the bomber in a washed cotton canvas, which presents a different set of problems. Canvas doesn't have the same recovery as nylon. It creases. It fades. The stripe, applied with the same grosgrain tape, sits differently on the surface. Moretti is testing a twill tape instead, which has more body and holds its shape better on a matte ground.

The collection is due in six months. She has four prototypes on the table, each with a slightly different tape width and placement. One of them will work. The rest will go back into the archive, another iteration in a process that's been running since 2019.

The jacket will still look like an Off-White bomber. The customer won't see the difference. But Moretti will know the stripe is two millimetres closer to perfect than it was last season, and that's enough.