## The Hands That Sew Sicily

The Hands That Sew Sicily

Giuseppina Randazzo threads a needle in a third-floor workroom in Milan. She is sixty-two. She has been with Dolce & Gabbana for twenty-nine years. The garment in front of her is a black lace dress, the kind that appears in every third editorial featuring the house. She will spend the next forty hours attaching the lace to its silk lining by hand, one stitch every three millimetres. Her name does not appear on the label.

Neither does that of Antonio Calascibetta, who cuts the toiles for Dolce & Gabbana's tailored jackets, or Franca Vitale, who embroiders the gold filigree that winds through the house's evening pieces. These are not anonymous craftspeople in a supply chain. They are named employees, working in ateliers that Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana visit daily. But the fashion press rarely names them, and the house itself, for all its talk of Sicilian heritage and artisan tradition, has been slow to make them visible.

This is changing. Not out of altruism, but necessity. The generation that trained in the eighties and nineties is retiring. The skills they hold—hand-finishing a buttonhole so it lies flat against bemberg lining, setting a sleeve so the jacket moves with the body rather than against it—are not taught in fashion schools. They are taught in rooms like Randazzo's, over years, and only if someone is willing to learn.

The Lace Dress

The black lace dress is a signature piece for Dolce & Gabbana. It has appeared, with minor variations, in nearly every collection since 1987. The lace is Chantilly, sourced from Calais. The silk lining is Italian, milled in Como. The construction is Sicilian, which means it is built to last and to move.

Randazzo learned the technique from her mother, who worked as a dressmaker in Palermo. She joined Dolce & Gabbana in 1995, when the house was still small enough that Domenico Dolce could walk the atelier floor and know everyone by name. He still does, though the atelier now employs forty-six people.

The process begins with Calascibetta's toile. He has been cutting patterns for the house since 1993. Before that, he worked for Gianfranco Ferré, where he learned to draft a jacket pattern that required no alteration after the first fitting. This is rarer than it sounds. Most tailoring houses expect two or three fittings before a jacket is right. Calascibetta's patterns require one.

For the lace dress, the toile is cut in cotton muslin. It is fitted to a house model, adjusted, and passed to Randazzo. She lays the lace over the silk lining and begins pinning. The lace must align with the body's contours—bust, waist, hip—so that the pattern reads clearly. If the lace shifts even a centimetre, the dress looks unfinished.

She pins for two hours. Then she begins to sew. The thread is silk, the same weight as the lining. The stitches are invisible from the outside. This is the point. The dress should look as though the lace grew onto the silk, not as though it was applied.

Randazzo works alone. She does not listen to music. She does not talk. The room is quiet except for the sound of the needle pulling through fabric.

The Jacket

The tailored jacket is another signature, though it receives less attention than the lace dress. Dolce & Gabbana's tailoring is not Savile Row. It is not meant to be. The jackets are built for a Mediterranean climate and a body that moves. The shoulder is natural, the chest is close, and the skirt is short. The cloth is usually a lightweight worsted, 10oz or less, sometimes linen.

Calascibetta cuts the jacket in the same way he cuts the dress: by hand, on a table, with shears. He does not use a computer. He has tried. He found that the digital patterns lacked the small adjustments—an eighth of an inch here, a quarter there—that make a jacket fit.

The jacket is passed to Vitale, who sets the sleeves. This is the most difficult part of tailoring a jacket. The sleeve must curve forward slightly, following the natural position of the arm. If it is set too far back, the jacket pulls across the chest. If it is set too far forward, it wrinkles at the shoulder. Vitale learned to set sleeves at a tailoring school in Naples in 1981. She has been with Dolce & Gabbana since 1998.

She works with pins first, then thread. The sleeve is eased into the armhole, which means the fabric is gently gathered so that it fits without puckering. This takes an hour per sleeve. Then the sleeve is stitched by machine, and the seam is pressed flat. The pressing is as important as the stitching. A badly pressed seam will never lie flat, no matter how well it was sewn.

The jacket is finished by hand. The buttonholes are cut and stitched by Randazzo, who also finishes the lace dresses. The buttons are sewn by another artisan, whose name the house declined to provide. The lining is attached by machine, but the hem is sewn by hand. This takes another four hours.

The Embroidery

The evening pieces—the gowns that close the runway shows, the jackets embroidered with gold thread and seed pearls—are Vitale's domain. She learned embroidery from her grandmother, who worked for a couture house in Naples that no longer exists. The techniques she uses are not taught anymore. They are passed down, or they disappear.

Vitale works from a drawing, usually provided by Dolce or Gabbana. The drawing is transferred to the fabric with a pounce wheel, a tool that looks like a small spiked drum. The wheel perforates the paper, and chalk is dusted through the holes onto the fabric. The design appears as a faint outline.

She embroiders with a tambour hook, a needle with a hook at the end. The thread is pulled through the fabric from below, creating a chain stitch. This is faster than embroidering with a needle and thread, but it requires a steady hand. If the tension is uneven, the stitches will pucker.

A single gown can take two hundred hours to embroider. Vitale works with two assistants, both of whom she trained. One is thirty-four. The other is twenty-seven. They are the youngest artisans in the atelier.

What Happens Next

Dolce & Gabbana has not been good at succession planning. The house relies on a small group of artisans, most of whom are over fifty. When Randazzo retires, there is no one trained to replace her. Vitale has two assistants, but neither has her speed or her range. Calascibetta has been training a younger cutter, but the apprenticeship takes years, and the house has not committed to keeping the apprentice on staff.

This is not unique to Dolce & Gabbana. Most fashion houses face the same problem. The skills that built the industry are held by a generation that is ageing out, and there is no clear path for younger workers to learn them. Fashion schools teach design and pattern-making, but they do not teach hand-finishing or embroidery. Those skills are learned in ateliers, and ateliers are expensive to run.

The house has begun naming its artisans in press materials, a small shift that suggests a larger recognition. Randazzo, Calascibetta, and Vitale were all named in a recent campaign, though their faces did not appear. It is a start. Whether it leads to a real investment in training the next generation remains to be seen.

For now, the black lace dress is still made by hand, one stitch every three millimetres, by a woman whose name you now know.