Despite the strong connections many fashion houses and labels presenting their new collections at Florence’s Pitti have with traditional tailoring and dress-making techniques, rarely did the trade show visitors see any garments being made during the fair. At the latest Pitti, though, things changed thanks to fashion designer Gentucca Bini who took visitors to her own very special workshop.

An architect with a great passion for fashion and a grandmother who used to have her own atelier in via Montenapoleone, in the heart of Milan’s fashion district, Bini worked as creative director for Romeo Gigli before establishing her own label and shop. Her latest project, by Gentucca Bini, is based on an analysis the designer made of the historical, social and economic situation we are living in and it’s inspired by a popular trend that spread at the end of the Second World War when women started modifying their clothes to improve their styles. Bini asks people to take their most cherished garments and designer pieces to her workshop where they can be slightly updated or radically changed, according to the taste of her customers. In this way a garment from the past is customised, re-designed and re-branded and old pieces that may be particularly dear to her customers for their history or the memories they bestowed upon them become fashionable again.

At Pitti’s Dogana Bini recreated a workshop with a row of sewing machine tables and her own team of helpers clad in haute couture coats updating garments by different designers, from Comme des Garçons and Balenciaga to Dolce & Gabbana and Henrik Vibskov. Bini’s project continues in her own atelier in Milan’s via Bordighera 2 where she renovates clothes from individual customers, but also from companies who would like to revalue unsold items or out of fashion stocks, giving them a new life and identity.