Key takeaways
- Made in Italy means seventy percent of the world’s luxury fashion goods are produced in Italy, by a network of thousands of small manufacturers no other country has replicated at this scale.
- Family-owned Italian brands — among them Canali, Kiton, Fratelli Rossetti and Brunello Cucinelli — have built their entire business model around keeping production in Italy and are actively investing in training the next generation of artisans.
- The real threat to “Made in Italy” is a workforce gap. Italian fashion will need seventy thousand new workers over the next five years, and around half of those positions may go unfilled.
Midway through Milan Fashion Week SS27, it emerged that Gucci’s new Drip sneaker — Demna’s first for the house — carries a “Made in China” label. The shoe is part of the Primavera collection, retails at €800 in Europe, and was produced in China for what Gucci described as “technical reasons linked to the shoe’s design.” A second slip-on from the same collection carries the same label.
For a brand born in Florence, the detail was hard to ignore and even harder to stomach. But Gucci’s commercial reality is what it is: sales have halved over three years, and Demna was hired to fix that.
The technical justification only stretches so far. Is the “Made in China” label a deliberate provocation, a branding statement rather than a necessity? Does a steep price tag hold when the product is made in China, and will the consumer think it does? Is the Drip aimed mainly at the Chinese market?
And then, probably, the most important question of all: what are Italian fashion brands without “Made in Italy”?
What does “Made in Italy” really mean?
Seventy percent of the world’s luxury fashion goods are produced in Italy. Carlo Capasa, President of the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana, put that figure on the table at the RLC Fashion Summit in Milan this June. “Every brand that wants to produce something luxurious, high-end, comes to Italy,” he said. “This is because the industry is strong. It’s fragmented but very strong, very unique, made of many, many artisans. Ninety-two percent of our industry is companies with fewer than ten people.”
A network of thousands of highly specialized producers — in leather goods, textiles, footwear, tailoring — has built a tradition of Italian craftsmanship that no other country has fully replicated. Italy’s fashion industry is expected to generate approximately €94 billion in 2026 and directly and indirectly employs 1.2 million people, according to CNMI data, with exports accounting for roughly 90% of that total. The world, not Italy, is the industry’s primary customer.
“Other countries do not have these complete supply chains anymore,” Stefania Lazzaroni, CEO of Altagamma, observed at the same event. “That’s why we need to promote and protect these kinds of jobs in Italy.”
But the economic argument is only part of it. “Italian brands didn’t export only product,” Capasa explained. “We export a lifestyle. People bought one Italian garment because it represents something unique, special; but also it represents a way of living.” Armani, Versace, Prada, Fendi, Gucci, Valentino, and so many others, became global names not purely because of cut and finish, but because they sold an entire way of life.
For Capasa, the stakes could not be higher. “If we lose that, we are lost.”
Craftsmanship as commitment
Across Italy, thousands of companies have built their entire business around the commitment to produce at home, and many have done so for generations. Fratelli Rossetti has been making shoes by hand in Parabiago, outside Milan, since 1953 — founded by Renzo Rossetti and today run by his three sons, who have never moved production. Brunello Cucinelli, based in the medieval hamlet of Solomeo in Umbria since 1978, has kept all production in Italy and built a free School of Arts and Crafts at its headquarters to train future craftspeople.
Canali, approaching its centenary, manufactures 70% of its output internally, with the remainder sourced from Italian suppliers. “Italian brands have a very important feature — heritage — and a passion for quality craftsmanship and quality of fabrics used in every single production,” Stefano Canali, the company’s CEO, said at the RLC Fashion Summit in June. Independence, he argues, is what makes that commitment sustainable. “Family-owned and family-managed companies have mid- to long-term goals,” he said, “because they allow you to set goals and pursue the same goals consistently over time.”
Kiton, based outside Naples, once again makes the case for craftsmanship. Three hundred and fifty tailors sew by hand every day in its Arzano workshop. In 2000, founder Ciro Paone opened a free Scuola di Alta Sartoria — a three-year tailoring school admitting students between sixteen and twenty-one, around 80% of whom go on to work in the industry. The concern at the time was generational: the average age of Kiton’s artisans was fifty-five, and the craft had few young people entering it. Today, the school has brought that average down to thirty-six.
The institutional response has been sharpening alongside these individual efforts. In July 2026, the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana launched Il Bello della Moda, the first observatory dedicated to measuring the systemic economic, social and cultural value of Italian fashion and craftsmanship, produced with McKinsey. Altagamma has built its own case around the National Day of Made in Italy, held each April 15. Its 2026 edition centered on Noi, Made in Italy, a campaign that placed the people behind the products, rather than the products themselves, at the center of the argument. Last April, fifty-six Altagamma brands opened across more than forty-five Manhattan stores for Icons of Italy, with master artisans working live alongside workshops and demonstrations.
What the future holds
Stefania Lazzaroni put a number on the challenge: Italian fashion will need seventy thousand new workers over the next five years, and around half of those positions may go unfilled. The supply chain that makes Made in Italy what it is — thousands of small manufacturers carrying skills that cannot be automated or easily replaced — depends on young people choosing to keep those traditions alive.
Seventy percent of students at Italy’s leading fashion schools already come from other countries. The world has not lost faith in what Italian fashion represents. The question is whether Italy can sustain the human infrastructure required to keep representing it.
The debate is clear and it is here to stay. Every production decision a brand makes is a statement about what it values. And what it is prepared to let go.
