Jacopo Etro, Creative Director of the Etro Accessories and Leather, Home and Textile Collections: So, well I think Etro company’s been founded in 1968 and my father founded this company and he basically started with his beautiful textile company where he started selling fabrics to different designers from all over the world, from New York, to London, to Paris. And he was very concerned about quality, about the craftsmanship of his fabrics that had to be designed only by hand, of course in those ages we didn’t have computers to draw.
But the important thing is that we kept this kind of know how and this kind of artisanal way of drawing our designs and not using the computer, which is still very, very important now, nowadays. And everything was based on the paisley design, which has been really what the company has been well known over the years. Overall the quality is still very, very, very important and this is what makes very important--, in Italy what makes so important the textile industry in general. All our designs and prints are done in Italy, all our leather goods are done in Italy and all our clothes are sewn in Italy.
Textiles from Etro are actually--, they really come from everywhere from the world. I mean a lot of the trips that I have done have been a source of inspiration in the sense that I’ve been bringing back swatches and pieces of garments worn by people that are basically peasants or even people from the street, from China, from Burma, from India. And I think a lot of inspirations that Etro has from their collection comes really from all these kinds of garments and also from textiles from the past. And really Etro is about mixing up, so it’s really, really important for us to find sources of inspiration and then to really mix them with something else completely different in order to create something new.