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DISEMBODIED LEGS AND FEET! OH NO! Wait a second those are mannequin feet. Nevermind.

I had a very unexpected adventure today. As you know I have been taking a class on Italian fashion, which has been quite informative if a little strange. Today we went on a field trip and her little young son Arlo (an 11 month old baby who seemed to be distressed/amused by my glasses in turns) to the headquarters and factory of Stilnovo, the company of Emilio Cavallini, designer of high quality hosiery, in San Miniato. San Miniato is about 45 minutes away from Florence. We took a train out there, and I chatted with the 5 other girls and Annaluisa*, my teacher, while she tried to restrain her wiggling son. (ps. he is adorable)

So I wasn't really sure what to expect from this field trip. Annaluisa told us that she and her husband had both worked for Emilio Cavallini and had designed for him. So...naturally, I guess...Emilio's very stylish and very Italian son Francesco met us at the factory and gave us a tour. It was...so cool. I'm not even kidding.

 As weird as these photos look, they give you a little glimpse of what the factory offices were like. It was all very sleek, with black shiny furniture and glass and lots of strange leg-themed art. The photos above are not leg-themed art; those are displays of their newest designs. I have to say, even though I'm not a big tights girl, I was enchanted. There were probably 200 different designs on display, not including their men's line. Yes, that's right, they make tights for men.**
Francesco gave us a run down of the company while Arlo crowed and ate a cookie. He -- Francesco, not the baby -- was very personable and talkative, and of course gestured a lot while he spoke. He brought over some sample-clad mannequin legs for us to look more closely at, and when we had finished looking at them he just sort of gestured with them while talking*** (I found this really funny and managed not to giggle). After we'd looked through the fashion catalogs that Francesco handed around, we went for a tour of the actual factory part of the factory.

One never really considers what kind of machinery it takes to make regular, every day things, like tights, for instance.
Apparently it takes machinery that looks like giant spider monsters that hiss and spit at you and occasionally fire knitted stockings through pneumatic tubes.

Spider monster!

All of the stockings are made as single tubes out of white thread. I assumed that they knit together yarn that had already been dyed, but the dyeing actually comes after. Francesco took us back to see the computers that program the knitting machines -- there are 302 needles in each machine, so the armatures (basically patterns) for the stockings are 302 pixels wide. Each pixel represents a stitch!

After we saw the digital side, Francesco showed us the machines that sew two legs together and neatly stitch up the toes. This machine was also a big scary monster, with several moving parts that made interesting clanky noises. 

 Clanky machine! 

After that, we wandered around looking at other interesting parts of the process, up until the packaging stage. Emilio Cavallini makes tights for Zara, Bebe, Louis Vuitton, and several other huge companies. They themselves have only one small company store in Florence, because, as Francesco said, "it's very hard to sell  only stockings all year round.

That was the end of our tour. But that wasn't all.

We got presents.

I have two beautiful new pairs of tights from Emilio Cavallini, thank you very much.

*Annaluisa has probably had the most interesting life ever -- if you're interested in fashion, that is. She was, at one point, teaching in Venice, Florence, and Rome...at the same time. For a year. Why would someone do that to themselves.

**"Once we set up our web store, we noticed that a great many men were buying our products in large sizes. So we started making tights for men...they're selling very well."

***At one point Francesco held out one of the legs for Arlo to feel. He grabbed the toes with a chubby hand, looked up at Francesco, and squeaked. It was cute.