Ask the communications director of a major French maison where their silk comes from. The answer, if you receive one, will be vague. The factual answer is almost always the same: within fifty kilometres of Como, from the same Brianza workshops that have supplied the couture industry for the better part of a century. The specific quality of Como silk — the precision of the printing, the lustre of the weave, the range of finishing techniques available from a concentrated industrial district — is not reproducible elsewhere at the same scale. When you buy a silk scarf from a major French house or a blouse from a top Italian designer, the fabric has almost certainly passed through a Como mill.
This is not incidental to the local economy. The Como silk district — which includes the city itself and the surrounding Brianza and Comasco areas — employs tens of thousands of people in a cluster of small and medium-sized enterprises that have specialised in different aspects of the production chain over centuries. Throwing (the twisting of raw silk filaments into yarn), weaving, dyeing, printing, and finishing are all represented, often within single families that have operated the same processes for three or four generations.
How Como Became the Silk Capital
Silk production arrived in the Como area in the fifteenth century, when the Sforza rulers of Milan actively promoted the cultivation of mulberry trees and the establishment of silk-throwing mills in their territory. The geography was favourable: the pre-Alpine climate of the lake district provided the cool, humid conditions that silk-throwing machinery required, and the soft water of the alpine streams was ideal for the dyeing processes that gave Como fabrics their colour depth.
By the seventeenth century, Como was producing silk at a scale that gave it European market significance. By the nineteenth century, mechanisation — the Jacquard loom in particular, which allowed complex patterns to be woven automatically from punched card programmes — transformed the scale of production while maintaining the quality. The twentieth century brought synthetic fibres and the democratisation of what had been a luxury material, which challenged Como’s position. The response was to move up the quality chain: Como specialised in exactly the products that synthetics could not replicate — pure silk in high thread counts, complex printing techniques, finishes developed over generations.
The Museum and the Industry Today
The Museo della Seta in Como city is the best introduction to the technical history of silk production — the machines, the processes, the chemistry of dyeing, and the design history of Como fabrics are all covered in a museum that manages to be genuinely informative rather than merely celebratory. The collection of historic printed fabrics spans from the seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth and demonstrates the continuity of certain colour and pattern vocabularies across several hundred years of production.
Some of the Como mills offer factory visits, though the arrangements are typically formal (prior booking, minimum group sizes). The Setificio di Como — a weaving mill that has operated since 1893 and maintains a working Jacquard loom collection alongside contemporary production — is among the more accessible. The relationship between the technical complexity of the equipment and the beauty of the fabric it produces is, in the way of all good manufacturing, both logical and somehow still surprising.
The commercial end of the Como silk industry is concentrated along the Via Vittorio Emanuele II in Como city centre, where several shops sell Como fabrics direct to the public. Prices are lower than equivalent quality in Milanese boutiques; the range of designs available at source is considerably broader. A Como silk tie or scarf purchased on the street that made it has a material honesty that the same object purchased in a London or New York boutique cannot quite replicate.
Photo: Evan Verni on Unsplash
