Breaking down tradition
A famous Italian brand forges ahead with biodegradable fashion
If you were to leave a polyester shirt in a field, and return 50 years later to look for it, chances are that if no one had taken it home, you’d find it still lying there. It would be tattered, faded, dirty, creased, but it would be there. If we carry on our current trajectory of production and consumption of new clothes, it is estimated that by 2030 we will have colluded in the creation of 148m tons of waste each year, most of which goes to landfill.
Herno, the clothing company based in Lesa on Lake Maggiore in northern Italy, recently unveiled its Globe collection of clothes made from recycled wool recovered from industrial factories, regenerated Econyl nylon, and natural dyes derived from onion peel, bamboo charcoal, indigo leaves and olives (it is an Italian brand, after all). Most impressively, the company has developed a 20-denier nylon polyamide yarn that will degrade in five years if left exposed. It is used in a quilted bomber in its imminent autumn/winter 2020 collection. The jacket is filled with biodegradable down and even features biodegradable zippers.
“The hope,” says Claudio Marenzi, the president of Herno, “is to be able to overcome the vicissitudes of this moment and continue on this path so that sustainability is the wellstudied and marked path towards safeguarding our territory and, consequently, our planet.”
As boss of Herno — and president of Confindustria Moda, the body that represents the Italian fashion industry, as well as president of Pitti Immagine, the collection of trade shows held annually in Florence — Marenzi is a highly influential figure in the Italian fashion business. Herno was founded in 1948, but since the scruffily elegant Marenzi took the helm at the turn of the century, the company has enjoyed massive growth.
Herno remains foremost an outerwear company. Giuseppe Marenzi, Claudio’s father, lost his job with an aircraft maker after WWII but found work at a raincoat manufacturer, and quickly established his own company with his wife Alessandra Diana, naming it after the nearby River Erno which flows into Lake Maggiore. In the decades that followed, Herno grew steadily, making raincoats and more under its own name and for other brands to label as their own. In the Seventies, the Marenzis expanded into Japan; in the Eighties, the USA. Growth was steady but the third-party business was dwarfing the Herno brand.
When Marenzi Jr took the helm, he wanted to re-establish Herno as a maker rather than a maker-for. Going forward, Herno-branded products would be the focus. He injected youthful energy into the company, redesigned the factory as a “creative building site” and formalised the house style — elements of technical sportswear fused with traditional luxury. And it worked. Between 2007 and 2017, the company’s annual turnover ascended from over €7m to over €90m.
“I didn’t want to make ‘normal’ clothes and therefore I created my personal point of view,” Marenzi says. “It was a message that the male audience immediately caught: fashion coats and double-breasted [closures] with heat-sealing, ultrasound stitching; couture fabrics but with the design of a technical garment.”
Its Globe collection fits with the modern Herno aesthetic of being tech-savvy and styleconscious, but it clearly illustrates how the fashion industry is being forced to adapt to customers’ increasing interest in how and where their clothes are produced, and what impact they make on the environment.
“Transparency and ethics are fundamental principles that should be accepted by the entire fashion supply chain,” says Marenzi. “It is a form of respect for those buying your products.”
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