Venice is a city that — if you ignore cranes holding up sinking buildings and skyscraper-sized cruise liners out at sea — still looks much as it did in centuries gone by. Wooden gondolas ply the waterways on which candlelight from palazzos flicker. Men in polished handmade shoes sip espressos in tiny bars and, at night, elegant elderly women carry sensuous little velvet evening bags embellished with silk embroidery.
Although it’s less well known than Venetian gondolas and espresso, velvet is inextricably linked with the city. In the 1500s, a fifth of the local population was employed in its manufacture. The fabric was the ultimate symbol of status, wealth, sophistication and worldliness. There was no other cloth anywhere that was anything like as valuable, and the Venetian Republic was where the finest velvet on earth was made — in attics and factories, backrooms and halls, which reverberated day and night with the clatter of looms and the chatter of weavers.
Which is why today it’s astounding that there is just one manufacturer in the world that still produces handmade silk velvet: Bevilacqua.
The company has been making velvet since the 1400s, when its fabrics swathed the bodies of courtiers and clergymen across Europe (look up the 1499 painting The Arrest of St Mark from the Synagogue by Giovanni Mansueti: one of the men depicted, in a velvet toga, is Giacomo Bevilacqua). Remarkably, given the recent acquisition of some of the most fabulous palazzos across Venice by hoteliers, the Bevilacqua family has managed to hold on to its headquarters beside the Grand Canal, which for centuries has housed its collection of the fabric and the machines that made it.
Today you can step off a boat and through an enormous weather-beaten door enter a world that’s looked pretty much the same for generations. Within a double-height room crammed with shelves of punched pattern cards, barbarous-looking tools and thousands of wooden spools of coloured silk, there are also rows of some of the world’s oldest working looms. Thanks to the dedication of the family who have maintained the craft, all of them still work.
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Some of the looms, hewn from oak and bearing scars of hundreds of years of industrial battering, were rescued in 1806 from the Serenissima Silk School, which Napoleon closed to protect the production of fabric in France; others are later 19th-century wooden constructions. When the factory’s small team of weavers are in full motion — paddling wooden pedals with their feet while pushing wooden spools across an intricate web of thousands of gossamer threads — the space throbs with the age-old sound of traditional fabric-making.
Away from the clanking, in the company’s colourful little jewel of a showroom, the kingpin of the company, Alberto Bevilacqua, explains some of the complexities of velvet-making. To weave a piece of fabric, he says, first the loom has to be set up according to the chosen pattern — which, on these machines, consists of a spool of linked, punched cardboard cards, invented by a Frenchman named Jacquard (after whom the patterned fabric was named) and which laid the foundation for modern-day computer programming. Next, the taut “warp” threads — of which there might be 15,000 — have to be hung down across the width of the loom. Finally the threads for the horizontal “weft” have to be wound around the shuttles, ready for the weaver to use. Just setting up the threads on one loom to make one pattern, Alberto says, can take three weeks.
Only once that’s done can the weaver sit at the loom — for a maximum of five hours a day, because it’s such physically demanding work — sending the shuttles backwards and forwards and clamping each horizontal silk thread in place to slowly build up the fabric. To make about 30cm of silk velvet, he explains, takes about a day. Fifty metres could take as much as a year. This explains the prices: from about €5,000 for half a metre of single-hued velvet (which is sometimes strengthened with linen or cotton threads for upholstery) to €40,000 for a complicated, multicoloured pattern over several metres, such as that ordered by the Kremlin for its chairs.
But what you’re getting, he says — bringing out an exquisite, complex sample in which the shimmering gold-silk background is flat and woven and the rich red foreground pile thick and raised — is “an ancient art form, with every millimetre controlled by the human brain”.
By using the 3,500 or so patterns in its archive, the company can reproduce rich red lion-embossed velvets that hung in 15th-century Venetian palazzos, the art-deco patterns once popular in Paris, or the golden tiger-skin designs beloved of Mariah Carey and Iris Apfel for furnishings in their New York apartments. For designers such as Valentino, Dior and Dolce & Gabbana, Bevilacqua can turn out bespoke rolls of rich fabric for couture. And given the right budget, it can also create an original fabric, as it did for the Chinese designer Yiqing Yin, who wanted a dress inspired by a scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This required the weavers to not only set up the looms in configurations that hadn’t been done for 50 years, but also to create an entirely new set of patterns from scratch.
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The dozen or so weavers — all women, Alberto says, “because they are very patient and diligent and like the intellectual stimulation of this very fine work” — mostly sit with earphones on, listening to the radio or music. But it can’t be too loud, he insists. “With these ancient machines, you have to be very attuned. If something goes wrong, you need not only to see it, but hear it. These looms have their own music. This isn’t a factory; it’s a place we make art.”
luigi-bevilacqua.com
Visits to Bevilacqua can be made only by appointment through a tour operator such as scottdunn.com
