Shear Magic: wool’s journey from Australia to Italy
How a bale of Australian greasy wool weaves its way into some of the world’s most luxurious suits.
Related articles
The drive from Milan to the province of Biella was a fast one, rarely dipping below 160km/h and in the bandwidth of speed that, at home in Australia, means instant loss of one’s driving licence for a year. Sensing my unease, Giovanni slowed down.
I hadn’t come to this part of northwestern Italy to follow in the footsteps of Australian F1 driver Daniel Ricciardo, but to follow the journey of an Australian bale of wool. Biella is a part of the story of so much of what most of us will only ever see as a ‘greasy’ fleece (the term for unprocessed wool) laid out on a classing table, or as a finished suit.
Everything that happens in between is almost a mystery. Why don’t we process wool in Australia? What exactly is it that the Italians do? And why is Italy still at the top of the game?
There are few better people to ask than my driver, Giovanni. At the turn of the the 20th century, Giovanni Schneider’s great-grandfather built textile weaving machines for the Marzotto textile business in northeastern Italy. After the Great War, his son, Giovanni II, secured funding from local textile families and emigrated to Australia, promising to source and export greasy wool on their behalf.
Thus began the GSchneider Group which, in 1950, began to move vertically from mere wool trading to producing wool tops (fibres processed into uniform strands) here in Biella. In the ’90s the Biella plant ventured further into processing, as Italian rivals retreated from the rise of China. The factory is one of only three facilities in Europe that can take a bale of greasy wool and take it through the process of washing, scouring, blending, ‘carding’ (aligning the fibres and removing clumps) and combing. What emerges are slivers of wool that become rope-like wool tops, ready to be delivered to be dyed before being spun into thread.
An interesting (and patriotic) point in the process is that, during the initial washing, lanolin is extracted from Australian Merino. It is on-sold to the cosmetics industry, bringing an additional revenue stream to the Biella plant.
Today, about three-quarters of the world’s wool goes to lower-cost producers in China. Biella’s two remaining plants focus on higher-grade fibres destined for weaving into suit cloths and luxury knits. In fact, familiar luxury names like Brunello Cucinelli, Marzotto, Zegna and Loro Piana all have shares in this facility. Their local competitor is a partnership between Reda and Vitale Barberis Canonico.
Vitale Barberis Canonico cites a history back to 1663, though some have scoffed at this. There’s a great deal of snobbery in these parts, where lineage and prestige matter. Meanwhile, Giovanni Schneider IV was on the mobile phone, orchestrating for me to be picked up by the side of the road to be driven to Trivero, in the Biellese Alps, where he had arranged for me to tour the VBC plant.
Another rapid trip ensued in the hands of a different driver, Silvio. The landscape on the winding ascent was more Switzerland than Italy; there was something unusual about the buildings that I couldn’t put my finger on.
Vitale Barberis Canonico begins dyeing wool tops in large bullet-shaped chambers. Robots place the wool tops into vats that heat them to 70 ̊C; the temperature varies over a three-hour cycle to ensure the dye penetrates. After drying, the wool tops are sent to the spinners who prepare the fibres and twist and turn them into threads.
This is quite an art form – akin to blending grape varieties – as the fibres are mixed between varieties (think Merino, cotton, mohair, cashmere, silk and linen) and colour.
The Vitale Barberis Canonico facility occupies multiple buildings and employs machines, robots and people to produce more than 10 million metres of wool fabric every year.
Between the washing of the wool and the finishing treatments, the process consumes water at the rate of 60 litres per finished metre of fabric. Vitale Barberis Canonico today has a large and extensive water treatment centre adjacent to the plant, but it’s this need for water that largely explains why Biella became the hub of wool textile processing. The water that melts from the Italian Alps is ‘soft’, or low in minerals, and there’s plenty of it.
The plant is very secretive about the names on its machines and the weaving processes they use. Biella province was once home to around 500,000 people; it’s today closer to 200,000. Over the past 20 years, many in the industry have shut up shop or moved offshore, while the two that have remained have had to invest in automation. While they pride themselves on inspecting every metre of cloth at every stage with their own eyes, in time those eyes may be digital.
I was introduced to Michele Papouzzo, head of the cloth design team. Despite the relatively remote location, Michele was impeccably dressed in navy melange pants, belt, white shirt and a double four-in-hand knotted tie on a sky-blue garza weave. This is Italy, of course.
I learned that I had many misconceptions about weaving looms. The types of designs that can be woven in wool are much less complex than those possible with a jacquard loom for silk. More importantly, most of those 10 million metres of wool are done in simple dark blues and greys, varying in weaves and weights. The market for more vibrant wools is minimal.
I was also fortunate to meet Francesco Barberis Canonico, creative director of VBC and, as such, the man behind the very fabric of so many suits from famous designers, including Armani, Versace, Prada, Gucci and Ralph Lauren.
Collected again by Giovanni Schneider, we ascended the mountain farther, stopping by his maternal great-grandfather’s house: Casa Zegna. Ermenegildo Zegna is understandably legendary in these parts, a fastidious man who built not only a business, but a town and a proud culture around textiles and tailoring. His house, mostly boarded up, is maintained by a family foundation. A small walkway still joins the house to the weaving and making factory, operating today much as it always has.
From such a quaint and essentially Italian scene, I wasn’t quite prepared for the blast of Australian ambience I would encounter soon after at the Schneider plant.
As Giovanni opened the factory door, it was almost as though I was in the shearing shed with the shearers and wool classers. There was row upon row of hyper-compressed wool bales, stacked ceiling-high and marked with maps of Australia and stencils like ‘Pomanara Mudgee AusFine’.
The bales are opened in a special machine – so tightly are they compressed, they could injure or kill as they explode apart – and allowed to sit for a few days to air and expand. We moved into the washing room, where a bath resembling a set from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory takes Merino wool and proceeds to wash virtually all of the Australia out of it, forks dipping and lifting the wool in and out of varying temperatures, the process continuing until white and fluffy wool emerges from the other side. The sooty brown water is diverted to another treatment process, where the lanolin is extracted into blue drums to be transported away.
The wools were next sent to a machine that mixes them together to create a uniform staple (cluster of fibres), which will help the spinners to weave an even thread. Then the wool is carded and combed to straighten and align the fibres and remove any vegetable matter that may have remained from the original fleece. As the machines continued running the wool, it began to look like a mane of hair, turned into a loose rope. This was cabled onto large drums, before being compressed into a wool top.
The same process also holds for mohair, cashmere and indeed, the €4 million-worth of vicuña Andean llama wool that had recently been air freighted here from South America. The Schneiders’ plant runs 24 hours a day, six days a week.
As we prepared to leave, I was shown the power plant, a natural gas-operated engine room that generates the power and steam for the factory. The water, soft from the Italian Alps that framed the backdrop, is drawn from aquifers. There is nothing here that we don’t have in Australia; except that the Italians have spent more than 100 years developing and refining their processing methods. Between that and our wool, it’s a formidable and fruitful partnership.
Subscribe to the Newsletter
Recommended for you
Cutting Louche
Lighter, more relaxed, less boring: how to wear the season’s coolest suits.
October 9, 2024
The World’s ‘Most Expensive Bag’ Just Debuted on the Runway in Paris
The 18-karat gold purse, priced at roughly $500,000, made its debut during the Rabanne’s spring 2025 show in Paris.
September 26, 2024
You may also like.
You may also like.
How the Most Rare and Valuable Watches Are Traded Among Elite Collectors
Some of the world’s most interesting watches spend decades being traded privately before we learn about them.
Before social media became the lingua franca of the watch world, there were forums. And on those forums, collectors—especially collectors of vintage Rolex—often traded timepieces amongst each other.
The advent of Instagram in the early 2010s, coupled with the explosion in interest in vintage timepieces, drew attention to this corner of the watch world, and with that attention came increased competition for the finest examples. In the case of six- and seven-figure watches, high-end dealers, like James Lamdin, founder and vice president of vintage and pre-owned watches at Analog:Shift, became trusted intermediaries, negotiating sales for pieces not once or twice but often multiple times as they made the rounds of the collector community.
“There are watches out there that may not be massively rare by reference, but are by example,” Lamdin tells Robb Report. “Tropical patina, ghosted bezel, or celebrity provenance—it’s that watch. When those watches go into a collection, usually it’s with the implicit understanding that they’re valuable and people will want them from you and will make you a profit when you sell them.”
The best dealers have built relationships with collectors around the world and often have first right of refusal when those pieces come back to market. But even still, the most coveted models can still slip through their fingers.
Eric Wind, of Wind Vintage in Palm Beach, Fla., has lost and found some of the world’s most storied watches. In 2015, when he was vice president, senior specialist at Christie’s in New York, Wind came across a “super rare” 1957 Audemars Piguet Ref. 5516 perpetual calendar that had languished in rural Florida until the nephew of the original owner consigned it to Christie’s. The first perpetual calendar wristwatch to feature a leap-year indicator, the piece was one of just nine made by Audemars Piguet in the 1950s. Wind considers it “the one in the best condition.”
He showed it to one of Christie’s better-known clients, Patrick Getreid, owner of the OAK Collection, who purchased it in 2015 for $545,000. In 2023, Getreid consigned it to Christie’s in Hong Kong. That’s when Wind decided to give the piece another shot.
“I had registered to bid on it but at the last minute, I got cold feet,” Wind continues. “It was starting kind of high compared with what Getreide had paid for it. I was bidding remotely from Florida, but when no one else is bidding, you’re kind of wondering if you’re a genius or a fool. Is there something everyone else knows that I don’t? The question was about market value. The watch ended up passing and I purchased it via private sale—or private treaty, as it’s known—after the sale. I had two clients who really wanted it. I offered it to both, but one was more ready to pull the trigger and he got it. It never saw the light of day.” That Audemars Piguet perpetual calendar, Wind says, “remains one of my top five watches on the planet.”
As he reflected on the piece’s winding journey, Wind considered his own role in its comings and goings. “It was fun to be part of the lifecycle of that watch, from when it was discovered in rural Florida and consigned to Christie’s, and then sold to a great collector, who sold it again,” he says. “I imagine it will come back to me at some point. I don’t know if it will be two years from now or 40 years.”
Another grail watch that Wind helped shepherd to a client was an exceptional Paul Newman Rolex Daytona Panda reference 2623 with a full set and a tropical dial that was sold by a small Swedish auction house just under a decade ago. “Another dealer got it,” Wind explains. “I was still at Christie’s, and I fell in love with the watch. This dealer who had it for a year then sold it to an Italian dealer, who then sold it to a collector in Asia. I was tracking the watch on Instagram and saw the collector post it. By that time, I had become a dealer.
“I made an offer to the collector to purchase it on behalf of my client,” he adds. “It had been owned by a Swedish boat captain and had been given to him by the family he worked for, the equivalent of the Rockefellers in Sweden. We had to arrange shipment to the U.S. by Malca-Amit armored transport. Whenever these high-value watches move around, you have to deal with armored shipments, customs, proper transportation, and a lot of paperwork. It takes some time but it’s well worth it.”
Both the AP perpetual calendar and Daytona were original and unpolished—“the kind of watches I look for,” Wind says. “It’s funny how watches circle around. Within the high-end watch world, we’re not talking about thousands and thousands of watches. We’re talking about a relatively small amount of great watches.”
Eric Ku, a high-end vintage dealer in Northern California, certainly knows the drill.
About 15 years ago, he was offered a first-of-its-kind 1996 Rolex Cosmograph Daytona “Rainbow” reference 16599 in white gold on a leather strap.
“I’ve been hunting jeweled Rolexes for a really long time, before it was a cool thing,” Ku, cofounder of the online auction site Loupe This, says. “The watch first surfaced to me around 15 years ago. It was offered to me by a dealer in the Middle East and was coming from, allegedly, a member of a royal family. At the time, the pricing was completely different than it is today. After going back and forth, I offered $130,500 and the seller wanted $136,462. I lost the watch. I was gutted. I’d been stalking the watch. But at the time, relative to the market, it didn’t make sense for me. It was a really tough time, might have been around the financial crisis. I felt confident it would come back to me, but it didn’t.
“Then, in 2012, Rolex introduced its new rainbow Daytona,” Ku says. “I had no doubt about the authenticity of the watch I’d lost out on, but seeing the new rainbow Daytona completely validated me and erased any scintilla of a doubt that I had about the watch. Fast forward a couple years: The watch was offered to me again privately, by a different person in the Middle East at a significant multiple of the original offering—let’s say in the mid six-figures. I bought it.”
In 2017, Ku sold the watch to an important collector based overseas, “a person of very high taste and connoisseurship who appreciated the rarity of that watch,” he says. The collector, by Ku’s reckoning, also appreciated the story of its journey. “Dealers and old collectors always like trading war stories,” he says. “What’s the one thing that got away and then it came back? The collector got sold on the story.”
Now, the watch is coming back to market on Nov. 8 at Phillips Geneva, where it’s being offered in a sale dedicated to neo-vintage timepieces (Reloaded: The Rebirth of Mechanical Watchmaking 1980-1999) and is estimated to fetch in excess of $5.93 million.
“It’s probably the sexiest watch of the season,” Ku says.
You may also like.
Champagne Bollinger Just Released a Limited-Edition, James Bond–Inspired Bubbly
The Champagne Bollinger 007 Goldfinger Limited Edition comes with its own carrying case and glasses.
When it comes to drinks, James Bond may be best associated with a martini—shaken, not stirred, of course. But the secret agent has been known to enjoy a glass or two of bubbly as well.
Champagne Bollinger has long been the Champagne of choice for Bond, and now the house is honouring that relationship with a special-edition bottle that commemorates the 60th anniversary of Goldfinger.
Whether you’re a Bond fan or a Champagne connoisseur, the $5,950 Champagne Bollinger 007 Goldfinger Limited Edition package is meant to appeal to both sensibilities.
The star of the show is the Champagne, of course: Here, Champagne Bollinger is offering a 2007 vintage Magnum, made from hand-picked grapes and aged 17 years in the house’s cellars. Spicy aromas on the nose are contrasted with notes of fruit, brioche, and honey. The Champagne has been packaged in a bespoke Globe-Trotter Air Cabin Case and comes with four Champagne Bollinger 007 glasses in which to enjoy the bubbly. Limited to just 200 individually numbered pieces, it’s a true collector’s item.
Champagne Bollinger has enjoyed a lengthy relationship with the James Bond franchise, dating back to when Roger Moore popped the first bottle in 1973’s Live and Let Die. Since then, the two have become almost inseparable, and Champagne Bollinger is proudly being served at the very first official James Bond bar, which just opened in London. If you can’t snag the limited-edition set for yourself, you can at least imbibe in a glass of the good stuff at the 007 at Burlington Arcade.
That bar and the special Champagne Bollinger package are all part of the festivities celebrating 1964’s Goldfinger. The film and Bond’s ensuing legacy have established him as one of the biggest (fictional) names in the luxury world, with his love of expensive watches, fast cars, and fine spirits.
While it’s unlikely that many of us can channel the special agent when it comes to his escapades and hijinks, we should delight in the fact that we can embrace our inner Bond by sidling up to the 007 bar or throwing back a glass of the Champagne Bollinger 007 Goldfinger Limited Edition. It’s exactly how our favorite M16 agent would want us to honour him.
You may also like.
Golden Touch
Discretion is the better part of glamour at the glittering Maybourne Beverly Hills.
Los Angeles does not want for star wattage, but for years now, the city’s hotel scene has been a little lacklustre. So news that the beloved Montage hotel has been completely redone under the Maybourne brand (the British powerhouse that operates Claridge’s, The Connaught, and Berkeley Hotels in London, and the recently opened Maybourne Riviera on the Côte d’Azur) should come as a boon to Australians looking for a new Tinseltown bolthole.
Situated within Beverly Hills’ famous Golden Triangle, just north of Wilshire Boulevard and Four Season’s Beverly Wilshire, and one block from the world-renowned luxury retailers, restaurants and celeb-spotting of Rodeo Drive, The Maybourne Beverly Hills offers a chic retreat from the designer flexing at its doorstep; a rare escape in the heart of this storied enclave that flies under the radar like a cap-wearing celeb dodging the paparazzi.
Set amid the manicured, Mediterranean-style Beverly Cañon Gardens plaza, which unfolds from the hotel’s west entrance, the new incarnation of Montage Beverly Hills (55 suites and 20 private residences, each with a balcony or patio with a courtyard or city view) still evokes the grand estates of Old Hollywood while feeling like you’re in a European mainstay.
Revealing a restrained new guestroom and suite design by Bryan O’Sullivan, a blue-chip art collection and some of the most solicitous staff in town, the Maybourne speaks in a laid-back Californian accent but still holds true to the luxury touchpoints of five-star service for which one of the world’s most exclusive neighbourhoods—and hotel brands—is known.
“It’s reassuringly British when it comes to service—it’s a culture of yes,” says Linden Pride, the Australian restaurant and bar owner behind the award-winning Caffe Dante in New York and Bobbie’s, the new speakeasy opening this month below Neil Perry’s new Song Bird restaurant in Sydney’s Double Bay (page 40). Pride should know; he lived at the Maybourne for almost a year while he and his partner, Nathalie Hudson, set up Dante, the stunning new restaurant and bar on the hotel’s ninth-floor rooftop. “Looking out from the roof onto lemon and olive trees, it’s easy to forget that you’re in Southern California, not Europe.”
Opened last year, Dante has quickly become one of the hottest reservations in town, luring in celebrities from Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin to the entire Real Madrid soccer team. Like its sister outposts in New York (besides the Greenwich Village original, a West Village location opened in 2020), the focus here is on non-threatening antipasti and aperitivi in a produce-driven menu of fresh familiar stalwarts, with the addition of wood-fired dishes from a giant pizza oven at the heart of the room. Just as it does in New York, a negroni cart does the rounds, and each afternoon is welcomed with a martini happy hour.
It’s all fittingly Cali-chill. The only drama in the place is a striking ceiling fresco by Los Angeles artist Abel Macias, which dominates the 146-seat room. “Nathalie and I had just been to Europe when we decided to open up here,” Pride recalls, “and the Sistine Chapel blew us away. When we saw the domed ceiling in this room it was a no-brainer.”
Dante joins a string of newcomers in the area, including New York transplants Café Boulud, Marea and Cipriani. Don’t look now, but with arrivals like the Maybourne and Dante, one of the world’s stuffiest cities—yes, Beverly Hills is its own 14.8 km² metropolis—might just be entering a new golden age.
You may also like.
Hibiki 40 Year Old Resets the Bar for One of Whisky’s Most Exalted Names
The legendary blender reasserts itself in the industry’s uppermost pantheon with its oldest and rarest blended release ever.
Over the last decade, whiskies from Suntory’s famed Hibiki stable have gone from a top-shelf staple to the new byword for luxury in the increasingly rarefied world of Japanese whisky. As stocks of its famed age statement blends drew ever lower, the air of exclusivity around the distillery grew and grew – something that has stuck around even as the brand’s new flagship blend, Harmony, became more readily available once more.
It’s becoming clearer, however, that Hibiki still has a few exceptional tricks up its sleeves. Twenty-one and 30-year-old age statement whiskies have released in the past few years to critical acclaim, confirming that Suntory still has some particularly rarefied output yet to unveil. Now, in the brand’s boldest move yet, a 40-year-old blend is set to hit the market in extremely limited quantities, taking Hibiki’s already lofty benchmarks of rarity and lineage to new heights.
As with Hibiki’s other blends, Suntory’s Chief Blender, Shinji Fukuyo, has spent years perfecting a blend that brings some of Japan’s oldest and finest spirits into perfect harmony – achieving a smoothness and complexity that takes the brand’s hallmark qualities to a new plane. Single malts from Yamazaki, Hakushu, and Chita all feature, having been individually aged for four decades to form a true expression of the place they were made, before making their way into the final blend.
Truly a multi-generational blend, Hibiki 40 Year Old is designed not just as an expression of the skills and expertise passed down through generations of individual distillers, but that of Fukuyo’s forebears, legendary Suntory blenders Shingo and Shinjiro Torii.
The result is a final liquid rich with sweet fresh fruit, light citrus zest, and spice, supported by a luxurious undercurrent of acacia honey and dried fruit. Each crystal bottle is adorned with a mother-of-pearl inlay and decorated with a handcrafted label from Japanese washi artist Eriko Horiki.
While age statement single malts in the four- and five-decade category have become increasingly the vogue in recent years, never before has a blended whisky been attempted with such old stock—a unique challenge for its maker.
“Behind the elegance and bloom that is typical of Hibiki, there is a sense of subduedness,
like that of an old temple, and a wabi-sabi patina due to the long aging process,” says Fukuyo. “I would like people to enjoy the pure and pure aroma that has been sharpened over the years; the tranquility of old temples and storehouses and the nostalgic warm feeling that accompanies them.”
Limited to just 400 bottles, Hibiki 40 Year Old will release on October 4th, with bottles retailing at $75,000.
Australian fans of the brand will have the unique opportunity to immerse themselves in the Hibiki 40 Year Old experience, including a taste of the exalted liquid, at an exclusive event at Clare Smyth’s Oncore on October 24th, 2025. Tickets are available for $1,800 per person.
You may also like.
White Lotus-ing? How Hit Films and TV Shows Are Inspiring Elite Travelers to ‘Set-Jet’ Across the Globe
It’s not just The White Lotus. Prestige TV and blockbuster films set in far-flung destinations are driving bookings like never before.
“As seen on TV” may have lowbrow connotations, but the recent glut of award-winning shows and films set in alluring, far-flung locations is causing an unprecedented run on the world’s best hotels. Call it set-jetting: planning your vacation around a destination featured in a popular series or movie. And while romantic suites and beloved characters have gotten people on planes since the golden age of film, what has changed is how central beautiful venues have become to plots.
“The way that The White Lotus used the destination to tell the story was really unique,” says Misty Belles, an executive at the global travel-adviser network Virtuoso. It also made its settings—the Four Seasons resorts in Maui and Taormina, Sicily—nigh un-bookable. And it’s hardly the only example: “Paris wasn’t hurting for eyes, but Emily in Paris showed the city in a more playful way,” Belles notes. “And people weren’t exactly flocking to Richmond before Ted Lasso.”
Giulia Parmigiani/Netflix
The trend is so strong that a property doesn’t even need to be connected to a show to benefit from its boom. Henley Vazquez, cofounder of the New York–based travel agency Fora, points to Bridgerton’s impact on English estate hotels.
“Heckfield Place [used to be] a hard sell,” she says of the five-star Georgian mansion in Hampshire. “Now, people are dying to go there. It wasn’t featured in Bridgerton, but it’s just that kind of place.”
Others insist on the real deal. Jennifer Schwartz, managing director of Authentic Explorations, works with one family to build trips based on the Game of Thrones universe.
HBO
“They went out of their way in Portugal” to visit Monsanto, the setting for Dragonstone in House of the Dragon, she notes. “It’s definitely a criterion on which they choose where they want to vacation.”
For travelers who want more than simply to follow in their favorite character’s footsteps, London’s Black Tomato takes things several steps further. Since 2023, it has planned high-octane itineraries based on the James Bond franchise and works with the films’ producers, Eon Productions, to make you feel like an MI6 agent. (Some trips even offer lessons with Daniel Craig’s stunt double, Lee Morrison.)
The 007 success has inspired more such trips. “We’ve just recently launched itineraries inspired by Yellowstone and Ripley, focusing on Montana and Wyoming and Italy, respectively,” says cofounder Tom Marchant.
Netflix
Still, it’s important to remember that sharp camerawork—and editing—accounts for a lot of the on-screen magic. Schwartz, of Authentic Explorations, notes that “the White Lotus hotel” in Sicily is “not super accessible, but it’s filmed as if the beach is right there.” In reality, the shore club from the show’s second season is 133 miles away. “People go to the place and they’re like, ‘You have to get in a car to go to the beach? What do you mean?’ ”
So where shouldn’t you go? Netflix’s The Perfect Couple will likely send hordes to Nantucket next summer, and The White Lotus’s third season, set on the Thai island Koh Samui, has already caused a local spike—and it’s not even on the air yet.
Bookings of Virtuoso’s properties in the region are up 38 percent since the show was announced. Luckily, Belles says, the effect doesn’t linger. “We typically see a good two-year impact on a set-jetting destination.”
