Made in Tuscany

The best stories are those which turn the old into modern, without losing character. When a place’s reputation becomes inseparable from what they make, it’s a sign that a history is being preserved, in craft, art and everything in between. Tuscany does leather that way. Leather production operates through a concentrated network, in a relatively small stretch of land between Florence and Pisa. This industry is built around specialization. 

Little Travel, Many Hands

Follow the Arno west from Florence and eventually you reach Santa Croce sull’Arno, a small Tuscan town at the centre of one of Europe's most important leather districts. This  geography helped establish what is there now. The district extends across several neighbouring towns and operates as an interconnected network of expertise. 

This proximity is particularly valuable as luxury craftsmanship tends to be described through the individual artisan. One workshop may tan the leather, another may finish it, another supplies components or the pair of hands cutting, stitching or polishing at a workbench. Tuscany’s strength also lies in having generations of specialized knowledge gathered within a relatively small geographical area. A material can travel surprisingly little while passing through many hands.

This is the environment in which Florence developed its own relationship with leather. Leatherworkers had been formally organised in the city as far back as the Middle Ages, and traces of the trade remain embedded in Florence itself. Streets around Santa Croce still carry names associated with the leatherworkers and tanners who once occupied them. And as the craft survived, it also learned to change.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Florentine leather was beginning to travel far beyond Tuscany. A new generation began to carry out a mission of turning local expertise into something much larger. Among them was a shoemaker who was the first to spotlight the importance of foot anatomy.

The Shoemaker Who Studied Anatomy

Salvatore Ferragamo made his first pair of shoes when he was nine. According to the story he later told, his sister needed a pair of white shoes for her first communion. Ferragamo borrowed canvas, thread, nails and tools from the village shoemaker and worked through the night. By morning, his sister had her shoes.

The episode sounds almost suspiciously perfect as the origin story of a future shoemaker. What followed, however, is more fascinating. Ferragamo left Italy for America as a teenager and encountered a manufacturing culture radically different from the one he knew. Machinery fascinated him. The speed of American production fascinated him too. The shoes themselves did not.

He believed industrially produced footwear lacked something that Italian artisans understood instinctively, yet he was equally unwilling to accept that tradition had all the answers. So he went to university to study the human foot. While working in California, Ferragamo attended evening anatomy classes, studying how the body's weight travelled through the foot and how the arch could be properly supported. He eventually began reinforcing his shoes with a steel shank beneath the arch, approaching shoemaking as a problem of engineering as much as aesthetics.

Shortly after, he was rewarded with a glamorous space for experimentation: Hollywood. Ferragamo began producing shoes for cinema in Santa Barbara before following the film industry to Los Angeles, where he opened the Hollywood Boot Shop in 1923. Actresses including Gloria Swanson, Jean Harlow and Greta Garbo became clients. The American press eventually gave him the inevitable title: “shoemaker to the stars.” Yet at the height of this American success, Ferragamo chose to return to Italy. Florence his his dearest.

Between hand and machine

When Ferragamo arrived in Florence in 1927, he came with an idea that sat somewhere between two worlds. America had shown him what organized production could achieve. Italy had taught him what could be achieved by hand. His first encounters with established Florentine master shoemakers were not quite romantic. Some were sceptical of his methods, particularly his unusual systems for measuring the foot and constructing shoes. But the younger craftspeople were more receptive. Ferragamo eventually assembled a group of 75 apprentices whom he trained himself.

Rather than abandoning the workshop for the factory, he borrowed something from both. The production of a shoe was broken into stages, as he had seen in American manufacturing, while individual stages remained dependent on the specialist skills of Florentine craftspeople.

The story of luxury manufacturing is often framed as a struggle between hand and machine, artisan and industry. Tuscany suggests that the relationship has always been a harmonious chaos. Industrial organisation could allow specialist craftsmanship to exist at a larger scale. New technology could solve problems that traditional methods could not. The hand remained important, but so did the ability to experiment. Ferragamo became particularly good at doing exactly that.

The fish can't see it

One of his most famous experiments began, appropriately enough, beside the river that had shaped Tuscany's leather industry centuries before him. One of Ferragamo's workers returned from fishing in the Arno with a catch made using a relatively new material: transparent nylon fishing line. “The fish can't see it,” he reportedly told Ferragamo and a light bulb went off in his mind. Ferragamo used the transparent line to construct the upper of his now-famous Invisible Sandal, suspending the foot above an F-shaped wedge so that the shoe appeared almost to disappear. In 1947, the same year the design appeared, he travelled to Dallas to receive the Neiman Marcus Award for combining Italian artisanal tradition with modern ingenuity.

It is difficult to imagine a better description of the particular kind of craftsmanship that had developed around him. The value of the shoe was no longer simply that somebody had made it painstakingly by hand. It came from knowing a material well enough to manipulate it, understanding construction well enough to challenge it, and having access to craftspeople capable of turning an unusual idea into a functional object.

What Tuscany Makes

The mythology surrounding Italian craftsmanship makes it sound frozen in time: old workshops and generational techniques. But this image overshadows a better reality. The leather district around Santa Croce today incorporates modern tanning technology, material research and sophisticated systems alongside traditional expertise. Its production model still relies heavily on networks of specialists and workshops rather than one enormous manufacturer doing everything. Thus, making Florence a place where fashion houses can develop and produce objects within reach of this wider ecosystem of skills. 

Florence is also where House of Yamina produces its collections. For a house built around Italian production, the significance here lies in the knowledge surrounding the craft: the people who understand materials, construction and finishing, and the network that allows one artisan’s work to meet another's. Perhaps this is why Tuscany remains so difficult to separate from the idea of craftsmanship. Its legacy lives in the way generations learn how to make things, then decide to make them differently. The knowledge of what makes an object worth making is what truly matters.