Stylbiella

Biella cloth since 1974, the backbone of our range

Stylbiella began in Biella, the wool district of Piedmont, at the end of 1974, but cloth was already in the Perino family. Piero Perino, born in the district in 1900, sold Biella's finest wools to Italian tailors and later designed for some of its leading houses. His sons Giorgio and Giancarlo trained as textile specialists at Biella's technical institute, and from 1969 Giorgio worked in Spain as product manager for one of Cerruti's weavers before coming home to start a label of his own.

He began modestly. In its first years Stylbiella was a design office: the spinning, warping, weaving and finishing went to specialist firms across the district, and Giorgio delivered the finished pieces in his own car. In 1984 the brothers built their own plant at Valdengo, in the countryside outside Biella. Giorgio later remembered his father, then 84, walking the building site and watching his sons build what he had dreamed of all his life.

The house made its name on fancy cloth. Through the 1980s it made silk and wool ceremony suitings for Versace and jacketings for Zegna, and worked closely with Hugo Boss. Its Black Watch check became a signature, and Germany was its first export market. In the early 1990s a cotton chenille that imitated corduroy and velvet found buyers in Korea, Japan and the United States, and the house later worked with Etro and Missoni.

Today Stylbiella works only for made-to-measure tailors. The range has grown from wool suiting into coating, shirting and tie cloth, all of it, by the house's own account, made in Italy. Recent collections run from four-ply pure wool jacketing to blends of wool with silk, cashmere and alpaca, in Prince of Wales checks, glen checks and herringbones.

More THEODORE garments are cut from Stylbiella than from any other house. The wool suitings in the Lavender Haze Suit, the Mint Martini Suit and the Rialto Royale Navy Suit are fine enough to feel like an occasion and sturdy enough to wear hard. The house's old talent for texture shows in The Fifth Avenue Off White Corduroy Suit, a fitting heir to that chenille, and in The Highland Light Brown Check Alpaca Overcoat. Every Stylbiella garment in our range is made to measure, and the current bunches are yours to look through at any fitting.