Guabello

Biella worsteds with a dry, crisp hand

Guabello has woven wool in Mongrando, just west of Biella, since 1815, when the mill opened as Guabello Antonio e Fratello. The family had worked in textiles since the eighteenth century, and for much of the nineteenth the looms turned out shawls and mantillas. By 1873 the mill ran 40 plain looms and 10 Jacquard looms, and was known for its mantillas in the Flemish style.

The turn to menswear came in the mid-1930s, when four brothers, Nino, Angelo, Sergio and Danilo Guabello, decided to specialise in flannel. Royal Flannel became the house cloth, and its crown is still the Guabello hallmark. In 1991 the Marzotto group bought the mill, in the same year it bought Hugo Boss. Guabello now sits beside its sister mill, Fratelli Tallia di Delfino, and its archive from 1948 to 2004 is kept at Tallia's mill in Strona.

Guabello is a weaving mill rather than a merchant. Warping, weaving, finishing and quality control all happen at Mongrando. It supplies fashion houses and, through its bunch service, tailors, and its books are ones good tailors keep on the shelf: OneThirty for pure Super 130s suiting, Connoisseur for finer cloth, Vesper for ceremony and Vault for technical wool. Its Motion finish gives worsted a natural stretch without synthetic fibre.

The wool comes mainly from Australia, and the paperwork is solid. Guabello holds the Responsible Wool Standard, the Global Recycled Standard, Woolmark, ISO 14001 and SA8000, the social accountability standard for workplaces, and follows the ZDHC programme on hazardous chemicals. Its finishes are fluorine-free, and new solar panels at Mongrando are set to cover about a fifth of the mill's electricity.

Our favourite detail is a small one. In 2024 Guabello was one of 22 Biella textile companies printed on a special Biella edition of Monopoly, and it gave copies to a toy charity. A mill that has stayed in the same town for more than two centuries has earned its square on the board.

We cut from Guabello when a garment needs a dry, crisp hand and cloth that stays stable in the length. Five THEODORE pieces use it: the Waterloo Brown Suit, the Patission Espresso Houndstooth Sport Jacket and the Monarch Mill Checkered Wool Blend Jacket, plus two from the Everyday Archive, the Brown Striped Wool Jacket and the Green Linen Trousers in a heavy 270-gram linen. All are made to measure in Sydney. Ask to see the Guabello bunches at your fitting.