Stylbiella

Biella wool suiting, the backbone of our range

Stylbiella began at the end of 1974, when the brothers Giorgio and Giancarlo Perino set up on their own in Biella, the wool district of Piedmont. Cloth was already in the family. Their father, Piero Perino, born in 1900, spent his working life as a cloth merchant, selling Biella wool to Italian tailors.

The brothers started small. In the 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 something 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 it found buyers in Korea, Japan and the United States with a cotton chenille that imitated corduroy and velvet, and it later worked with Etro and Missoni.

Today the brand is run from Milan and sells only to made-to-measure tailors. Its stated aim is a high quality-to-price ratio, and that is where it sits: below the grandest Biella names on price, well above ordinary cloth in hand and behaviour. The range covers wool suiting, coating, shirting and tie cloth.

Stylbiella does not publish where its fibre is grown or which certifications its weavers hold, so we make no claims for it on that front.

What we can speak to is the cloth on our table. 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 special 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 Alpaca Light Brown Overcoat. Because the cloth is fairly priced, more of a commission's budget goes into the making.

Every Stylbiella garment in our range is made to measure in Sydney. Ask to see the current bunches at your fitting.