The makers · where the cloth begins
Les Mains
Flanders · Como · the Andes
Every garment begins long before the needle - in a field of flax under a northern sky, on a loom beside an Italian lake, in a pair of hands high in the Andes. We name these places because they deserve to be known.
Act I · Flanders
Linen, born of the rain
Flax asks for very little: a cool spring, a soft northern rain, and patience. Along the coast of Flanders and northern France it rises in a single season, opens into a sky-blue flower that lasts a morning, and is left to rest in the fields, where dew and time slowly free the fibre from the stem.
In Belgium, where the river Lys was once called the Golden River for the fortune it carried, that fibre is spun and woven by mills that have kept the craft for generations. Our linen is woven in Belgium from European flax, and traced from the field to the finished cloth.
The first summer it is crisp. By the third, it falls as if it had always known you.
Shop the linen
one morning in JuneAct II · Lake Como
Silk, the colour of water
On the shores of Lake Como, silk has been woven since the Renaissance, and the lake still sets its rhythm. Our mulberry silk is woven and finished there, by houses that have dyed and printed silk for generations, where colour is still judged by eye, in the light off the water.
It is cool when you put it on and warm a moment later. It moves a heartbeat after you do.
red tie-dye, ComoAct III · Peru
Alpaca, for the cold nights
High in the Andes, where the nights are cold enough to see your breath, the alpaca grows a fleece lighter than wool and warmer, soft enough to wear against the skin. The herds graze the high grasses as they have for thousands of years.
Ours is knitted by hand in Peru, stitch after patient stitch, so that no two pieces are ever quite alike: the Olivia in baby alpaca with mother-of-pearl buttons, the Inessa from a single fine thread.
It holds the warmth of the day a little longer than the day does.
Shop alpaca
hand-knitted in Peru
a shell button begins hereStitched in Europe
Cut, sewn and finished to the highest standard
Every ISABELLA V. piece is cut and sewn in Europe, in ateliers where a seam is finished properly even where no one will ever see it: French seams, shell buttons, hems turned with care. Each one is made to be worn for years, not seasons.
Sustainable · mindfully grown
What the land gives, gently taken
All our materials are sustainably and mindfully grown.
Certified · traceable