According to Saint Laurent CEO Francesca Bellettini, Saint Laurent’s vast new workshop just outside of Florence is built on a simple premise: ‘to develop the most desirable leather goods in the world’.
The gleaming L’Atelier Maroquinerie – ‘maroquinerie’ is a French term for the art of leather craft – certainly seems fit for the task. Spanning 28,700 sq m, the space contains a panoply of specialist equipment which marries technical innovation – one of the main aims of the space is to develop new techniques – with the traditional know-how of the region (the outskirts of Florence contain several such workshops for other major fashion houses).
