People often wonder where the meat they cook, the fruit they give their children for snacks, or the vegetables they decorate their dinner plates with comes from. It's a natural human curiosity, and it allows us to distinguish between quality, health, and good.
But where do the clothes we put on every morning come from? Who is behind the threads that weave the things in our closets?
At Alain Delon, we don't have to be ashamed of the origin of our products; on the contrary, we are very happy to share with you the stories behind each and every piece of clothing. So that you too can see more than just a piece of fabric behind our products. Just like when you buy eggs or cheese at the grocery store. Because our goal is not only to make you look stylish, but to make you feel confident that you are wearing only the best.
A miniseries about the stories of our things could not begin otherwise than with the story of our shirts. But before anyone gets to work, a shirt begins its journey in a fabric factory. If you don't use quality flour, even the best baker in the world won't bake good bread. The same goes for clothing. The highest quality raw materials are one of the most important elements in the chain, which is why your shirt begins its life in the Austrian city of Bludenz. The material is woven in the Getzner factory with almost two hundred years of tradition in the production of materials. It then travels to a small production facility with one hundred and fifty employees, located in the heart of western Slovakia, in Trnava. This is where all of our shirt production comes from.
Its proximity gives us not only the opportunity to offer work to a local producer, but also flexibility in production. Emails and phones will never replace personal contact, and we believe relationships are the basis of the highest quality products.
The most important process in production is, paradoxically, also its first. In today's robotic age, one would expect that long meters of fabric would be cut by a machine with laser precision. However, the opposite is true, the attentive eye and experienced hands of craftsmen are irreplaceable. The cutter draws individual parts on the fabric according to the template so that after cutting them out with millimetre precision, the pattern or check fits on the resulting product. Only then can the less than two meters of fabric be cut into pieces, from which the front parts, collar or sleeves will be created.
And the sleeves? They are cut and sewn with scissors by a person who can perfectly shape them, again with just the help of a sewing machine and a bit of their art.
For many, the work ends there. However, in our production, the shirt continues its journey. Every single shirt must be ironed before leaving the factory so that you can see a perfect product when you unwrap it at home.
The individual parts of the shirt then travel to a different part of the production line to each take on its final shape. Just like when making a car – first you make the body, engine, interior, and everything is put together like a puzzle at the very end.
While a worker sews a size label onto the back of the shirt, in another corner of the production line, someone else is intricately inserting reinforcements into the collar to keep it in place. All by hand. The front gets its face with a unique embroidered emblem.
Buttonholes are next on the agenda. Their positioning is determined by the master according to his experience. He does not need any template for this, and yet they are perfectly spaced apart.
In less than an hour, all the parts come together again to become one shirt. After sewing, it's time for the buttons and the final quality check. During this, the inspector measures and inspects the shirt. He looks for any flaws to ensure that only the highest quality product leaves the factory.
Then all that's left to do is wrap it, again by hand. When you're unwrapping your shirt, you'll know that someone painstakingly put them there before you. So that the unwrapping experience is exceptional.
The next time you put on a shirt, try to remember the work that went into making it. We believe that our story will make each one a little closer to your heart. Because behind each one are the experiences, love for the craft, and stories of dozens of people. Now it's up to you to decide what your story will be in our shirt.
