Bon ton-inspired footwear. This will be one of the trends for summer 2025 according to Air Collection, an embroidery company based in Prato with more than 30 years' experience in embroidery on fabrics and leathers. "Several brands have asked us for Sangallo processing, which we have developed both on fabric and leather," explains Désirée Calamai, the company's sales manager. "Thanks to the most up-to-date devices in which we have recently invested, in particular a series of special machines combined with laser bridges, it is easier to handle this technique, which until now has been very complicated to work with by machine.
But how does it work? By having the laser bridge mounted on the machine, the piece to be embroidered is placed on the frame and laser goes to pierce the leather in a much more precise way than with the old embroidery machines. Then the hole is contoured with the embroidery. Air Collection has had this system for about three years, but it took a year to master the technique that is now in high demand. "Thanks to the laser bridge mounted on the new machinery," Désirée explains, "we were able to fine-tune the Sangallo technique on leather, which is going strong and will feature heavily in the spring/summer 2025 collections.
Alongside Sangallo, trends for next season embrace canvas, linen, and, for footwear, lightweight suede. "Sangallo on leather was an experiment we wanted to do: we tried it on some types of leather, quite soft and not too treated, and we were able to achieve this effect. On the other hand, for leathers that are a bit more structured, not flaked and more substantial, we developed a process, again using a laser, that allows us to recreate images with raster," Désirée explains. To simplify, the laser goes to scrape the first and second layers of the leather, depending on the intensity you want to give the design, and is able to recreate patterns and images from a photo.
