Is that a Caravaggio?” We’re seconds into our kickoff meeting with Lubiam, the 113-year-old tailoring workshop in Mantova, Italy, and creator of our upcoming limited-edition Kingston wool blazers, when we see an almost four-metre-wide artwork covering the wall at the back of the showroom. It’s a masterpiece, reminiscent of Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath. The painting, Lubiam confirms, is the work of Fra Semplice da Verona, a Capuchin monk and contemporary of Caravaggio. Titled La Cacciata dell’Invitato Indegno (The Expulsion of the Unworthy Guest), it was a commission for Mantova’s ruling Gonzaga family in 1622. Following centuries of possession by the British Royal family, the Bianchi family, Lubiam’s third- and fourth-generation owners, purchased it from Sothebys in the late 1980s as a gift for the citizens of Mantova. Lubiam was founded in 1911 by local-born Luigi Bianchi, a third-generation tailor-barber who as a teenager toured the countryside offering grooming and sartorial services. With aspirations to become a great tailor, he apprenticed in Turin, before returning to Mantova to start his own bespoke atelier in the heart of the ancient city. His business grew so quickly that in the 1930s he decided to drain a swamp just outside the ancient city walls to create bigger headquarters, building adjacent residential accommodation with electricity for the exclusive use of his 800-plus workers.

Today, Luigi Bianchi’s great-grandsons and great-granddaughters continue his love for the city, its people, and its exquisite tailoring heritage. Our special project with Lubiam has been years in the making: the construction of 175 blazers made from methanereduced wool grown on the conservationist Kingston farm in Tasmania - our single source partner since 2017. To recap: with over 50% of emissions related to an M.J. Bale two-piece wool suit coming from the belching of sheep (methane release), in 2021 Kingston farmer, Simon Cameron, fed 500 sheep a type of seaweed grown off the east coast of Tasmania by our friends at Sea Forest. The seaweed, called asparagopsis taxiformis, was proven by the CSIRO in laboratory trials to reduce ruminant livestock emissions by more than 80% when fed to the animals as a small part of their daily diet. The successful production of this rare 16 micron Kingston fleece is believed to be the world’s first commercial production of methane-reduced wool. We then put it on a slow ship to northern Italy, where in Piedmont our long-term Kingston single-source wool weaving partner, Vitale Barberis Canonico, created a beautiful navy Super 150s bird’s eye cloth.

After a long search for a tailoring partner, we’ve chosen Lubiam for a host of factors. There is the company’s quality and craft legacy, of course. That’s a given. A precious natural fibre requires the world’s best weavers and makers to bring it to its full potential. The light-filled Lubiam workshop combines a mix of machine and intricate hand sewing, spread over 200 individual stages. Predominantly, however, we chose Lubiam as a our makerpartner because of their human-centric DNA. The familyowned company is a humanist operation, putting effort into providing their worker’s lives with meaning, and merging work with family lifestyle. With M.J. Bale’s values based on integrity, character, and service, Lubiam exhibits the type of ethics we want to work with, and to learn from. To culturally inspire their workers, the solar-powered headquarters are covered from wall-to-wall with art, and there is a pre-school on site. To help the mainly female tailoring workforce manage their work-life commitments, the Bianchi family created a pre-school here at Lubiam HQ for the children of staff to be expertly cared for during office hours. “The possibility to have children here is wonderful,” Alan, Lubiam’s Export Director, told us during our visit. “We can see the children out of the windows playing in the garden. For the mothers and parents, of course, they don’t have to worry about their kids. They can visit them during the day, if needed. It is a small thing but makes a big difference.”

During school holidays the children of staff aged six to 12 come to Lubiam for classes with professional teachers, enjoying lunch with their parents at the in-house cafe. “No, it’s not normal,” Alan continues when we ask if this practise is common in Italy. “But consider that in Italy there has always been a… let’s say, a sort of attention to creating a working environment that is not only for work. Having this humanist approach to business, putting the human being at the centre of what we do, is really part of our culture, our state of mind.” And the connection between art and Lubiam tailoring? “One inspires the other,” answers Alan. “We don’t think we make only products; we think we make something that has to be always inspired by beauty. We don’t only provide a jacket; we provide a piece of Italian lifestyle. That’s the connection. It’s part of our blood. It’s part of our DNA. So, you are always consciously or unconsciously inspired by it.” M.J. Bale’s Kingston single-source methane-reduced wool may have been more science than art up to this stage. However, in the form of the ‘Mantova’ blazer, made by Lubiam from VBCwoven cloth, it will undisputedly be a thing of beauty.