The story of the sumptuous silks of Rubelli is the story of Venice and

SPOTLIGHT:
RUBELLI
by Jean Bond Rafferty
DECEMBER 2012
THE STORY OF THE
SUMPTUOUS SILKS OF
RUBELLI
IS THE STORY OF VENICE
AND THE FABLED SILK ROAD.
The Rubelli family can trace its lineage to the late 17th
century, when a distant branch worked as master “red
dyers,” creating the crimson sails of the Venetian Fleet. The
“modern” chapter began in 1889, when Lorenzo Rubelli,
diplomat and collector of textiles, bought a prestigious
silk-, brocade- and braid-manufacturing firm that dated
back to the 18th century.
The Italian firm Rubelli produces handmade textiles for a variety of
prestigious clients around the world, including Caffè Florian, the
nearly 300-year-old Venetian coffee house. Previous page: Nicolò
Favaretto Rubelli, the fifth-generation co-CEO of Rubelli. All photos
courtesy of Rubelli
I
n the almost 125 years since, Rubelli’s fabulous
furnishing fabrics — incomparably woven brocades,
damasks, lampas, silks and velvets — have decorated
legendary interiors from the Doge’s apartments in
the Doge’s Palace in Venice, Italy, to the McKim,
Mead & White–designed Vanderbilt mansion overlooking
the Hudson River in Hyde Park, New York. From costumes
to curtains, their couture weaves also play a starring role
in a legion of storied opera houses and theaters including
Milan’s La Scala and Moscow’s Bolshoi.
During more than half of the last century under chairman
Alessandro Favaretto Rubelli, Lorenzo’s great-grandson,
the company has grown into a group of four distinct lines
with worldwide distribution: Rubelli Venezia, which now
also includes the collections of their Italian acquisitions
Lisio and Bises Novità; Parisian cult designer Dominique
Kieffer, who was just awarded the French Legion of Honor
for her design artistry; celebrated US modernist fabric and
furniture firm Donghia; and Armani Casa Exclusive Textiles
by Rubelli, a partnership with fashion designer Giorgio
Armani. They also produce custom fabrics for private
clients, commercial ventures and charitable sponsorships.
One of Rubelli’s most notable recent commissions was a six-year
renovation of Moscow’s renowned Bolshoi Theatre, which included
recreating a gigantic stage curtain that weighs nearly one ton and
uses real gold thread.
I
t’s a hefty heritage, but one that 48-year-old coCEO Nicolò Favaretto Rubelli, Alessandro’s son,
shoulders today with aplomb — “and a lot of hard
work,” he says with a wry smile. The dark-haired,
trimly bearded and utterly charming executive is the
middle brother of three — the fifth generation — who all
work at the company. The head of sales and marketing,
in charge of projects for hotels, ships and theaters, plus
overseeing design in the development of new products
and new collections, Nicolò occupies a pivotal position.
He made his debut at the Palazzo Corner Spinelli, Rubelli’s
historic headquarters, at age two, playing the role of Baby
Jesus in a Christmas nativity scene for a charity fundraiser.
Later, during school vacations, he and his siblings were put
to work in the sample department, typing labels. “I think we
slowed things down,” he jokes, adding “joining the business
was never predestined.” But when the company took over
an old mill near Como with a glass-and-steel roof that
needed replacing, Nicolò and his degree in civil engineering
were called into action. From there, he headed to Scranton,
Pennsylvania, where he oversaw a mill conversion. “I went for
seven months and stayed more than two years,” he recounts.
“Seeing how the textiles were created was fascinating.”
Nicolò Favaretto Rubelli, the great-great-grandson of
Rubelli’s original founder, plays many roles at the company today.
B
ack home, he got
involved in developing
the American market.
“I met such clients as
Donghia, which was
our first contact, Brunschwig
et Fils, and Clarence House,
whose founder, Robin Roberts,
was a genius,” Rubelli explains.
“Working with those artists,
designers and art directors to
weave fabrics for their own
collections was something I loved
doing. It was a natural evolution
to coordinate our own designers.”
Opulent Rubelli fabrics — such as the ruby-red San Marco,
an icon for 60 years — evoke Marco Polo’s stops along
the exotic Silk Road to Venice. Today, La Serenissima’s
ancient architectural patina is technologically translated
into gently aged “decayed” velvets, part of the Rubelli
DNA. The city’s palatial glamour is echoed in such fabrics
as the gilded Poliphilo, the subtle shades of Les Indes
Galantes and the thick golden contrasts of Chiaroscuro
in this year’s collection.
For the Bolshoi curtain, Rubelli wove in the Russian Empire czarist
double-headed eagle and crown, a St. George and the Dragon motif
and the word “Russian” in Cyrillic. Inset: The fabric San Marco is one of
Rubelli’s original patterns and a long-standing top-seller.
T
he Venetian Gothic blend of
the richness of the East, the
Renaissance — when Italy was
the height of civilization —
then the growing domination
of Europe, all this is reflected in the
fabrics,” says Nicolò.
And now, so too is the work of a 20thcentury Italian master: This year’s
collection includes four patterns by
Milanese architect and furniture designer
Giò Ponti, all of them updates of 1930s
Ponti-Rubelli collaborations that Nicolò
discovered in the company’s archives.
(Those archives, by the way, contain
some 6,000 textiles; in addition to
Rubelli’s own production, pieces stretch
back to the 15th century and are sourced
from Europe, Asia, Africa and America.)
“Vivere Alla Ponti,” an exhibition held at
the Palazzo Corner Spinelli during the Venice Architectural Biennale at the end of the
summer, spotlighted a limited-edition reissue of a 1950s armchair Ponti designed
for his own home, available in a choice of
Rubelli’s new Ponti designs.
Rubelli’s Venice showroom is housed in the late15th-century Palazzo Corner Spinelli, on the
Grand Canal.
RUBELLI’S MISSION TODAY IS TO CONSERVE
THE AESTHETIC TRADITIONS OF THE PAST
WHILE PUSHING FAST-­FORWARD TO ORIGINAL
SOLUTIONS FOR THE FUTURE.
The president of Rubelli, Alessandro Favaretto Rubelli,
and his sons, from left, Lorenzo, Nicolò, and Andrea.
I
n the 21st century, fashion designers are among the
company’s collaborators. “Working with Giorgio
Armani is like walking in my great-great-grandfather’s
footsteps,” Nicolò avers. “Giorgio selected some
Art Deco sketches that had been commissioned by
Dante Zeno Rubelli in the early 1930s. He chose fabulous
colors and we translated them into silk textiles.”
Nicolò’s mission today is to conserve the aesthetic traditions
of the past while pushing fast-forward to original solutions
for the future, “We have four handlooms in our mill for
museum and custom commissions,” he points out. “But now
the electronic jacquard looms have an innovative feature
that will allow a silk damask like San Marco to be woven with
the same feeling and movement as before.”
From top: Rubelli’s Calgary fabric for Armani/Casa; Gio Ponti’s
recently resurrected Punteggiato damask fabric features raised velvet polka dots on a metallic background.
L
inking Rubelli’s creative originality to what the
market wants while still staying ahead of the game
is the challenge. “The adventure now is about a
dacha in Russia, a villa in Dubai or Riyadh, a yacht
or a house in China,” he underlines. “Residential
projects, where we are talking about ten thousand euros,
or even one hundred thousand euros, each, can mean
that sometimes you are connecting with a designer in one
country and a purchasing firm in another for a project in
a third. It’s like being a referee to make it go smoothly.”
High-profile ventures such as the current restoration of
Venice’s aristocratic Palazzo Gritti Hotel, a collaboration
between Rubelli Venezia and Donghia Associates — the
group’s newly refounded separate design company
under creative director Chuck Chewning — call for
radical reinvention.
One of Rubelli’s most visible stateside commissions is the interior
of the Beaux-Arts-style Vanderbilt mansion in New York’s Hudson
Valley, an exemplar of Gilded Age opulence.
For the Giglio Prestige Room at the Gritti Palace,
which is scheduled to reopen in February, Rubelli
has painstakingly created archival-design silk and
velvet drapes and wall fabrics; given the hotel’s
long legacy, the rules for renovation are strict.
T
he requirements are very strict,” says Nicolò. “An
18th-century Venetian brocade design used in a
bedroom has to be rewoven in a flame-retardant
fabric.” He continues: “The progress has been
amazing — in the spinning of the yarns, the
finishing, in the way it is woven. Sometimes even we look
and say, ‘Is this Trevira [a quality polyester fiber] or silk?’”
The company’s successes shimmer on the walls of many
an operatic shrine, but perhaps nowhere as significantly as
Venice’s La Fenice, rebuilt after a tragic 1996 fire. “My greatgrandfather supplied their fabrics in the thirties,” Nicolò
reports. “When the theater burned, we reconstructed and
donated the historical damasks of the Sale Apollinée [in a
fireproof ivory-and-gold phoenix-pattern].”
Following a devastating fire, Rubelli was able to historically reconstruct the textile decorations for Venice’s La Fenice theater
— whose name, appropriately enough, means “The Phoenix” — by
researching historic photos and textile documents from its archives.
The cast of
Mitridate, clad in
Rubelli-designed
costumes, takes a
bow at La Fenice.
R
ubelli also played a significant
role in the rebirth last year
of Moscow’s storied Bolshoi
Theatre, which involved almost
40,000 feet of fabrics, 1,100
pounds of gold yarn and huge pattern
repeats on the main stage’s threepart curtain, which weighs nearly a
ton. The company was charged with
reproducing existing silk and real gold
weave of the curtain using fireproof
fibers. “So instead of silk and gold, it
was Trevira and gold,” Nicolò explains.
“We hadn’t woven with real gold since
my great-grandfather made the fabrics
for the Savoy royal family. To weave
gold with a polyester fiber was quite an
experience of innovation and tradition.”
Modern times call for adapting in other
ways too. “We were extremely proud of
what we did at the Bolshoi, but if no one
knows about it, it gets lost,” Nicolò confides.
“Our marketing used to be almost a hobby,
now it’s vital.”
To wit, Rubelli has debuted a glossy magazine, LR, to punctuate the presentations of
each collection. The first issue’s cover shows a
youthful model wrapped in flowing Poluphilo
arabesques, proof that “textiles are not only
works of art: they are created to be lived in
and with,” as Nicolò writes in the preface.
O
ther one-of-kind custom designs by Rubelli
include the red San Marco damask gown worn by
Danish Queen Margrethe on a commemorative
stamp, the vestments of various popes and
the exquisitely embroidered silks of the Oscarwinning costumes in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and
Stephen Frear’s Liasons Dangeureuses.
Family milestones are celebrated with the same theatrical
panache. For patriarch Alessandro’s golden anniversary at
the firm in 2005, an adaption of Nicola Porpora’s baroque
opera, Mitradate, took the stage at La Fenice.
The ravishing costumes? By Rubelli, of course.
Queen Margrethe II of Denmark wears a gown made from Rubelli’s
San Marco fabric on a commemerative stamp; above, she was photographed visiting the company’s mill in Como in 1994.