Forte_Forte: A Low Key Label from Italy is About to Make a Lot of Noise

Forte_Forte: A Low Key Label from Italy is About to Make a Lot of NoiseWhen Giada Forte decides to check up on what’s happening with the latest collection for her label Forte_Forte, she doesn’t need to play a game of planes, trains, and automobiles to do the perusing. Instead, she simply gets into her car at her studio an hour away from Vicenza, drives for ten minutes, and that’s it. By doing that, she can visit the person who embroiders her vintage lingerie–like slip dresses, meet the tailor who gets the line of her soft, slouchy jackets just so, and then talk to the team that is busy making sure her fabrics look and feel the way she likes them (washed, weightless, and wonderfully tactile). “Local!” Forte says. “It is so important to us. I can drop by the pattern cutter on a Sunday, work for a while, then have lunch while all her nephews are running around. That’s better than being stuck in a factory in Hong Kong for a month. . . . ”In these ethical, environmental, and expense-minded times, labels like Forte_Forte, with their discreet charm and relatively low price tags (anywhere from $122 for a tee to $419 for an embroidered dress), seem more right than ever. Founded just over six years ago by Giada and her brother Paolo, the offspring of a Venetian fashion-manufacturing dynasty, the company has slowly and quietly been building a following for its gentle, romantic, wear-them-any-which-way-and-every-which-season look. There is no radical change of perspective every season. Everything is always comfortable—drawstring-waist pants, for instance, or bias-cut, Empire-line dresses. Lightness, too, is superimportant to the Fortes; they have spent years researching fabrics that will retain heat without being at all heavy. And they’ll immerse themselves in vintage research: Giada loves to trawl the Porte de Vanves flea market in Paris for new finds for her collection of old lace gloves, antique buttons, and wooden clothes hangers from the fifties and sixties.Lightness? Ease? Comfort? It all sounds like it runs counter to fashion-with-a-capital-F, especially now, what with hard-edged eighties shoulders, lean, mean leggings, and shoooort skirts just about everywhere you look. And yes, it does—which makes Giada Forte very happy. “I don’t like sharp corners,” she says, laughing. “I want our way of life to be translated into the clothes.”