Glove affair: The journey of luxury leather goods from Naples to Dublin

With a population of more than three million people and one of the busiest ports in the world, Naples has a dark edge, a city where the very rich and the very poor live side by side. “Luxury embedded in squalor,” was how writer Peter Robb described it. The city is famous for many things – for its pizzas, music and movies, but also its sartorial style and traditions, notably tailoring and glove-making.

It is the historical capital of glove-making and Neapolitan dynasties can trace their history in the craft back to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies when Naples and Palermo were its capitals. Though the industry has declined in recent years, renowned craftsmanship and skills in making gloves by hand for generations are still being kept alive.

It is to this city that Irish glove queen Paula Rowan travels every three weeks to oversee the family-run factories that translate her ideas into leather and whose products replenish her Westbury boutique in Dublin twice yearly and have established her international reputation.

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Francesca making the final stitch checks

We make our way to one factory, located down a steep alleyway off a street near Capodimonte (also famous for porcelain) where Rosaria, a fourth generation artisan runs the business, founded by her father and grandfather in the 1940s, with her husband.

“There are 14 stages in the making of a pair of gloves and everything is done by hand,” explains Rowan, who is one of their biggest customers and who flits around the place with proprietorial ease and familiarity. In a room stacked high with hides and fur, she points out that most of the expensive leather used in her gloves comes from Ethiopia, but is dyed, tanned and dressed organically (and certified) in Italy and thus classified as Italian leather.

Leather

Standing at a large marble table in another room, Salvatore, a fourth generation glove-maker who has been plying his trade for 55 years stresses that the selection of the right leather is the heart of glove-making. On the table he smooths out a supple lambskin of grey leather, thin and strong, stretching it tightly and rhythmically for several minutes over the edge of the table, a process that requires strong, dry hands and a firm thumb. It is then measured for two pairs of gloves, cut and folded. Cardboard templates of the required hand size (15-20cm for women, 20-28cm for men) for each glove are placed on the leather and buttonholes marked. Thumbs are cut separately. The shapes are then stamped out on a hydraulic press using cutting dyes.

After that, seamstresses fine stitch together the pieces inside and out. Readymade linings, usually cashmere, silk or wool, are shaped on to heated hand irons and glued, then the leather is stretched over to a snug fit. The top stitching and hemming that follows is time-consuming, detailed and laborious. Through a translator (since nobody speaks English), I ask Carmella who is intently sewing a crochet upper on to a leather car glove how long it took her to learn how to do this. “40 years,” she replies. After this, any decoration or trim and hemming follows before the gloves are finally smoothed on to heated metal iron hands and given a final buffing – the glove-makers equivalent of ironing. Some styles can take up to five hours to make.

The workmanship is slow and painstaking and Rowan points out the difference between the handmade glove and its high street equivalent: handstitched hems, and the feel and stretch of the leather are telling details not found in cheap and bonded mass produced equivalents.

“When everything is mass produced, this craft is still alive here and they put so much effort and passion into producing my gloves,” she says. “Personal relations in Italy are so important – it’s all about the family and relationships and if you grow with me, I will grow with you. I am regularly contacted by Chinese and other Italian factories, but what is here is part of the magic of gloves.”

Each year she designs some 40 new styles – an equivalent number may be repeats or variations of best sellers. Her sketch book is full of drawings and style notes. “When I design I think about how it will work on the hand and wrist and I get inspiration from art, architecture, scenes in movies, magazine scraps and living by the sea as I do. There is so much you can do with leather – so coming back and forth from Italy gives you ideas and I just try to bring a modern fashion edge.”

She pushes the factory to its limits in design terms but regular visits, though expensive and time consuming, ensure that she gets what she wants. Mistakes can be costly.

It’s a hands-on operation in every sense, a two-way stretch, fusing her ideas with their expertise. A current style in production, for example, called the Danielle, in red leather is trimmed with a cuff inspired by Elizabethan ruffs; another features an oversize bow which led to some arguments with Rosaria and her production team, agreeably resolved. Standout pieces like these attract attention vital to the promotion of her business which this year celebrates its 10th anniversary.

A history and classics graduate of UCD and the youngest of six, Rowan worked as an interior designer before buying out her brother’s leather bag shop business called Claudio Ferricci in 2006 in the Westbury Centre. Two years later she launched her first glove collection, five or six styles in different colours on “the day Lehman went down,” she recalls wryly. “My idea was to create a range using the finest quality production in Italy, but fashion driven – statement pieces for the hand. I also thought that gloves were an understated accessory and that nobody was doing new season collections of gloves, so the only way to do it was with my own range.”

Since then her name has become synonymous with luxury gloves (though she also stocks bags and belts) and high-profile customers have included Helen Mirren, Chloë Sevigny and Kate Moss. Her more avant garde designs, such as the flamboyant black gauntlets sought after by stylists, feature in international magazines including Vogue, Marie Claire, Town & Country as well as The Financial Times. "You express yourself with your hands and the last thing you put on is the first thing that is noticed. I see gloves as couture, as little works of art for the hand," she says. A long-term ambition is to have her own factory and ideally to be to gloves what Jimmy Choo is to shoes. That's throwing down the gauntlet, so to speak, but one thing this determined Dublin businesswoman has never been afraid of, is a challenge.

paularowan.com