Socially made in Italy is a meeting point between luxury brands and social cooperatives to promote the work of incarcerated women in 11 Italian prisons.
Socially made in Italy is a community that, at the intersection of ethics, fashion and human rights, brings together luxury fashion brands and social cooperatives working on employment inclusion, with the aim of promoting the artisanal work of incarcerated women inside eleven Italian women's prisons.
A project of the social cooperative Alice, which works on training and reintegrating disadvantaged people into employment, Socially made in Italy was created to encourage and support companies that want to transform their brands into social brands — that is, brands in which social commitment is a strategic element of production. Led by project manager Caterina Micolano and social impact manager Luisa Della Morte, it is a network that connects visionary companies with designers and tailoring workshops and other craft technique workshops — such as weaving, leatherwork, felt and screen printing — set up in the women's sections of Italian prisons. They are united by a single vision: an ideal of social as well as aesthetic beauty, to give high-end made in Italy products a precise identity and social dimension.
In eleven Italian penitentiary institutions, craft workshops of excellence have been established, employing incarcerated women who have been given specific professional training: screen printing in Venice; tailoring in Milan-Bollate, Genoa-Pontedecimo, Rome-Rebibbia, Palermo and Brescia; leatherwork in Monza and Vigevano; artisanal weaving in Milan-San Vittore; felt in Catania. Supporting the project are representatives of made in Italy, Italian high fashion and luxury, who also serve as instructors on the training courses and mentors within the workshops. In the immediate term, work is a tool for generating income for the women, but it carries an even deeper significance for their future outside prison walls: it offers the opportunity to acquire that sense of dignity, love, attention, care and appreciation for beauty that "doing things well" is able to generate.
In collaboration with Carmina Campus, the fashion accessories brand of Ilaria Venturini Fendi, Socially made in Italy produced one thousand shoppers for the 2016 edition of the Milan design film festival, created by incarcerated women at the Milan prisons of Bollate and San Vittore using textile offcuts.
Another project is the one with Alisea, a Vicenza-based company and inventor of Perpetua, the pencil made entirely from recycled graphite waste, for the creation of the G-Case. Designed by Marta Giardini, it is a container printed with G-ink, an innovative non-polluting ink that uses graphite powder recovered from industrial production processes.
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"We have some workshops that have reached the quality and competitive standards of the finest made in Italy," says Caterina Micolano, "becoming genuine resources available to the market regardless of the fact that they are located inside penitentiary institutions. The union between seemingly distant worlds — that of luxury brands and social enterprise — if reinterpreted not in a charitable or welfare-based way but in a productive one, can restore new meaning and vigour to the economy too, making it more attentive to others and to the environment, without losing efficiency and effectiveness."
The production system coordinated by Socially made in Italy is certified by the Sigillo mark of the Ministry of Justice, which attests to compliance with sector trade union contracts and guarantees the socially beneficial impact of the work undertaken. Sigillo is the first national coordination agency for the entrepreneurship of incarcerated women and a new model of sustainable economy. It is the mark of the Department of Penitentiary Administration (Dap), which certifies the quality and ethical nature of products made within the women's sections of some of Italy's most overcrowded prisons. It is managed by a dedicated agency that oversees its product, communication and market positioning strategies in a true brand management logic — an entirely novel and innovative approach to social intervention projects on the part of the public administration.