In September, the Milanese house that has worn paisley like a family crest for more than forty years sent a collection down the runway where you had to squint to find it. The teardrops were there. They just looked as if they had been left out in the sun all summer.
When I saw the photos, I smiled. Not because it was a surprise, but because it was the first time a runway agreed with something I see on the street in Italy every fall.
A print with a long way behind it
The shape is older than any of us. In Persia it was the boteh, and in India the buta, a curled drop that some read as a mango, some as a flame, some as a cypress bending in the wind. Weavers in Kashmir made it famous on fine wool shawls, and European merchants were bringing those shawls west by the 1600s.
Europe could not get enough of them, so it copied them. In the early 1800s the weavers of a Scottish mill town turned out imitations so fast and so well that the town's name stuck to the pattern. That is why English speakers say paisley.
Italians never did. In Italian, as in French, the print is still called cachemire, after Kashmir, the place it came from. I love that. The name remembers the shawl, not the factory.
Forty years of teardrops in Milan
The house is Etro. Gimmo Etro started it in Milan in 1968 as a textile business, and in 1981 he came back from a trip to India with the motif that became its signature, first on furnishing fabrics, then on everything. For many Americans who bought one good Italian scarf on a trip, it was an Etro paisley.
This season's show, called Halo, did something a house rarely does to its own signature. The paisleys came out sun-bleached and barely visible, broken into patches and washed-out patterns. The colors moved like a day in the sun, from nude and powder through yellow and blue, and ended in burgundy, brown and black.
A fashion house fading its most famous print sounds like a risk. Walk through Milan or Florence in November and it looks more like a confirmation.
How Italian women have always worn it
Here is what I notice, every fall, and what I think Etro finally put on a runway. Italian women do not wear paisley loud. They wear it as if it had been in the family for years.
- One piece, never two. A paisley skirt or a paisley scarf. Never both, and never with another print nearby.
- Soft colors over bright ones. Smoky blue, grey, faded rose, rust. The paisley that looks like it has been washed a hundred times.
- A plain color pulled from the print. Whatever sits next to it is one of the colors already inside the pattern, so the eye rests.
That last one is the whole trick. The paisley satin wrap skirt in these photos is made in Italy by Tensione In, in a satin-faced viscose that falls in one piece rather than fluttering. Its paisley is blue-grey, and a deep burgundy border runs down the wrap edge like a line drawn under a sentence. The silver satin top beside it is simply the grey from inside the print, lifted out and worn on its own. Nothing else is needed. For November here in Sarasota, add a thin knit in that same grey, or a burgundy one that picks up the border, and it is done.
Worn this way, paisley stops reading as a costume from 1968 and starts reading the way the Italian name suggests: something soft, something that came a long way, something you keep.
If there is a paisley scarf folded in a drawer somewhere in your house, this is its season. Take it out, wear it with one plain color from inside it, and let it look a little faded. My fall skirts, the paisley one included, are in the skirts.
She travels to Italy each season to hand-select the boutique's collection.
Keep reading
Why Nothing in an Italian Closet Looks Brand New
The Lake Como silk story
