The Makers

Aklasu does not own its mills. It works with families and ateliers who have practiced their craft for generations, and who would work this way whether Aklasu existed or not. Origin is about the cloth and the construction. The Makers is about the people who put both together.

The Loom

Como has woven silk since the fourteenth century. The jacquard looms used to weave grenadine garza fina are slow machines by modern standards, and that is the point. Each tie's worth of cloth takes hours, not seconds. The texture that makes a grenadine tie sit and knot the way it does is the result of weaving slowly enough for the threads to lie down properly.

The looms in question are not antiques. They are still working. The people who run them learned from the people who ran them before. The cloth coming off them today is not meaningfully different from the cloth that came off them fifty years ago, because the technique is the same.

The Family

Most of Aklasu's mill partners are family-owned. A father, a daughter, a son, an uncle. The mill has been there longer than any one of them, and will be there after. The technical knowledge is not held in a manual. It is held in the people who run the looms, the people who finish the cloth, the people who ship it.

This is not a romantic preference. It is a practical one. A family that has made cloth for a century knows things about cloth that no audit can capture. The cloth Aklasu specifies is made by people who have already corrected for everything that can go wrong with it.

The Conversation

Aklasu's cloths are developed with the mills, not ordered from a catalogue. A weave, a colour, a yarn count, a hand. Each is decided over time, sometimes over years, sometimes after a tie has come back wrong.

The relationship is craftsman to craftsman. The mill makes the call when the call is theirs. Aklasu makes the call when the call is Aklasu's. Both push back, and that is how the cloth gets better.

The Hand

After the loom, the work moves to the bench. Each tie is cut on the bias by hand, folded by hand, slip-stitched by hand, self-tipped by hand. The wool interlining is matched to the cloth by feel.

A tie that holds a knot, returns to shape, and lasts thirty years requires this much human attention. A machine can sew a tie in seconds. It cannot sew one that will outlast the suit it is paired with.

Made by hand. Made by family.