Launched in 2023, the project was spearheaded by Yoox founder Federico Marchetti, chair of the Sustainable Markets Initiative (SMI) Task Force, who had been personally asked by the then-Prince of Wales in 2021 to devise a meaningful sustainable fashion initiative. “The first fashion player I called was Armani,” Marchetti recalls. It was a natural choice for Marchetti, who shared a personal friendship with the late Mr. Armani, as well as a longstanding business relationship with his brand, having servced on its board of directors since 2020. “I was basically the go-between for two kings — King Charles and King Giorgio,” he jokes.
The vision was clear: to root the project in Italy and explore how regenerative agriculture could breathe new life into the country’s long-dormant cotton fields, rethinking Armani’s most-used fiber in the process. Apulia, with its gentle climate and rich agricultural tradition, was chosen as the ideal testing ground. The researchers at CREA, which operates 12 research centers across Italy dedicated to sustainable agricultural and forestry ecosystems, offered one of their five Apulian farms for the experiment. On five hectares of land, Italian cotton primed for its comeback.
Reviving an ancient practice
Cotton cultivation in Italy has ancient roots, tracing back to the exchanges between the Arab world and the medieval Mediterranean. Introduced by the Arabs between the 9th and 10th centuries, it first took hold in Sicily, where the Saracens turned the island’s fertile eastern lands into thriving cotton fields. From there, the crop spread gradually across the peninsula, though it remained modest for centuries. Its true renaissance came in the 19th century, when cotton became a key crop of the south and Sicily proudly earned the title “Mother of Cotton in Italy”. But the boom was short-lived. By the 1950s, competition and labor shortages sent production into decline, and Italy’s once vibrant cotton fields faded into memory, their legacy surviving only in a few determined revival projects in the south.
The Apulia Regenerative Cotton Project began in 2023, with a single hectare of cotton sown among neat rows of peach trees. The following year, the agroforestry practice grew bolder, welcoming poplar and pomegranate trees into the mix and stretching across three hectares — agroforestry counting for 0.6 hectares, classic monoculture for 2.4 hectares. By the third year, the fields had become a sort of Mediterranean garden, with cotton now sharing space with carob, fig and mulberry trees over 5.2 hectares, increasing agroforestry to 3.6 hectares and reducing monoculture to 1.6 hectares. The project surpassed its five-year expansion goal well ahead of schedule, and the harvests came in kind: 2,400 kilograms of regenerative cotton in the first year, and 3,000 kilograms the next.
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