Textile virtuosity

From clothing to home collections, the common thread linking them are the fabrics that have their roots in a family tradition from Calabria, where weaving is an ancient art: Maison Celestino creates artistic fabrics on manual looms, bringing ancient and high-skilled techniques back to life, as well as embroidery and designs full of symbolism to create cotton, linen, hemp, and pure silk fabrics that translate into as many products and haute couture garments. Fabrics that the Maison, now in its fifth generation – with Caterina Celestino flanked by her husband Francesco Mercogliano – has also used to experiment with the shoes it uses for its catwalks. High-heeled pumps, sandals, and flat models are embellished from time to time with high quality, precious fabrics, such as selvedge, which can only be produced on ancient looms, bringing back to life processes taken from the company’s archives, the same ones that animate the clothes or accessories for the home. Drawings depicting the stork that nests in the Sibari (or the Sybaris) the charging bull of Sybaris stylistically revisited and adapted to be reproduced on fabrics. Or the even more cultured reproduction of the Krités (an ancient judge), an iconographic motif of Byzantine origin in which two doves are portrayed balanced on a scale, a theme that also appears in home textiles. And then the golden ears of grain woven into the wefts of the most delicate silks and foliage fil coupé that animated the high fashion collection for Spring/Summer 2023, presented at the end of July at Casello Mascaro in Corigliano Rossano, in the heart of the Sibari plain. In the company’s collections, there are always cultured citations: in this last show there were references to the realism of the American painter and illustrator Edward Hopper, present in the colours, while for the last S/S 2021 collection the tribute was to Freud, where clothing was understood as an extension of the unconscious.