Craftsmanship
On a quiet morning in our atelier, the linen arrives in long bolts wrapped in paper. It has travelled from a mill in northern Italy where this fibre has been spun for more than three centuries. It will leave us, weeks later, as a shirt or a coat that someone might wear for the next ten years.
This page is the in-between.
It begins outside Como
Our linen is woven by mills that have specialised in flax since their grandparents' time. Italy still does this better than anywhere else — not because of marketing, but because the people running the looms inherited the craft from people who ran them before.
We choose mid-to-heavy weights. Light enough to breathe in Dubai's summer, structured enough to hold the line of a tailored coat.
"Italy still does this better than anywhere else."
Cut by hand
Once the bolt arrives, each pattern is laid by hand. We don't stack-cut large quantities. Every layer is placed deliberately, the grain checked twice, the slubs of the linen positioned so the eye finds them in the right places.
It is the slowest step. It is also the one that decides whether a coat will hang well, or whether it will pull at the shoulder six months in.
Stitched, finished, pressed
A small team sews every piece. Seams are bound or french-finished — the inside of a DNKMP coat looks almost as considered as the outside. Buttons are sewn on by hand and reinforced. Stress points at the shoulder, the pocket, the placket are all secured with extra passes of thread.
When the garment is finished, it is pressed only once, by hand. Linen punished by repeated steaming or machine-flattening loses its character. We let ours read soft.
"We would rather make it well than make it often."
By the time a piece reaches its box, it has been touched by perhaps four pairs of hands. None of those hands were rushed.
If you would like to know how a particular piece you own was made — which mill the linen came from, who finished the seams — write to hello@dnkmp.com. We can usually trace it.
