The company I want to investigate is Everlane, which is an American company whose headquarter are in San Francisco, California. Although being identified as an American fashion brand, this company sells specific products that are “Made in Italy” or “100% Italian feather,” according to the product descriptions. It well represents a combination of American and Italian fashion. I’m always curious about and interested in what “Italian fashion” means and represents in nowadays’ globalized fashion market. Especially how the classical Italian idea of fashion “sprezzatura” (effortlessly chic) is involved in the design of an Italian style fashion product. When I found this brand, I thought my questions were dissolved. The Italian leather products of Everlane explains what Italian fashion is very clearly. 
   

Every pair of shoes this company designs has a very simple outline and is meant to be comfortable to wear. Each shoe seems to speak to the consumers that if you buy it, your life will get easier and your life quality will be leveled up. The brand advertises heavily on how comfortable and simple its shoes are. To facilitate the comfortability of its shoe line, the company focuses a lot on the quality of the raw materials, using minimum decorations on their products to make sure they maintain the texture of their raw materials, which coincides with the reading “Italian Fashion Designers in Hollywood” we read in Stanfill’s book about Italian fashion and what we’ve discussed with Del Conca from the Italian tile company. In the meantime, the brand also absorbs some American elements into its designs. For example, one type of shoes often comes with various color choices for consumers who want a variety of colors in their shoe cabinet instead of just black and white. Also, the models who wear these shoes appear to be very brisk, which is more Americanized and very different from some poker faces that we usually see on some high-end fashion brand models. This not only displays how comfy these shoes are but also balances the formal feeling brought by the designs of the shoes.  Continue reading →