The Bite Magazine Issue 17

Give Me The All-Leather Look Any Day! Vivi Callanan discovers how DROMe, a father and daughter team won the fashion world over with their all-leather attire. bite fashion I t’s so encouraging to discover that a father and daughter from completely different eras can team up to create a staple label whose collection of all- leather garments seems to be setting the fashion world on fire.While Marianna Rosati, designer of the ‘ready-to-wear, made-in-leather-only’ line DROMe received her dual master’s degree in design and business management from Polimoda International Institute of Fashion Design & Marketing in Florence, her father and business partner Ferrero has a history of working in leather management for the likes of Prada, Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and Jil Sander, after starting out working at his cousin’s tannery at the age of 20. “My knowledge is simple,” Ferrero told Elle Magazine ,“I was born where leather is the history of the place.” Not long after they designed their first capsule collection, the fashion editorial world immediately took note and started queuing up to discover more about the dynamic duo. Elle describes them as a label that “makes leather clothes so soft [that] evenVersace is impressed” while Vogue sees them as “making the case for the all-leath- er-everything wardrobe” and Idol Magazine says we’re “hell-bent for leather with DROMe”. Talking about Versace, Ferrero remembers a time when he showed the late designer an example of how he is able to craft skins including python into mate- rials soft enough to be made into clothing. “He told me,‘This is impossible.’”, he recalls with a chuckle,“I sold him four kilometres!” DROMe, the name taken from the Nor- wegian word ‘ drøm ’ meaning ‘dream’ and also the name of the travelling song of the Roma people, which is connected to the brand’s taglin e of ‘DROMe as a dream. DROMe as a journey’, was founded in 2009 by Ferrero and Marianna through their mutual obsession with leather. As a child Marianna would help her father around the factories, and after her studies and a brief stint at the Prada press office, she worked at Italian label Santacroce, first as an assistant designer under Ugo Cacciatori and then as head designer from the SS09 collection onwards.When the label closed to start a new umbrella company, Factory SRL, Marianna followed them in their venture and it was from this experience that DROMe was born. While her father declares that “leather is my life”, the unique basis of the brand came from Marianna’s desire to defy leather