Standing for Manifattura Italiana Tessuti Indemagliabili, MITI has been at the front of ‘knitting innovation since 1931′. We arrive at the factory in Urgnano, an outlier town of Bergamo, and enter a marble floored hall where “loom number one” sits. Sales Director Marco Magrini, in his perfect English, explains that Miti were the first Italian mill to use the warp knitting technique. Warp knitting runs yarns in a parallel pattern, which allows for the construction of durable and stretchy fabrics.
The other relic of history in the hallway is a bust of Vincenzo Polli on which Cavaliere del Lavoro (knight of industry) is inscribed under his name. The father of the company, Polli was fascinated by the technology he could use to create textiles, bringing in German-made machines to establish Italy’s premier fabric mill. Only in the 1950s did other Italian companies follow this innovation for mechanical warp knitting, a technique allowing for more intricate construction.
Today the greige fabric (raw fabric) is milled six hours away in Hungary, near the border with Slovenia. Miti’s sixty or so state-of-the-art looms create all the greige there before it is brought by truck to the plant in Urgnano for processing, dyeing and finishing.