INSIDE A FRENCH COUTURE JACKET WORKSHOP IN ITALY

This workshop was eight days in Arona, just nine of us in the class, and it was slow — like properly slow, the kind of slow where you start questioning your own life choices by day three.

Nobody was racing through anything. We'd watch the teacher show us something, try it ourselves, get it wrong, get corrected, and do it again — sometimes the same technique two or three times before it actually stuck. With only nine of us in the room, there was nowhere to hide. She could see exactly what everyone was doing, which meant a lot of "no, try it again" and not a lot of faking it.

This wasn't a "find your own way" kind of class either. You did it her way, step by step, in the order she taught it — and I quickly learned the order actually matters, because I tried skipping ahead once and immediately regretted it. Everything on the jacket got marked by hand. I used tailor tacks for basically everything — seams, balance lines, waist placement, the lot — before I let myself sew a single permanent stitch.

We barely talked about what the finished jacket would even look like. It was all about right now — is the fabric behaving, is my marking straight, is my handwork actually consistent or just pretending to be. The machine came out exactly once, for the quilting lines as I mentioned in the first post. Everything else was by hand, with a five-centimeter seam allowance because the fabric frays if you so much as look at it wrong, so there was zero room to be sloppy.

Working next to everyone else at the same pace was kind of nice, actually — nobody racing ahead, nobody falling behind, we all just moved through it together. We were constantly checking in on each other's jackets too, comparing notes, having a laugh about whoever's tailor tacks looked the most chaotic that day. Once the day was done it was dinner and drinks together, which made the whole thing feel a lot less like a class and a lot more like a week spent making new friends who also happen to be a bit obsessed with sewing.

This is the second in a three-part series on learning to make a French couture jacket:

1. Learning the French Couture Jacket Technique
2. Inside a French Couture Jacket Workshop in Italy (you are here)
3. Making a French Couture Jacket by Hand