The winner of the Global Denim Awards 2015 is... Sartoria Diletto & Candiani Denim

“And the winner of the 2015 Global Denim Awards is… Sanatoria Diletto and Candiani Denim!” announced Marietta Hoitink, founder of HTNK to the hall filled with over 750 denim professionals Thursday night at Amsterdam's Westergasfabriek. The team was named the victor from a group of 8 emerging designers who were paired with eight progressive denim mills in order to showcase the best of denim craftsmanship, innovation, design and sustainability.

The winner of the 2nd edition of the denim’s industry version of the Grammy’s came as a surprise to many, but was the biggest shock for Andrea Diletto, the designer behind bespoke tailoring label Sartoria Diletto as it was his first time working with denim and creating a denim collection. “It is such a wonderful surprise,” he said to FashionUnited after the show. Although the jury had been leaning towards selecting an international winner for this year’s edition, the young designer’s win felt close to winning the lottery.

Italian duo wins Global Denim Awards 2015

Together with 77 year old Italian denim mill Candiani Denim, the two set out to combine both the best of tailoring and denim for their collection for the Global Denim Awards. With both designer and denim mill having roots in Milan, it became clear that the resulting collection would breath premium craftsmanship, heritage and as well as innovation. “I wanted to discover a new world, a blue world. A combination of heritage from Italy, and a new perspective on denim in tailoring,” said Diletto on his collection.

The team aimed to create a collection which brought together the best of denim and tailoring, in a way which had never been seen or done within the industry before. “There has been work produced before which saw tailoring and denim come together in the past, but the industry did not pay much attention to. It’s never been done before, not like this. Not on this level ,” said Simon Giuliani, marketing manager at Candiani Denim.

Candiani Denim encouraged Diletto to experiment with denim fabrics, treatments and washing in its own personal laboratory in order to get hands on experience working with the material. “My hands turned blue working with all that denim,” joked Diletto. However allowing the young designer the freedom to work in their denim labs paid off, and Giuliani notes afterwards they really had to narrow down the selection of fabrics to use. "If we had not been working with him, then we would have never developed these new fabrics, such as the striped women's waistcoat which is made from 100 percent recycled fibres" added Giuliani.

“But it was Diletto who really made this fabric work for the collection. It was plain blue without the stripes and it look terrible. He was the one who suggested we add them in and made it work.” Diletto and Candiani used old shuttle looms to weave new fabrics from recycled yarn, tailoring hemming techniques on the denim, as well as brushing treatments that went hand in hand with match lashings to create a finish unseen before on one of the collection’s jackets. The entire collection was hand made in Milan, where Andrea to from the young age of 18 to establish this bespoke tailoring concept.

“We wanted to create something with the most premium denim, at the highest level of craftsmanship so everything was done by hand. It took us 100 hours to make a two piece suit for the men,” explained Giuliani. The resulting collection comprised of 3 sharply tailored women’s denim suits and two men’s suits, as Diletto wanted to emphasis tailoring on the female form and create a more relaxed, casual fit for the male form.

“I have seen the collection many times before, on models during fitting sessions and on the hangers. But when I saw the collection tonight on the catwalk, I had goosebumps on my arms and tears in my eyes, it was simply beautiful,” admitted Giuliani. Andrea Diletto is the second designer to win the global denim awards, following the event’s debut winner Jonathan Christopher in 2014. In addition to winning 10,000 euros, the winning collection will be exhibited during at international denim trade fair Kingpins in Amsterdam, New York and Hong Kong.

Italian denim mill Berto Industria Tessile, who was partnered with StudioPretzel and its founder Emiliano Laszlo, was awarded Best Fabric prize.

Photo Credit: Simon Trel Photography