The Polytechnic of Fashion: from Mug Magazine’s idea to its fulfillment.

The Veneto area can boast an outstanding position in the world of industry, so much so that the region’s production soars high in all the main fields of made-in-Italy goods, from footwear and leather goods to knitwear, clothing, jewelry, furniture and eyewear, and we can proudly say that Veneto makes a relevant contribution to the production of luxury goods worldwide.
The region’s creative skills are deeply rooted in history and have undergone a long development which was accomplished in the past five or six decades. No doubt the Venetian Republic, a cosmopolitan city of trade and culture, was an important landmark in this development, at once open to art patronage and to the development of industry.

Venetian schools were a strategic resource for the growth of the region’s craftsmanship and industry as they created districts characterized by refined knowledge and specialized techniques. As a result, the use of materials, processing techniques, a sense of the beautiful and the pride for well-made products have slowly but steadily pervaded the area’s collective culture.
On the Brenta Riviera, among the villas of the Venetian aristocracy, where most luxury footwear is manufactured, Politecnico Calzaturiero (the Footwear Polytechnic) inherited this great tradition about a century ago. A unique experience in Italy and Europe, the School for model-makers, established at Villa Pisani in 1923 became a Polytechnic in 2001 and has always managed to combine its refined processing techniques with top product culture, the art of design and new technologies. The School is now a research and innovation benchmark in the field of footwear, a pole of attraction and exchange for art and fashion schools worldwide.

Entrepreneurs, professionals, footwear technicians, none of them teachers by profession, devote their knowledge and experience to the training of young people teaching them to think, design and above all manufacture the shoes the world wishes for.
Nearly all of the ten thousand people employed in the district were the School’s students, an incredible virtuous circle involving school and factory. The presence in the area of the Footwear Polytechnic has enabled the territory to keep its employment rate unaltered and to continue to be a benchmark for all the luxury brands worldwide.

About ten years ago the Polytechnic has widened its interests shifting from classic shoes to sneakers and leather goods. With the support and skills of top textile and clothing firms the school is now facing a still more ambitious challenge, the creation of the Polytechnic of Fashion. Nowhere else in the world is there a region with such a high concentration of knowledge, art, tradition, a sense of beauty and technical skills. Here high quality processing is conceived and created, from wool production to the weaving and enhancing of fabrics.

The Polytechnic of Fashion focuses on a very simple idea: to use the experience acquired in the field of footwear and to move it to other sectors through firms which are centers of knowledge and skills, and become formative thanks to the excellence of their human resources.
The Footwear Polytechnic is therefore the place and starting point of a great, ambitious project. The problem to tackle does not simply consist in meeting the demand for skills that the market can hardly offer. Indeed, it means to transfer the territory’s ancient, precious knowledge and prevent it from vanishing, to orient the young and future generations to professions that offer great opportunities, to enhance firms in which the history of this territory is rooted, to show to the world that history, art and knowhow can create fabulous products.