Italian fashion safeguards its future at the precise point where everything acquires substance: in the hands, in the gesture, in the patient discipline of learning. That is where Grand Tour. Journey Through the Academies of Arts and Crafts begins, the documentary presented by the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana on the occasion of the National Made in Italy Day 2026. It is not merely a tribute to education. It is a cultural statement of intent, one that chooses to illuminate what often remains outside the frame of luxury itself: the transmission of knowledge, the making of expertise, the dignity of craft.
Milan, once again, does not simply host an event; it sets its cadence. At the Teatro Lirico Giorgio Gaber, on the evening of April 15, the Italian fashion system appeared in its most solid and least ephemeral form, before institutions, entrepreneurs, designers, representatives of culture and the arts, alongside students from the country’s leading fashion and design schools. Nicole Bottini hosted the evening for Class TV Moda, with Lutech as partner. Yet the true protagonist, both on stage and on screen, was something deeper: the human capital of Made in Italy.
The Grand Tour of knowing hands
The title of the documentary evokes the formative journey once undertaken by young Europeans between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Italy represented an essential destination for culture, taste and refinement. Carlo Capasa grasped its meaning with striking precision, speaking of “what cannot be seen,” of “wise hands,” and of the urgency of protecting the transmission of knowledge that so many brands continue to preserve through their academies.
That language says everything. It asserts that luxury, before it becomes image, is structure; before it becomes desire, it is competence.
Capasa underscored the point with exceptional clarity: “The success of our sector is rooted in the alliance between creativity and industry,” and for that reason, “education is therefore a strategic priority for the future.” He went further still, delivering the phrase that gives the project its moral stature: “At the centre is work, in its highest meaning.”
Those words move the discourse around fashion beyond the surface and return it to the place where Made in Italy still earns its global authority. They also reveal that Grand Tour is not only a film. It is an industrial and cultural position statement, one that argues for the future of the sector with seriousness and conviction.
At Teatro Lirico, luxury chooses depth
The Milan premiere possessed the rare quality of occasions that do not chase spectacle, but density. Teatro Lirico Giorgio Gaber proved the ideal setting for such a debut: not a decorative backdrop, but one of the city’s civic theatres, fully commensurate with a narrative about Italian prestige and the system of knowledge that sustains it.
In an age dominated by speed, by the relentless turnover of images and by the obsession with novelty, Grand Tour imposed a different grammar altogether: continuity, responsibility, memory transformed into skill. Written and directed by Alessandro Manieri, with executive production by The Blink Fish, the documentary enters the academies of some of the most emblematic names in Italian fashion: Brioni, Brunello Cucinelli, Dolce&Gabbana, Fendi, OTB Group, Kiton, Tod’s and Valentino.
It maps a national geography of making, crossing territories, production chains, business cultures and creative languages, while holding firmly to one principle: excellence is not inherited by inertia. It is built through method, selection, exercise and the living presence of masters.
The Maison Academies and the Concrete Geography of Excellence
This is where the documentary finds its real centre: in the internal schools and specialist programmes that make education a structural choice rather than a symbolic gesture.
Brioni, through the Nazareno Fonticoli School of High Tailoring in Penne, reopened in 2024, has established a two-year course built on 1,300 annual hours of training, centred on practice and direct mentorship from master tailors. Brunello Cucinelli has developed a system of Contemporary Schools of High Craftsmanship for Arts and Trades, spanning womenswear, menswear tailoring, knitwear repair, mending, knitting and pressing, with a monthly scholarship that acknowledges the value of the path itself. Dolce&Gabbana, through its Botteghe di Mestiere, active since 2012, has turned education into a concrete model of internal growth, extending it in 2024 to goldsmithing and watchmaking.
Then there is Fendi, with the LVMH Institute of Excellence in Craftsmanship, here focused on high-quality artisanal leather goods, in partnership with other group Maison and Polimoda, and enriched by 400 hours of paid in-company training. There is OTB Group, whose School of Trades transmits increasingly rare expertise across prototyping, style and product development, pattern-making and industrialisation, with more than 85 per cent of participants now employed within the group. There is Kiton, whose school of high tailoring, founded by Ciro Paone in 2000, has already trained more than 200 young people. There is Tod’s, whose Bottega dei Mestieri brings together artisanal knowledge and technological-digital skills. And there is Valentino, whose Bottega dell’Arte in Piazza Mignanelli welcomes six students each year into the heart of Haute Couture, alongside former Première and atelier professionals, taking them as far as active support in the preparation of the Maison’s couture shows.
Taken together, these experiences reveal something decisive: the most credible contemporary luxury no longer separates storytelling from production, imagination from manufacture, reputation from the transmission of knowledge. These academies are not philanthropic appendices, nor cosmetic gestures. They are the silent infrastructure on which the promise of quality associated with Made in Italy continues to stand.
Grand Tour captures this with accuracy and restraint. It does not indulge in the folklore of craftsmanship. It restores expertise to its rightful rank: a strategic asset.
From Milan to Rome, and on to Athens
The project does not end with its Milan unveiling. After the Teatro Lirico, Grand Tour continues on April 19, 2026, at the MAXXI Auditorium in Rome, in a special public screening held במסגרת the protocol signed by CNMI and the museum in 2024. On April 27, it will arrive in Athens, at the Goulandris Foundation, on the initiative of the Italian Embassy, followed by a talk by Carlo Capasa addressed to students, journalists, scholars and industry professionals.
This is an important passage. Italian artisanal education is not being framed as national nostalgia, but as a cultural and industrial model capable of speaking to Europe and beyond.
In that sense, Milan retains its most authentic role. Not merely as a capital of taste, but as a city where luxury can still become a civic language, an industry of value, a system of relationships between enterprise, culture and talent. The evening at Teatro Lirico had the merit of reminding everyone of exactly that, with elegance and without rhetoric: Italian fashion remains great when it invests in embodied knowledge, in the discipline of work, in the precision of the hands that transform heritage into future.
Grand Tour arrives, then, at precisely the right moment and in exactly the right register. As the market searches for new equilibrium and international luxury redefines its codes, the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana has chosen to place at the forefront the least ostentatious and most decisive foundation of all: education.
This is where the seriousness of a system is measured. This is where Made in Italy ceases to be a slogan and once again becomes what it has always been at its best: a standard to uphold, every day, in full fidelity to the weight of its own history.
Read the italian version: https://www.milanoluxurylife.it/grand-tour-camera-nazionale-moda-italiana-made-in-italy/
