Fortela and the archive of Alessandro Squarzi

Some time in the 1980s, a teenager from Forlì walked through La Montagnola, the flea market in Bologna, and came home with a pair of faded Levi's. Old ones, with a capital E on the red tab, the mark of jeans made before 1971. He still has them.

The teenager was Alessandro Squarzi, and those jeans became the first piece of a collection that now runs to around six thousand garments. Most of it is kept in Forlì, in a space that has come to be known as his Area 51. It is also where Fortela begins.

The archive

Taken together, it reads like a history of how men dressed for work, war and weather between the 1920s and the 1980s. Army field jackets. Hunting coats. Leather flight jackets. Denim worn by people who needed it to last. Squarzi gathered it over four decades, at flea markets and on trips through the United States and Japan. A selection was photographed for a book, The Squarzi Archive, with a foreword by Scott Schuman of The Sartorialist, whose street photographs helped make Squarzi one of the most recognised faces in menswear.

None of this started in a design studio. Squarzi was born in Forlì in 1965 and started out in fashion in the early 1990s, first in a clothing shop, then as a salesman. Over the years he built showrooms in Bologna, Florence, Ancona and Milan, and a reputation for spotting brands before anyone else did. In the early 2010s he began designing his own. Fortela was the one that grew out of the archive.

Studying, not copying

It would have been easy to reproduce the archive. Fortela does something slower. Each old garment is studied the way Squarzi, who also collects old cars and motorcycles, might look at an engine: the cut, the construction, the weight of the cloth, the buttons, how a seam was finished and why. What comes out is a new piece, made by workshops in Italy and Japan, that carries the logic of the original rather than its costume.

The brand puts it plainly: "The past is our foundation, not our limit."

The shapes come from American military and western clothing. The denim is often Japanese selvedge, from a country where old workwear is studied with a devotion Squarzi shares. And the way it is all worn is Italian: soft, unfussy, never stiff. Squarzi calls his own style "my classic," and describes it as "not what is fashionable today, but what will last over time." When he travels, he packs white Fortela trousers, Edward Green shoes and a camel coat. That is the whole idea in one suitcase.

In good company

That mix is why Fortela feels at home at Neighbourhood. Squarzi's collection started with denim, and the care for the original that we described in our piece on dry denim is exactly what drives Fortela. Its tailoring shares the Italian ease of Tagliatore, seen through a vintage lens. And The Brooklyn Circus, another brand built on American roots and a well-dressed attitude, has written about Squarzi too, after meeting him at Pitti Uomo in Florence.

What we carry

In Arnhem, Fortela is about surface and shape. The wool bomber jacket starts from the flight jacket: short in the body, with a ribbed collar, cuffs and hem. Fortela makes it in soft wool from the Italian mill Manteco, with horn buttons down the front and two flapped patch pockets. It has the structure of a blazer without the formality. Worn over a white shirt with wide, pleated trousers, it looks almost like tailoring; over a T-shirt and jeans, it is simply a very good jacket.

The woven crewneck sweatshirt is the quieter piece. From across the room it is a sweatshirt, with raglan sleeves, ribbed trims and the small V at the neck that old athletic sweatshirts had. Up close the cotton is woven rather than knitted, which gives it texture and helps it hold its shape. Indaco is a deep indigo made for denim. Agave is a pale sage green that looks best with cream, brown and washed blues.

For your son and daughter

Fortela has a line it uses about its own clothes: "Not for sale. Only for your son and daughter." It sounds like a slogan until you remember the Levi's from La Montagnola, bought four decades ago and still in the collection. These clothes are made to be worn, softened and handed on, the way the originals were.

Come and try them in the shop in Arnhem, or see the full Fortela collection online.