How Flora Frroku managed to set up her own made-to-measure shirts business after fleeing her native Albania is an incredible story and a testament to her will to succeed.
In via Cairoli 24r, Florence, the workshop Flo and Flo has been turning out tailored shirts for men, women and children for the last 15 years. There, Flora Frroku uses the finest fabrics, such as the Thomas Mason line and the Egyptian cotton ‘Giza 87.’
Each shirt, sewn and finished in the traditional Florentine fashion, can be personalised with the addition of precious mother-of-pearl buttons or a hand-embroidered monogram.
Frroku arrived in Italy in a rubber dinghy from Albania when she was 23 years old, escaping the terrible economic crisis that had hit her country.
For three years she lived as an illegal immigrant with her brother in Genoa, working in a tailor’s workshop, where she honed the skills of weaving and sewing, already inherited from her parents who were tailors in Albania.
To learn more, she moved to Florence, where high fashion melds with a wealth of culture. She spent three years studying at the Carlo Secoli fashion school, during which time she was also able to regularize her immigrant status. In 1999 she started her own tailoring business, which has become the success it is today.
Frroku also makes shirts for big names in the Italian fashion industry, among them Valentino and Ungaro. Her clients include certain Florentine aristocrats as well as countless visitors from overseas who come year after year to be measured for one of her designs.
Attention to detail is one of the key elements in a made-to-measure shirt, and this can also be seen in her line of underwear and in the splendid jewellery she makes in collaboration with the Florentine jeweller Belfiore.
An excellent way to see Frroku at work is the annual exhibition Artigianato e Palazzo, which will be held in May 2014 in the beautiful Corsini Gardens.
Flo and Flo di Flora Frroku
Via Cairoli 24r – 055/583882
www.camiciesumisurafirenze.com
floandflo@hotmail.it
This article is published in collaboration with Artigianato e Palazzo (www.artigianatoepalazzo.it)
