The Prince's Foundation and Yoox Net-A-Porter have teamed up to create a fully sustainable (and not a little sexy) capsule collection designed by artisanal trainees.

Officially titled the “Yoox Net-A-Porter For The Prince’s Foundation Collection”, a new capsule of some eight handmade menswear pieces lands on Mr Porter and Yoox today, each having been designed and crafted by modern artisan trainees in order to in the words of the retail group “strengthen textile skills training and equip trainee artisans in the UK and Italy with the skills and confidence to produce luxury apparel to the highest standards”. 

Designed by six Italian students from the Politecnico Di Milano’s Fashion In Process (FIP) course and handmade at Dumfries House – the headquarters of The Prince’s Foundation in Ayrshire, Scotland – by six British craftspeople, all proceeds from the collection will go directly back to The Prince's Foundation and its essential Future Textiles programme. 

Consisting of a high-lapel merino wool and cashmere overcoat, a padded charcoal cashmere bomber jacket, a perfect white poplin cotton shirt and a pair of high-waisted wool trousers, to name a few, it's a comprehensive collection of essential winter basics. 

Perhaps most notably there's an ivory-hued cashmere rollneck finished with cable-knit detailing, which has been manufactured at Johnstons Of Elgin's mill in Hawick, Scotland, where all of the aforementioned British artisans were taught the essential skills in the knitwear development process.

The Prince Of Wales has dedicated much of his life and, of course, the work of his foundation to the preservation of traditional crafts and this new project acts as a perfect marriage of the style that he projects through his person (and that covetable wardrobe) and the values he both pursues and projects in his many endeavours. 

“I’ve been enormously impressed by the efforts, the ideas and the vision shown by the artisans from the UK and Italy,” says the Prince of the new collection.

“Hopefully they will take away a great deal of skill and understanding of sustainable approaches to design and manufacturing that they can apply to their own businesses or future careers.

The key for me is to rediscover the importance that nature plays, understand where natural materials come from and how they can be used in exciting and innovative ways,” he continues.

“After all, nature is the source of everything.”

One of the most intriguing elements of this new project is the fact that each of the items in the collection have been directly informed in terms of design by purchasing data that the Yoox Net-A-Porter Group has harvested over the course of the past two decades.

It's a point that means the collection is based on stuff that luxury consumers actually want to buy and, in short, will most likely sell like hotcakes. 

“I’ve long been inspired by uniting seemingly opposing worlds,” says Federico Marchetti, chairman and CEO of Yoox Net-A-Porter.

“The Modern Artisan Project harnesses big data and artificial intelligence to transform the ancient profession of craftsmanship into a contemporary career.

We have equipped the next generation of artisans with the digital tools of the trade to navigate an ever-evolving landscape.

“Designed in Italy and crafted in the UK, this truly sustainable luxury collection illustrates the vast possibilities of cross-border collaborations to tackle environmental challenges and train creative talents in these uncertain times and beyond.”