What Is Carnet? — An Italian Fabric Brand for Tailoring
Written by Kenji Tanaka
When choosing fabrics at a tailor, you may come across the name Carnet.
But what exactly is Carnet?
Simply put, Carnet is a fabric brand developed by Ratti, an Italian textile company, specifically for tailoring and made-to-measure clothing. Ratti was founded in 1945 and works across various areas of textiles, including fabric development, weaving, dyeing, printing, and finishing. Carnet became part of the Ratti group in 1991 and today offers more than 4,000 fabrics for tailors and designers.
In other words, it would be misleading to think of Carnet simply as a traditional wool mill producing all of its fabrics in a single factory. It is a tailoring-focused fabric brand within Ratti, offering a very broad range of fabrics for made-to-measure clothing.
More Than 4,000 Choices
One of Carnet's main characteristics is the breadth of its collections. Plain fabrics, stripes, checks, different colors, textures, and weights. For a tailor, having such a wide range of options is extremely useful.
A good fabric does not necessarily mean the most expensive fabric. The right choice depends on how the suit will be used.
Is it for everyday business wear? For travel and business trips? Or for a special occasion? Does the client want a soft, comfortable feel, or a more structured appearance?
The right fabric changes according to the person and the purpose of the suit. That is why having a wide range of choices matters to a tailor.
Explorer at uniontailors
Carnet offers many different collections, and one that we actually work with at uniontailors is Explorer.
Explorer is made from 100% wool, yet it has a useful degree of stretch and is highly resistant to wrinkles. This makes it particularly practical for people who wear suits regularly or travel frequently.
A suit should not only look good when you are standing still. You sit, walk, drive, and spend long hours on trains or airplanes. In those situations, it matters how well the fabric moves with the body and how well it recovers after being worn.
From our experience, this is one of the things that makes Explorer such a practical fabric.
Does 100% Wool Mean More Wrinkles?
When people hear “100% wool,” they may imagine a delicate fabric that wrinkles easily. But not all wool fabrics behave in the same way.
The characteristics of a fabric depend not only on the wool itself, but also on the yarn, weave, construction, and finishing. These factors influence its comfort, stretch, wrinkle resistance, and overall performance.
Explorer is a good example of a 100% wool fabric designed to offer the practicality needed for everyday wear.
That is something you can understand much better by actually making a suit and wearing it than by simply looking at a specification sheet.
Fabric Cannot Be Chosen by Specifications Alone
When choosing a fabric, we naturally look at things such as fiber composition, Super numbers, and weight. These specifications are important.
But as a tailor, I also care about how the fabric actually performs in everyday life.
How does it move with the body? How much does it wrinkle? How does it look after a full day of wear? And, most importantly, is the client comfortable wearing it?
These are things that numbers alone cannot tell us.
That is why I do not believe in simply choosing the “best” fabric. The important thing is finding the right fabric for the person and the purpose of the garment.
This is where Carnet becomes particularly interesting. Its broad range gives a tailor many possibilities, while collections such as Explorer show how those possibilities can translate into fabrics that are not only attractive, but also genuinely practical to wear.
For a tailor, that is ultimately what matters: not simply how a fabric looks in a book, but what it becomes when it is made into a suit and worn by a real person.