Inside an Italian Dye House
A tour of Montega, an Italian dye house, shows how they're cutting water use in textile finishing. Their iFlow system applies color without water, replacing the 10 bathtubs of water typically needed per pair of jeans. They also showcase mineral-pigment dyes, laser pretreatment, and experimental techniques that create textured, scented fabrics.
Chapters
Westmoreland, Westmoreland, o pura principessa, nella tua fredda stanza, fuori di le stelle che tremano d'amore. I understand that Montego has two sides of the company. Why is this side of the company so important?
Oh, because here is the heart of the formulation. So every type of innovation starts from here. Even if you are looking for, I don't know, a special treatment on your t-shirt, you need the right chemicals to do it, and the right chemicals are born here.
We were just at Montega's chemical lab and now we're taking a little trip down to one of their production facilities. Montega makes the chemicals, also uses them in washing and dyeing, and also does production for clients for washing and dyeing, correct?
Yes. Today we have some video creator, I would say, and they are to show everybody what is Montega. To get some special effect, but also to get some saving. In energy and in water, it is very important that you follow our process and you use our chemical. Okay, this is why we prefer that our customer came here and see how to use at best, what is the process, what is the application. This is why we talk about my process, your success. You see the— here there is a Glossy effect. This is an effect that give you like a brilliant imagine, and you can also manage the end. You can be more soft or not. It depends on the end modifier.
Which process was applied to this? This was like a garment dye and then like a—
Yes, and then you have pigment and also butterfly inside the machine. During the dyeing process, you put also butterfly, that is a towel in cotton that enable you to get some random effect.
Not real butterflies.
No.
We can wet with a corrosion agent like permanganate. You put in the machine black pant, the original was like this, with permanganate, random corrosion on the surface of the garment. You can achieve an effect like this.
As that butterfly towel, as that towel that's filled with corroding agent is running around the machine, it's randomly splotching the pair of pants, just creating the effects that we see that are like this. So that's really cool. It's just one of their processes among a million. I'm with Fede, with the fucking G. This guy is the reason we're here today. Your clothing brand Garment Workshop has been through like a lot of experimentation.
Montega, it's a a top company for research and development, especially in the dyes. I wanted to experiment with my beach shorts, nylon beach shorts. I had a few which were like blue-green, but I wanted to do some more special products, so I contacted them. I went here to Montega, they were able to treat it. Now you can see it's softer.
Yeah, it's very soft.
And through the machinery that you can see here, and of course some handwork, they were able to basically make this kind of artisanal tie-dyeing on an nylon piece, which is something you don't see every day.
I think what's really interesting here is, you know, when people hear chemical, there's a stigma around the word chemical.
It's difficult to explain to people how we move to be every day more sustainable, more greener, because this is our aim.
So these, these chemicals are chemicals that are saving the world because you're reinventing all these age-old processes for dyeing denim, bleaching, and so on, and using much, much more environmentally friendly chemicals, using a lot less water, just a lot less waste overall. If I look at a pair of denim like this, it's obviously gone through a lot of treatments. So to me, the fact that this was able to be done while being environmentally sustainable is pretty remarkable.
To get the brown, we have used mineral pigment brown.
Okay. It's a mineral dye.
Yes.
So you've extracted—
It's a mineral dye over over the denim.
This looks like the Galaxy phone.
Yeah. You have a product that is named Croco Surface because you see the surface of this is like—
like a crocodile texture.
Like a crocodile. You can get this glossy that you can see.
No, it's amazing.
Here you have just to touch.
Oh my God. This feels like nylon. Yeah. Every single pair here has a different story of how you achieved this.
Different story, yes.
You can never storytelling for every, for every, uh, fan.
Crazy, crazy jeans. These pieces stood out to me, and these are insane.
This jeans is made with laser. Before the laser, we have used a product that is called Resimax LS. When the rayon of the laser Tess, this Resimax LS enable to enhance the effect.
Enhance the effect.
Enhance the effect.
Right, because laser usually it comes out in like a lightish gray color, and in this case it doesn't leave behind anything at all, and that's because of the pretreatment they applied here.
This is Croco Mood. Croco Mood is a paste that you put on the garment to get this special effect when you take away this paste and you get this effect like a serpentine. Here you see very, very strong. You can have also local, very little. This is yellow, this is brown, so you have two kind. You use a product called Resimax Double, enable you to get a double dyeing effect. It is important to smell this garment because we have encapsulated an essence, okay?
I don't know, so why does it smell so fresh? Like, it just smells like—
it's many years that this garment has been made and it will always smell.
How old is this one?
It's about 10 years.
This is 10 years old?
Wow.
These practically look like they're leather, but they're not. It's denim. And I'm noticing it's white denim specifically on the inside. So there's a specialty coating. All right. Should we go see the production?
Okay. Possiamo andare di sotto? Sì.
We are in the production facility, the smaller production facility of Maltega. They have another facility which is much larger for larger production. But over here they do a lot of sampling and small collections.
Matteo is our technician. Textile designer. Here we can do a mineral pigment process, so you can see. And in the washing machine of Genealogia, that is a flow machine, we can make a treatment by nebulization.
They put blue dye in here, so we'll see in a little bit what the result looks like. We'll check in in a bit.
Matteo is going to introduce pants.
No water. No water.
No water. Dry pants. No wet pants.
No water. Wow. This machine works in tandem with this washing machine. What's really special here is that no water at all is being used in the process. In fact, that liquid is going to be sprayed into the machine kind of like a fog that's going to be moist enough to actually be able to penetrate the fabric without using any water at all, which is pretty revolutionary because dyeing is traditionally one of the processes that consumes the most water. They say that to make one pair of jeans, it typically takes 10 bathtubs worth of water. So this is very, very cool.
After the production of the pants, you can wash with this system named wet cleaning.
But what do you mean by wet cleaning?
It's a soft washing. Delicate washing, like in a cradle. Okay.
Yeah. So what are these rubber balls for? Do they have the same effect as stones or is it different?
At the end of the process, you can put in the dryer or in the machine. The garment dry with this. For effect, the mechanical effect, you can— the fabric became more soft.
Qui abbiamo fatto una tintura in iFlow. Praticamente abbiamo lavorato con 1 kg di merce con 1 litro d'acqua. The dye is particolare. Nothing left behind. So that blue dye we saw from before is now done. Machine has been stopped and wow, that looks sick. Oh my God, very cool, very, very cool. BEEP!
