Nico Didonna: FROM DISHCLOTHS TO DESIGN LEGACy

​SøEdited Team
Article: Kellie Neilson
SøEditor-in-Chief: Chris Saint Sims 
​SøFashion Director: Savannah Barthorpe

​Fashion has always had a weakness for mythology. Designers are so often introduced through origin stories burnished by hindsight: childhood sketches, innate genius, an early certainty about the life awaiting them. Nico Didonna offers something less stage-managed and, for that reason, more compelling. His career appears to have unfolded through instinct, timing and conviction rather than overt ambition, each decision gradually resolving into a philosophy entirely his own.
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In person, Didonna is notably free of performance. He speaks with the assurance of someone shaped by the mechanics of fashion rather than merely its surface. Tailoring, fabric and construction enter the conversation as naturally as travel and memory. His relationship to fashion feels considered, exacting and quietly singular.

His path has been anything but linear. It moved through Milan, London and America, through uncertainty and reinvention, through risk, persistence and recalibration. Around him, the industry has transformed repeatedly. Yet certain values seem to have held fast: quality, individuality and a refusal to move in step simply because the wider culture expects it.

We meet to discuss beginnings, old Soho, sustainability and the realities of building longevity in fashion.

​SO: 
You moved to London in the late eighties without planning to stay. What changed?

ND: 
London wasn't the plan. America was. I came to London in 1987 because I had a cruise line job that was eventually supposed to take me to the US. But when I arrived, my English wasn't very good, so I worked at The Goring Hotel for six to nine months. Then I went to America and quickly realised it wasn't for me.

For many people, America represents possibility: scale, ambition, movement. But as Didonna describes it, geography was never really the issue. He was looking for somewhere that felt intellectually and creatively aligned, and London, rather than America, became the place that offered that fit.

SO: 
What didn't you like about it?

ND:
I just didn't connect with it. It felt loud to me. I couldn't relate to the culture. I went back to Milan afterwards, thinking I'd stay there, but after living away, I suddenly saw it differently. I'd experienced freedom and independence, and going back felt restrictive. I felt depressed. After two weeks, I came back to London. I stayed with friends at first, but that temporary arrangement became permanent.

That return to London feels telling. In the late eighties, the city still possessed a rough-edged glamour, a creative charge not yet over-curated or over-explained.

It is easy to understand why Didonna, almost inadvertently, found in it the place that would become home.

SO:
Fashion wasn't your original path either.

ND: 
No. A teacher at college encouraged me to study tailoring. At the time, people saw it as something disappearing, not something to build a future on. But tailoring teaches you everything about construction, proportion, and movement. Once you understand how clothes are made, you can design with confidence rather than guesswork.

There is something quietly revealing in that answer. At a moment when fashion so often privileges image above all else, Didonna still speaks first about construction. For him, design begins beneath the visible surface, in the architecture, proportion and discipline of the garment itself.

Building a Business

SO: 
Your first breakthrough came from an unlikely source.

ND: 
Dishcloths!

​SO: 
Actual dishcloths?

ND: 
​Laughs. Yes. The beauty to me was that it was pure cotton. I bought a big roll of it, but it shrank when cut, so I washed it and dried it in the sun so that it was workable.

I made T-shirts from them while I was studying because I liked their texture and look. Then somebody from a shop asked where they came from. I got an order for 37 pieces. When I went to collect my payment, I couldn’t see any of the T-shirts in the shop, and I was angry as I assumed they hadn’t been displayed. But they sold out within two hours. Then they wanted 200 more. At that point, I thought, maybe something is happening here.
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What now reads like an origin myth was, at the time, simply an act of experimentation led by curiosity rather than strategy. Yet the episode already contains something essential to Didonna's sensibility: an instinct for locating beauty and potential in materials others might overlook.
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SO:
How quickly did it become a business?

ND: 
Very quickly. I brought in fellow students to help make everything and paid them properly. I worked from home and put half of every sale straight back into the business. I never borrowed money and never took investors.

His account of building the business carries the same independence as his design philosophy. There are no dramatic investor stories or overnight transformations, just steady expansion, reinvestment and control over the work itself.
Style and Philosophy

SO:
You often talk about Soho as an important influence. What made it special?

ND: 
​It had a particular energy then. You'd walk around and meet artists, musicians, writers, and designers. It felt mixed and unpredictable. You could spend a day there and leave with ten new ideas. Now I think many places lose character once they become too commercial. The spaces remain, but the atmosphere changes.

His reflections on Soho feel less nostalgic than diagnostic. Creativity depends upon collision: people, ideas and disciplines meeting with a degree of unpredictability. Strip too much of that away, and a place may remain visually intact while losing the very conditions that once made it culturally alive.

SO:
Your work is rooted in tailoring, but there is always something altered or unexpected. How would you describe your style?

ND: 
Classical with a twist.

I start from something familiar and then shift something: the shape, the cut, the structure. I want people to feel comfortable in what they're wearing, but also feel like they're wearing something with personality.

The phrase is deceptively simple, which is perhaps exactly the point. In a landscape increasingly defined by excess, Didonna's work occupies a more assured register, one in which individuality emerges through measured disruption rather than overt display.
Sustainability and Legacy

SO:
Sustainability has become central to your work.

ND: 
Because it has to be.

Everything new we make is upcycled or produced through zero-waste methods. I use natural fibres wherever possible and avoid synthetics. People sometimes think sustainability automatically means compromise, but I don't see it that way.
If you make something well and it lasts for years, that's value.
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SO: ​
His answer is brief, but it opens onto a broader recalibration in how luxury is understood. Exclusivity once rested largely on rarity and price; now, longevity, responsibility, and the integrity of making have entered the conversation. In Didonna's view, sustainability reads not as a passing expression of virtue, but as a fundamental expectation.

SO:
You're critical of fast fashion.

ND: 
I think the problem is that original ideas become disposable very quickly.
Someone creates something, then copies appear immediately at lower prices and larger volumes.

And even some luxury brands have changed. Branding isn't enough anymore.
People look at quality much more carefully now.

SO: 
His criticism isn't delivered with outrage. If anything, it comes across as disappointment, less concerned with imitation itself than with the gradual erosion of value attached to craftsmanship.

SO:
What has fashion cost you personally?

ND: 
Time.

Fashion takes a lot of it. You don't really separate work and life.
But I still enjoy making something new and seeing it become real. That's still the part I like most.

Designers are often asked about inspiration, and less often about sacrifice.

SO: ​
Didonna's answer is striking precisely because it is so undramatic. Behind every collection sits repetition, uncertainty and long stretches of unseen labour, and he describes that reality with characteristic clarity.

SO:
One final question — what advice would you give young creatives?

ND: 
Stay focused on what you're trying to do.
Listen when people criticise you, because sometimes they're right.
But learn the difference between useful criticism and noise.
And keep going.

Conclusion

What lingers after the conversation is not a single quotable line or a neatly packaged headline, but a sense of consistency: a designer who has remained committed to the same principles while the industry around him has repeatedly shifted its mood, its tempo and its values.

​In fashion, where reinvention is so often treated as a prerequisite for relevance, there is something quietly elegant in that steadiness. That one of his most enduring pieces is a jacket conceived two decades ago feels less like nostalgia than confirmation that tailoring, quality and conviction still retain their authority.

Nico Didonna
29 Great Windmill St, London W1D 7LN, United Kingdom
+44 20 7287 0207
Open · Closes 7 pm
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