Why the names are Latin

Spend enough time in Milan and you start seeing Latin everywhere. Over church doors. On the fronts of old banks. Right across the Duomo: MARIAE NASCENTI, big enough to read from across the piazza.

Nobody speaks it, of course. And yet everyone sort of can.

That's where the names come from. Every design starts with a word. Civitas: the city. Memento mori: remember that you will die (cheerful, we know – stay with us). Speculum: a mirror, which is how that drawing ended up as a gilded frame.

Some are Italian instead, because some things sound better the way a grandmother would say them: domani, amore eterno, basta pasta. (Nobody has ever really meant basta pasta.)

We like that the words are so much older than the clothes. A shirt wears out eventually. Libertà comes from libertas, a word the Romans were already using.

No Latin? No problem. The homepage has a list of every name, what it means and how to say it.

So which one would you wear first?

Designed in Milan, produced in Los Angeles.