Giuliana Coen Camerino’s use of Venetian velvet was much more than a design choice; it was the revival of a centuries-old textile tradition.

The velvet associated with Roberta di Camerino was woven by specialist Venetian silk weavers using techniques that had changed little since the Renaissance. Venice had been Europe’s centre for luxury silk weaving from the 15th and 16th centuries, producing sumptuous velvets for the courts of Europe. By the mid-20th century, only a handful of workshops still possessed the historic looms and the knowledge needed to produce these fabrics.

The process was exceptionally slow. Unlike modern industrial velvet, the pile was created on traditional hand-operated looms where two layers of fabric were woven simultaneously. Fine wires or rods were inserted into the weave to form loops of silk. Each loop was then either left intact, producing looped velvet, or carefully cut with a specialised knife to create the rich, upright pile known as cut velvet. This painstaking method produced remarkable depth, softness and a luminous surface that changes colour as it catches the light.

Many Roberta di Camerino handbags feature soprarizzo (also called soprarizzo or voided velvet), one of Venice’s most celebrated textile techniques. In this method, areas of cut pile are combined with flat woven grounds or looped pile within the same fabric, creating intricate raised patterns with extraordinary visual depth. It is one of the most technically demanding forms of velvet weaving.

Rather than treating these historic textiles as museum pieces, Giuliana Coen Camerino transformed them into contemporary luxury handbags. The combination of Renaissance weaving techniques with bold modern colours, sculptural brass frames and distinctive trompe-l’œil designs became the defining signature of Roberta di Camerino during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

This marriage of centuries-old Venetian craftsmanship with innovative fashion design is one of the reasons vintage Roberta di Camerino handbags remain highly regarded by collectors today. They are valued not simply as accessories, but as examples of Venice’s surviving textile heritage translated into twentieth-century luxury.