Special guest at Micam celebrates Indonesia-Italy ties
Indonesian designer Poppy Dharsono was a guest of honour at Micam in Milan in September.
In addition to designing for her own fashion label, Ms Dharsono is also president of Indonesia Fashion Week, which she founded in 2015. Earlier in her professional life, she was a model and film star.
She said she had been visiting Italy for many years and had always admired the Italian fashion sector, including its producers of leather, shoes and handbags. “I realised a long time ago that Italy sets the global standard,” she remarked.
But she also spoke with pride about a shoes, bags and leather project she set up about three years ago in her home town, Garut, which is around 200 kilometres from Jakarta.
“It is a beautiful place,” she told leatherbiz. “It has hot springs and it used to attract very famous visitors. Members of several European royal families used to go there. So did Charlie Chaplin, the poet Pablo Neruda and lots of other famous people. It is still a beautiful place.”
During one visit from Jakarta, where she now lives, Ms Dharsono decided to set up the leather sector manufacturing project to help create employment and boost the local economy in Garut.
At the start of 2025, this project led to the opening of Piazza Firenze in Garut, a space for fashion, culture and tourism. It also hosts factory-outlet shops for the leathergoods and footwear manufacturers that have been operating there since the project began.
Poppy Dharsono’s strong ties to the industry in Europe have already brought other benefits to the small companies operating in Garut. At her invitation, former senior production experts from major brands in Italy and France have travelled to the Indonesian town in their own time to mentor and tutor the craftspeople there.
More recently, four of the Garut artisans had the chance to travel to Italy to spend several weeks advancing their pattern-cutting skills at course hosted by the Ars Sutoria training school.
“So many people have been kind to us,” Ms Dharsono said. “When we opened Piazza Firenze, we even received a message of congratulations from the mayor of the real Firenze, the city of Florence.”
She went on to say that Italian leathergoods and footwear brands should pay close attention to south-east Asia in general, and to Indonesia in particular, as potential growth markets for their products.
Image shows Poppy Dharsono addressing the audience at one of the seminars at Micam in September.
