FRAQAIR is a silk wedding dress house between Milan and Lake Como. We cut wedding dresses by hand from Italian silk, in small numbers, in our own atelier — and send them to brides marrying far from home.
The house is small on purpose. Nothing is made before it is ordered, nothing is graded from a block, and no two dresses leave with the same measurements. What we make is not a dress off a rail, but a dress made for one woman, once.
The photographer who makes the dress
Before I made wedding dresses, I photographed them.
For years I have stood on the terraces of Lake Como with a camera — watching brides arrive by boat, waiting out the afternoon wind for the evening light, learning how a dress behaves when the day is real and not a studio. I saw the same thing again and again: gowns that photographed beautifully standing still, and went wrong the moment a woman moved. Stiff, heavy, built for one pose.
So I made the opposite. I trained at Istituto Marangoni, opened FRAQAIR in 2015, and have shown in Milan, New York and Paris — and set out to cut a dress from natural silk that moves the way the day moves: light enough to fold into a case, alive in the smallest wind, and made to the exact measurements of the woman wearing it.
I still photograph. It is the same eye behind both — I design the dress, and I know what it has to do in front of a lens, on a terrace, at golden hour. That is the whole of FRAQAIR.
— Nadia Fraqair, founder and designer
What we make
Silk wedding dresses, each made to your measurements.
The first is Aria — silk chiffon, weightless, a rosette worked by hand at the bodice. It is drawn on my table, cut in the atelier in Milan, and sewn by hand. For a bride who wants the dress drawn from nothing — her silhouette, her silk, her detail alone — there is bespoke. And for the whole of the day held in one pair of hands, the dress and the photography together.
Every gown is made to order and made to travel: cut to leave its case without a crease, and delivered wherever the wedding is.
The atelier
Everything is made in Italy.
I design and cut; a small circle of sarte and embroiderers builds each piece by hand. The silk is woven in Como, thirty minutes from the atelier. Nothing is held as stock — the dress is cut on your measurements, after the order, and finished seam by seam.
Lake Como
The house begins on this lake.
I live and work here, and the light on the water is in everything I make — the pale of the silk, the way a skirt lifts off a terrace in July. It is also why I know weddings from the inside: I have dressed and photographed them across the lake, from Villa del Balbianello to Bellagio. A dress made here is made by someone who has seen the day it is for.
Made to move
Every choice in the house comes from one idea: a wedding dress should move.
Natural silk over stiff construction. A gown that travels light and falls open when she arrives. True ivory, held true in real light and never warmed to cream. The materials and the making are meant to be felt, not announced.
The morning before
The house also makes the robes for the getting-ready morning — one for the bride, one for each of her party, cut from the same Como silk as the gowns. For many brides it is the first thing FRAQAIR makes for them, and the piece the whole morning is photographed in.
To begin
Every dress starts with a conversation — by video from anywhere, or in person at the atelier in Milan. Tell me where you live, when and where you marry, and what you are looking for.