The “fashion creator” Alba Toni, aka Koefia, was born and raised in Ravenna, founder of the Koefia Academy in Rome, famous not only nationally and still frequented today by many students from different countries around the world.
In recent days, a garden has been named after her in the green area located in Via Val di Fiemme. Present at the inauguration were Massimo Cameliani, president of the city council, the two city councilors who, together with Giancarlo Schiano, proposed the naming in 2022 as voted on by the council, Stefania Beccari and Chiara Francesconi, the CEO of the Koefia Academy, Antonio Lo Presti who emotionally remembered the founder of the academy, representatives of Soroptimis and some family members.
Alba Toni Koefia was born in Ravenna on 6 April 1913, into a simple family: her mother Rosina, a housewife and her father Paolo, a stonemason. During his school education, working in tailoring and millinery workshops, Koefia felt a growing interest in fashion. She was little more than a teenager when she designed a revolutionary new technique. The young girl had the idea of cutting the models directly on the mannequin. This intuition gave the creations no longer a flat vision as in the classic paper pattern cut on the table, but a three-dimensional one. This technique made her famous to the point that the best tailors in Europe began to ask for her designs. Even today, the great garments of Italian high fashion are created this way. In 1951 she founded the house that created high fashion models Koefia in Rome, followed a few months later by the opening of the Koefia International Academy, a place in which to teach young people the secrets of high fashion and the production process, from the design to the creation of clothes and collections. The prestige of the school and the skills that it develops among its students are still highly regarded and current throughout the sector among the most famous fashion houses and brands.
