My name is Gianna Soria. I am the founder and Brand Director of Monte Sharp, an independent fashion house, working studio and mono-brand boutique in Florence. I founded the company in 2022 with Alfredo Di Mauro, an architect and Monte Sharp’s co-founder and Creative Director.

The real story is considerably less linear.

I did not arrive in fashion because I had studied design or knew how to make a pattern. I am a Venezuelan lawyer. In Barcelona, I completed master’s degrees in Branding Communication and Marketing Communication.

For more than 25 years, I helped companies build brands that could expand internationally and improve how they presented themselves. My work combined strategy, business, branding, communication and team leadership. I knew how to identify an opportunity, turn disconnected ideas into a system and organize the people required to build it.

Then I arrived in Italy and, for a while, I could no longer understand what any of that experience was worth.

Starting again in Italy without starting from zero

I moved to Italy in 2019 as a Venezuelan in exile. Soon afterwards, the pandemic arrived, and my first two years in the country were largely shaped by confinement and uncertainty.

My professional life had always depended heavily on language. I had worked in Venezuela and Spain with the precision that comes from thinking and communicating in your own language. In Italy, I could learn enough Italian to live, but that was not the same as building a career around words.

At 48, I felt lost. I needed to generate my own income and recover the feeling that I was still capable of building something valuable. For a period, I believed that moving countries had made much of my professional identity unusable.

Eventually, I understood that I was asking myself the wrong question.

I did not need to decide what new profession I should learn from the beginning. I needed to ask what I could build with everything I already knew.

That distinction became the foundation of Monte Sharp. I did not start from zero. I changed where I applied my experience.

Why I chose fashion without being a designer

Fashion allowed me to create value through a language that was not based only on words. A garment communicates before its wearer speaks. Proportion, material, silhouette and construction can express authority or ambition without an explanation.

I knew I was not a fashion designer, and I had no interest in pretending to be one. But I knew how to recognize what a company needed, bring the right people together and direct them towards a coherent idea.

My role could be to build the brand, define its mission, understand its customer, organize its capabilities and edit what the company produced. I needed to know which specialists to trust, what questions to ask and when a product did or did not belong to Monte Sharp.

That remains my role today. I am not Monte Sharp’s designer or Creative Director. I am its founder and Brand Director.

Alfredo Di Mauro is Monte Sharp’s co-founder and Creative Director. He is an architect, and his training is important to the way the brand approaches volume, balance, structure and the relationship between a garment and the body. The company is built at the meeting point between two disciplines: my experience in brand strategy and business direction, and Alfredo’s architectural approach to creative development.

Monte Sharp also exists because international investment partners provided capital and believed in the project before its outcome was guaranteed.

From bags to a fashion house

Monte Sharp was founded in 2022 and began as a handbag brand. It did not arrive fully formed with the identity it has today. It developed through prototypes, wrong turns, commercial disappointments and repeated attempts to understand where our greatest strength truly lay.

We tried to establish the brand through Milan, presenting collections and working with industry professionals in a system where thousands of brands compete for the same attention. Those efforts did not produce the traction we needed. For a small company, attention without sufficient orders is not growth.

For some time, I assumed that people established in fashion must understand my company better than I did. I confused their technical knowledge with the right to define my business.

That expensive mistake forced me to recover the value of my experience. Not knowing how to design a collection did not mean my strategic judgement had no place in fashion. I could rely on experts without surrendering the company’s mission to them.

In 2025, we opened the Monte Sharp boutique in Florence, with our working design studio next door. That physical space changed the company. For the first time, we could observe directly what women touched, tried on, rejected, remembered and returned to buy.

Behavior came first. Explanation came second.

Why Florence matters to Monte Sharp

I want Monte Sharp to become an international brand, but I want it to be unmistakably Florentine.

Milan has Fashion Week, showrooms, agencies, buyers and a powerful concentration of fashion businesses. It also has an enormous number of people competing to be noticed. Florence has important fashion schools, creative professionals, skilled workshops and, nearby, the textile knowledge of Prato and Montemurlo.

The ability exists here. What I want to contribute is more confidence, visibility and international attention for the contemporary fashion being created in Florence.

I love Florence deeply. My commitment to the city is not a decorative part of the brand story. It is part of the business I am trying to build. I want Monte Sharp to help put Florence on the map as a place where a new, independent and internationally relevant fashion house can be born.

Who is the Monte Sharp woman?

The Monte Sharp woman is often passing through a professional transformation. She may be building a company, entering a more powerful position or deciding that her image must finally reflect what she has already become.

She may be a lawyer, finance professional, founder, entrepreneur, consultant, director, psychologist or creative. These women think, decide and create. They have an intellectual presence that conventional clothing does not always make visible.

She does not want to look ordinary, but she does not want to look overdressed either. Monte Sharp works inside that tension.

Our clothes must allow a woman to feel comfortable and recognizably herself while giving her greater presence. When she enters a room, I want people to understand that she has arrived—not because she looks theatrical, but because the garment allows her to occupy more space, visually and intellectually.

That is also how I evaluate a product. Monte Sharp has developed a clear understanding of its proportions, silhouettes and visual codes. I contribute ideas and make decisions about direction, editing and coherence, but I am not deeply involved in the technical creative process. My most important question is practical: can our client actually use this garment in her life?

A piece may be beautiful and still be wrong for Monte Sharp. If it asks our woman to become someone else, or if its complexity prevents her from living and moving with authority, I reject it.

Why the name Monte Sharp?

Mount Sharp—also known as Aeolis Mons—is a mountain inside Gale Crater on Mars. NASA’s Curiosity rover has explored its layered slopes, but no human being has stood there. We know it through technology, images and scientific interpretation.

For me, that distance became a metaphor for the mind of the Monte Sharp woman. She is not immediately accessible or easily explained. Her intelligence, ambition and inner life cannot be understood at a glance. There is something difficult to reach in her, but the difficulty is part of her beauty.

The name does not describe a geographical place where we produce clothing. It describes the mystery and complexity of the woman for whom we create it.

What sustainability means inside a small fashion house

We use deadstock and surplus materials and produce in limited quantities because the environmental and social costs associated with overproduction are too significant to ignore.

But I do not believe that using the word “sustainable” makes a fashion company harmless. Clothing always requires materials, energy, transport and human labor. Our responsibility is to make decisions we can explain honestly.

Through our approach to sustainability, we select existing materials for their weight, hand, surface and behavior and work with a network around Florence, Prato and Montemurlo. Limited production is environmental, creative and economic at once: it reduces unnecessary inventory, protects the rarity of a material and lets us learn from customers before repeating a piece.

Monte Sharp is not a brand for everyone. But the people who understand it should be able to see that there is real design, thought and work behind the product.

What the Cappotto 11R taught me

The Cappotto 11R became the clearest example of how Monte Sharp learned to listen.

Before opening the store, a fashion retail consultant advised us not to produce the camel coat. Monte Sharp was unknown, the coat was expensive to make and established outerwear and luxury brands were minutes away from our future boutique.

We followed his advice.

Months later, I used the rejected prototype as a prop in the Christmas window. Women entered asking to try it on. Men asked whether it was made for them. People wanted its price and sizes. We had no stock, so I kept saying it was sold out.

Then an elegantly dressed older Italian woman asked me to come outside. She did not want to buy the coat. She simply wanted me to congratulate the person who had designed it, and she asked its name.

I looked towards the small address plaque beside the studio door and improvised: “It is called 11R.”

The customers had validated the coat before we learned to interpret their behavior. A product rejected by an expert had become the piece people remembered.

Today, the Cappotto 11R is Monte Sharp’s signature coat. It gave us an operating principle: observe first, interpret second, produce gradually. No forecast is more important than repeated evidence from real customers.

A boutique with a working studio beside it

Monte Sharp is located near Ponte Vecchio and the Uffizi. The boutique is at Via Lambertesca 13R, and the working studio is next door at 11R.

I do not want a visitor to experience it as just another shop. I want her to understand that clothing is being considered, tested and developed here. The studio makes the process visible and connects the finished garment to the people, decisions and experiments behind it.

Not everyone who enters will understand Monte Sharp, and that is fine. But the person who does should feel that she has discovered something: an independent fashion house in the process of becoming itself.

What we are building next

Within five years, I want Monte Sharp to be an international fashion brand known above all for its capispalla—its coats and outerwear. I believe this is where our greatest product strength lies. We know how to create beautiful coats with presence, structure and a distinct point of view.

I see substantial international sales, but recognition matters as much as scale. I want Monte Sharp known as a new Florentine fashion house: founded by a Venezuelan woman in exile, built with an architect, supported by partners who believed in it and made real by a team that translated an improbable idea into clothing.

I have fought to build this company in a country that was not mine and in a language I did not fully command. Yet Florence has become inseparable from what I want Monte Sharp to represent.

I am not trying to build a charming little boutique in a beautiful Italian city.

I am trying to build an international fashion house—and I want the world to know that it was built in Florence.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Monte Sharp?

Gianna Soria founded Monte Sharp in Florence in 2022. Alfredo Di Mauro is its co-founder and Creative Director. A group of international investors supports the project.

Who is Gianna Soria?

Gianna Soria is a Venezuelan lawyer, brand strategist, entrepreneur, and Monte Sharp’s founder and Brand Director. She spent more than 25 years helping businesses develop brands and expand internationally.

Is Gianna Soria a fashion designer?

No. She is Monte Sharp’s founder and Brand Director. She defines its strategy, mission, positioning and customer direction, organizes its capabilities and edits decisions according to the brand’s identity.

Who is Monte Sharp’s Creative Director?

Architect Alfredo Di Mauro is Monte Sharp’s co-founder and Creative Director. His architectural training informs the brand’s approach to structure, volume, proportion and the relationship between clothing and the body.

When was Monte Sharp founded?

Monte Sharp was founded in Florence in 2022. It began as a handbag brand and later evolved into clothing. Its first mono-brand boutique opened in Florence in 2025.

What is Monte Sharp best known for?

Monte Sharp is developing its identity around architectural womenswear and capispalla, the Italian term for coats and outerwear. The Cappotto 11R is its signature coat.

Where is Monte Sharp in Florence?

The Monte Sharp boutique is at Via Lambertesca 13R, near Ponte Vecchio and the Uffizi. Its working fashion studio is next door at Via Lambertesca 11R.

Why is the brand called Monte Sharp?

The name refers to Mount Sharp, or Aeolis Mons, a mountain inside Gale Crater on Mars. For the founders, it represents a woman whose intelligence and inner world are beautiful, complex and not immediately accessible.

How does Monte Sharp produce its clothing?

Monte Sharp works in limited quantities, uses deadstock and surplus materials when appropriate, and collaborates with a production network concentrated around Florence, Prato and Montemurlo in Tuscany.

About the author: Gianna Soria is the founder and Brand Director of Monte Sharp, an independent fashion house, boutique and working studio in Florence. She is a Venezuelan lawyer with master’s degrees in Branding Communication and Marketing Communication from Barcelona and more than 25 years of experience in brand strategy, business development and international expansion.