STITCHED DREAMS: THE WOMEN BEHIND PATBO'S EMBROIDERY

Paris has Lesage — the embroidery house behind a century of Chanel and Dior couture, so central to French fashion that the government named it a "living heritage" institution. Brazil has something the global industry has barely heard of: the Escola de Bordado, a free hand-embroidery school run out of the Instituto Patrícia Bonaldi in Uberlândia, a city in Minas Gerais that most fashion editors couldn't find on a map, let alone credit for the beadwork on a stadium tour outfit.

That's not a stretch of a comparison. It's the same relationship — a fashion house that depends entirely on a workshop of skilled hands to make what it designs — just one that almost nobody outside Brazil has been told about yet.

The school, not the sweatshop

Founded by Patrícia Bonaldi in 2015 as Costurando Sonhos ("Sewing Dreams"), the school offers a three-month course in sewing, embroidery and hand-beading — entirely free, funded by PatBO itself, and open to anyone over 18. Participation isn't a condition of working for the brand; it's a genuine skills program first. Bonaldi has trained more than 500 women through it, by her own and the brand's account, and graduates leave with real options: some join PatBO's own atelier as embroiderers, some become instructors at the school itself, and others use the training to open their own independent sewing businesses or work for other labels entirely. The brand is currently planning to expand the program to São Paulo.

Bonaldi is explicit about why it exists. "I have always deeply valued the art of embroidery," she has said. "Carrying on the tradition and legacy of handmade embroidery is a fundamental passion of mine." Pressed further, she's put it more bluntly: "The type of detailed embroidery I do is not something easily found in Brazil, so it was important for me to preserve this artisanship." It's a striking admission — that even inside Brazil, the specific hand-embroidery skill her brand depends on was at risk of disappearing before she built a school to keep it alive. "By empowering these people," she's said, "we are valuing our culture and talent and preventing this labor, which is so important, from becoming scarce."

What they actually make

This isn't decorative stitching bolted onto finished garments. PatBO's technique list reads like a haute couture atelier's: sequins (paetê), lace (rendas) and pearls worked by hand onto pure silk, silk organza, tulle and taffeta, alongside crystal beading and hand embroidery — all produced across PatBO's own factory in Uberlândia and an atelier in São Paulo. It's worth situating that within a wider picture most people outside Brazil never hear about: the Northeast, in states like Paraíba and Rio Grande do Norte, holds centuries-old lace traditions of its own — renda renascença and labirinto embroidery among them, some now recognized as official intangible cultural heritage. PatBO's atelier sits further south and isn't a keeper of those specific regional techniques, but it belongs to that same undertold story: Brazil as a country with deep, living textile craft traditions, not a country without them.

Bonaldi describes her own standard for the work in terms that leave no room for "craft" as an afterthought: "Eu faço roupas com tanto empenho de trabalho manual que são joias" — I make clothes with so much manual effort that they become jewels. It's a claim you can test against the client list: a bodysuit built for Beyoncé's Renaissance tour took a workshop 60 days to embroider by hand. That's not a speed a factory line produces. That's the school, and the women who came through it, doing exactly the kind of work Bonaldi built the program to protect.

Why she built it this way

Bonaldi didn't start in fashion. She trained toward medicine and law before changing course, then spent three years working in Japan. When she came back to Brazil, she opened a multi-brand boutique — and found, almost by accident, that the pieces she'd made herself, by hand, were the ones customers actually wanted. That's the moment she traces her entire business back to: not a trend she chased, but proof that handmade work was her actual competitive advantage, long before "craftsmanship" became a marketing word anyone could reach for. "Defina o tamanho do seu negócio de acordo com o propósito dele," she's said — size your business according to its purpose. For Bonaldi, the purpose was never speed. It was keeping a specific, disappearing skill in Brazilian hands, and building a business large enough to make that sustainable.

That philosophy now sits inside a formal framework: PatBO is a signatory of the UN Global Compact, and organizes its sustainability commitments around three pillars — Plantio, a reforestation initiative; Carbon Free, aimed at offsetting emissions; and Costurando Sonhos itself, named as a pillar in its own right alongside the environmental ones. Craft preservation isn't filed under "community outreach" at PatBO. It's filed under sustainability, on equal footing with planting trees.

A portion of every purchase

Here's the detail worth knowing as a consumer, not just as an audience learning a brand's backstory: PatBO directs a portion of revenue from every purchase toward funding the school. Buying a PatBO piece — whether it's a $350 swim top from a Farfetch order in the Gulf or a $3,000 gown from the Flatiron boutique — is, structurally, also a small transfer into a free training program for Brazilian women in Uberlândia. As one description of the program put it, each piece carries "a beleza que nasce das mãos, das histórias e dos sonhos costurados" — the beauty born from hands, from stories, from stitched dreams.

The part that doesn't make the headlines

This is the story sitting underneath the Beyoncé headline, and it's arguably the more important one. Brazilian fashion keeps getting filed under "exotic," under Rio, under commodity manufacturing — cheap hands producing someone else's designs. PatBO's atelier is a direct rebuttal to that framing: a Brazilian designer who identified a skilled, specific, at-risk craft, built a free school to keep it alive, trained more than 500 women in it, and then put that exact craftsmanship on one of the most photographed bodies on the planet — not despite being made in the interior of Minas Gerais, but because of it.

Paris protects Lesage as living heritage. Brazil has its own version quietly running in Uberlândia. The difference is simply who's been told about it.

Sources & further reading

• Instituto Patrícia Bonaldi / PatBO, on the Escola de Bordado and the Costurando Sonhos program, Uberlândia.
• PatBO, statements by founder Patrícia Bonaldi on handmade embroidery and the school's purpose.
• PatBO, UN Global Compact participation and sustainability pillars (Plantio, Carbon Free, Costurando Sonhos).
• Press coverage of the PatBO bodysuit created for Beyoncé's Renaissance tour — 60 days of hand embroidery.
• IPHAN, on renda renascença and labirinto embroidery recognized as intangible cultural heritage.