Angela Petrulli

“In couture, magic comes from patience"

international prize

Dossier réalisé par Eve Chatelet

“You can spend a lot of money on clothes and still not know how to dress. When you have a made-to-measure garment in your wardrobe tailored to your morphology, it's a piece you can keep for years. There's always enough fabric to let it out, and it's more environmentally friendly,” explains Angela Petrulli, a Master Tailor in Monaco. She helps look after Princess Grace's dresses at the Palais Princier in Monaco and began taking an interest in couture at an early age. “As a six-year-old, I watched the master tailors at work. It fascinated me. I made my first made-to-measure clothes when
I was 14,” recalls this enthusiast. But things were not straightforward from the outset. She opened an atelier in Calabria when she was 18 but went out of business. Bookkeeping is no easy task at that age. She considered throwing out her needles for a while. But a famous Bordighera brand took her on until she moved to Monaco, where she eventually set up her own business, Angy Moda Création, now AMC Haute Couture.

Raising the profession’s profile

“I now work with my husband and our daughter, Chiara. I'd bought a second atelier just before the COVID-19 crisis. We opened in October, and by the following March, we were in lockdown! I thought about selling the new atelier, but my daughter, who had just finished her Baccalaureate, told me she wanted to take it over. She's opened another world for me by helping me make my creations more visible online and on social media. She's also particularly good at sketching and is working on designing a truly timeless Made in Monaco collection,” Angela Petrulli, who can now concentrate on her haute couture and made-to-measure creations. There's a lot of demand for this type of work, and you can produce marvellous results if you put in the time. Angela is a member of the Steering Committee responsible for the FCE Cross-Border Commission in Monaco. She is also a member of the World Federation of Master Tailors (WFMT) and promotes her profession to younger generations: “I founded the Bespoke Academy in Monaco, an association dedicated to promoting arts and crafts. Couture is a trade you must get into early. You also need to develop a taste for hard work.”

AMC Haute Couture

She uses fabrics she knows by heart to design dresses and suits without necessarily having to draw them. “With experience, you learn to see people's morphology. I know quite quickly in my head what a garment will look like. Some people ask me for clothes that I know won't suit them. I refuse, and that's part of what makes me a good professional," explains Angela Petrulli, who creates a dozen models each time for the World Congress of Master Tailors fashion show. At AMC Haute Couture, she designs made-to-measure menswear and womenswear for an international clientele in Monaco and Europe. And she’s always coming up with new designs using a carefully selected choice of noble, eco-friendly fabrics.