Venice

Why it matters: founded in 2003 by the Il Cerchio social cooperative, Banco Lotto N.10 is a working tailoring atelier inside the Giudecca Women’s Prison, where inmates learn dressmaking as a real trade and hand-cut and finish every garment sold. The little San Polo boutique near the Rialto Bridge sells the results: full-skirted, polka-dot 1950s-style dresses and jackets in silk shantung and fine wool, some from donated Fortuny and Bevilacqua fabric. Buying here funds training that many women carry into seamstress work after release. Ask the shop to help fit a dress to your size – most pieces run roughly 80-180 euros – and budget a few extra minutes to hear the story behind the workshop.

Why it matters: Process Collettivo is the retail storefront of Rio Terà dei Pensieri, a social cooperative that has run workshops inside Venice’s prisons since the 1990s, giving inmates paid jobs making goods for sale to the public. The shop opened in 2017 in the Frari district, backed by artist Mark Bradford, who represented the US at that year’s Venice Biennale. Browse the Malefatte line of bags and totes cut and sewn from recycled advertising banners, plus screen-printed t-shirts and cosmetics also made in the cooperative’s prison labs. Sales fund job placement for people leaving prison, so a bag bought here doubles as a small vote for reintegration over recidivism.