Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana has submitted eleven recommendations ahead of the 2027 Budget Law. They range from design incentives and corporate academies to relief for exporters hit by US tariffs, energy costs, and family ownership transfers. Read together, the package is less a wish list than a diagnosis. It identifies where the Italian fashion industry feels most exposed and proposes fiscal and industrial tools to address each weakness.
None of these measures is law yet. They form the opening position in a dialogue between the sector and the government and Parliament, and they will be trimmed, reshaped, or expanded before any of them reaches the statute book. That makes the text worth reading closely, because the priorities it sets out say as much about the industry’s self-assessment as about its demands.
Why the Industry Is Pressing Rome Now
Annual exports are approaching €90 billion, and fashion is among the largest contributors to Italy’s trade balance. That economic weight is the core of the argument. The case rests on an interdependent network that spans global luxury houses, small and medium-sized manufacturers, artisans, and specialized suppliers. Many of these businesses depend on one another, and a shock to one link can ripple through the rest of the chain in ways that rarely surface in headline export figures.
Italian fashion is one of our country’s great industrial, creative and cultural assets, investing in fashion means investing in the growth and the future of the country. – Carlo Capasa president of Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana
Carlo Capasa, President of Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana, framed the initiative as a long-term industrial question rather than a short-term request. “Italian fashion is one of our country’s great industrial, creative and cultural assets,” he said. “Investing in fashion means investing in the growth and the future of the country.”
The timing is significant. Fashion houses are operating in a Milano Fashion Week environment where collections are increasingly judged on commercial viability as well as creative vision. Measures aimed at production, training, and market access therefore carry a direct bearing on how brands plan their seasons, and not only on how they manufacture them.
The Eleven Proposals at a Glance
- Design and creativity: extend the design tax credit to 2030 at 10 percent, with €200 million per year.
- Corporate academies: create a Register of Corporate Academies and offer a 30 percent credit, up to €1 million per company.
- New export markets: offer a 10 percent credit on export growth to Mercosur and Gulf Cooperation Council countries in 2027 and 2028.
- US tariff relief: provide a one-off 2027 credit covering 50 percent of tariff costs for firms with at least 15 percent US sales.
- Energy transition: introduce a 30 percent credit for renewable electricity and storage, with €70 million allocated for 2027.
- Employment protection: extend wage supplementation by up to six months in 2027 and 2028 for firms with orders down at least 20 percent.
- Circular economy: set documentation rules for unsold goods, incentivize donations, and allow removal of brand identifiers for reuse.
- Sustainable materials: reward renewable and natural fibers through extended producer responsibility fees.
- Supply chain consolidation: offer a 30 percent credit for acquiring stakes in strategic suppliers, conditional on 36 months of Italian production and jobs.
- Family businesses: aggregate family shareholdings for the controlled realization regime, without changing thresholds.
- Legacy R&D credits: offer a facilitated settlement for 2015 to 2019 research and development credits, with reopened deadlines.
Design and Training: Funding the Craft Pipeline
The first proposal seeks to extend the tax credit for design and aesthetic conception activities through 2030, at a rate of 10 percent and with an annual allocation of €200 million. Its real value lies in predictability. Houses plan collections years in advance, and a credit with an uncertain horizon makes long-range creative spending harder to defend to finance committees. Working backward from the allocation, the €200 million figure implies an eligible base of roughly €2 billion per year, which indicates how much creative expenditure the industry expects to qualify.
The second proposal concerns the skills pipeline. Camera Moda wants a dedicated Register of Corporate Academies at the Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy, paired with a 30 percent tax credit on eligible costs of up to €1 million per company per tax period. That ceiling caps the benefit at €300,000 per company in a single period. The design is deliberate: it rewards firms that invest meaningfully in training without channeling the bulk of the subsidy to the largest groups. The underlying objective is to transmit pattern-making, cutting, and construction techniques before the workers who hold them retire, a risk that many workshops already face.
Export Diversification and the US Tariff Problem
Two proposals deal with international exposure, and they respond to different threats. The first offers a 10 percent tax credit on increased exports to Mercosur and Gulf Cooperation Council countries over 2027 and 2028, capped at €300,000 per year per company. The incentive rewards growth above a baseline, not overall volume, which means it favors companies already expanding into these regions. It is a targeted bet on diversification, designed to reduce reliance on established Western markets.
The second proposal is the more immediate of the two. It seeks an extraordinary 2027 tax credit equal to 50 percent of the additional costs directly attributable to US tariffs, limited to fashion companies that generate at least 15 percent of their sales in the United States. The threshold is a useful analytical marker. It separates firms with a substantial American footprint from those with incidental exposure, and it concentrates the relief where the damage is most measurable. The 50 percent rate is steep, and it signals how seriously the industry views the tariff regime as a structural threat rather than a temporary irritant.
Energy, Employment, and Consolidation
Energy costs sit at the heart of the manufacturing debate, and the fifth proposal pairs immediate relief with a longer-term structural plan. It introduces a 30 percent tax credit on electricity purchased from renewable sources, conditional on a rise of at least 20 percent in the average energy price component compared with 2026. A parallel 30 percent incentive would fund new renewable generation and storage serving Renewable Energy Communities across the supply chain. The total envelope is €70 million for 2027, split between €20 million for energy costs and €50 million for communities. The conditionality is notable. Relief activates only when prices rise, which makes it a stabilizer rather than a permanent subsidy, and it aims to convert a cost shock into an opportunity to build energy independence.
The sixth proposal addresses a different fragility. Where orders or sales have fallen by at least 20 percent against the same period of the previous year, Camera Moda wants existing wage supplementation schemes extended by up to six months across 2027 and 2028. The logic is economic as well as social. Dismissing skilled staff during a downturn is costly, and rehiring them later is often costlier still, since specialized labor is scarce. Preserving the workforce through a cyclical trough is therefore a form of investment in future capacity.
The ninth proposal targets consolidation. It offers a 30 percent tax credit to companies that acquire stakes in strategic suppliers and subcontractors, provided production and employment in Italy are sustained for at least 36 months. The three-year condition is the mechanism that keeps the benefit aligned with national industrial goals. It discourages acquisitions designed to relocate production, and it treats ownership of key links in the chain as a means of protecting domestic capability.
Circularity and Sustainable Materials
The seventh proposal responds to new European rules prohibiting the destruction of unsold goods. Camera Moda asks for documentation standards that would prevent goods transferred as waste for reuse preparation from triggering a tax presumption of sale, provided their destination is properly recorded. It also proposes a tax incentive for donating usable surplus to social economy organizations, with the normal value of those goods excluded from taxable revenue under defined conditions. A third element lets brands strip identifying features from returned or surplus items, protecting their intellectual property without rendering the garments unfit for reuse. The three measures together address a problem that has drawn criticism from both regulators and consumers: the question of what happens to inventory that will not sell at full price.
The eighth proposal would add reward criteria to the fees set under extended producer responsibility schemes, recognizing sustainable renewable materials, including natural fibers that meet European environmental standards. The measurement would depend on objective, verifiable parameters. That requirement is essential, because an industry that has faced greenwashing accusations cannot credibly claim sustainability advantages without auditable metrics.
Family Ownership and Tax Certainty
The tenth proposal is directed at the family-owned houses that shape much of Italian fashion’s identity. It would allow shareholdings held by members of the same family unit to be assessed collectively against the thresholds of the controlled realization tax regime, without altering those thresholds or extending the benefit to outside parties. The analytical point is that the existing rules can penalize succession, since dividing a holding across generations may push each portion below thresholds that a single owner would exceed. Aggregating family stakes removes that distortion while keeping the scheme closed to outsiders, which limits the policy’s scope and its potential cost.
The eleventh proposal resolves a legacy dispute. It seeks a facilitated settlement procedure for research and development tax credits accrued between 2015 and 2019, reopens the deadlines to join it, and rebalances the position of companies that already repaid their credits in full. The justification rests on reliance. Businesses made investment decisions based on the interpretive framework in force at the time, and a retrospective change in that framework leaves them exposed. The proposal does not reopen the substance of those claims. It seeks a procedural route to closure, which is a more realistic ask for a Budget Law.
What the Package Reveals
Taken as a whole, the eleven proposals point to three priorities. The first is investment continuity, visible in the design credit, the training register, and the consolidation incentive. The second is market resilience, reflected in the tariff relief, the diversification credit, and the wage supplementation extension. The third is institutional predictability, expressed through the tax certainty measure, the succession fix, and the unsold goods framework. Each priority responds to a specific vulnerability, and each carries a fiscal cost that the government will need to justify against competing demands.
The Budget Law will go through several rounds of negotiation, and the measures with defined ceilings and clear conditions are likely to survive in some form more easily than open-ended commitments. The tariff credit and the energy measures are the most time-sensitive, since both depend on external conditions that could shift before the law takes effect. The corporate academies and the sustainability framework, by contrast, rest on structural commitments that will take years to evaluate. How Rome weighs those differences will show whether it treats fashion as a strategic industry on par with other pillars of national production.
