His delicate features, light brown hair, blue eyes, a kind, friendly and easy attitude immediately put you at ease, but also show his sharp knowledge of the history of fashion and costume, reveal his innate taste, a strong passion for the present, beauty, relationships and people.
I met Angelo Caroli for the first time years ago during a vintage denim exhibition hosted at Pitti Uomo and a few months later when I visited his newly redesigned A.N.G.E.L.O. Vintage store in Lugo di Romagna, where I bought my first pair of Levi’s red-selvedge vintage jeans.
After 40 years spent getting involved in many activities and especially his well-known vintage clothing store and A.N.G.E.L.O. Vintage Archive, his famous archive of 150,000 rare fashion items in Lugo di Romagna, the newly issued movie “Angelo, il Principe del Vintage,” (“Angelo, the prince of vintage”) portraits this Italian passionate collector, a pioneer, a major expert of rare vintage apparel. It shows an entrepreneur in love with fashion from the past, but not a nostalgic personality as he projects what he sees to be interpreted for the present time.
The docu-movie speaks about him, his constant research and dedication–between cult and obsession–spent discovering, collecting, restoring, renting or selling precious vintage clothes (that are at least 20 year old, differently from what is commonly known as “secondhand” clothing, less valuable).
Despite they presented the movie worldwide for the first time on 10 June 2026, during the Biografilm Festival in Bologna, the official movie’s premiere will take place this fall at Teatro Rossini in Lugo.
The work, already carrying English subtitles, will then be broadcasted by fall 2027 at festivals, universities, and movie theaters to raise awareness of an archive that is one of the major ones, at least Europewide, and a project that has been promoting beauty and sustainability for the last 40 years.
The movie is a trip into the memory of Italian and worldwide fashion, through the life of a man who was able to transform his passion into a unique world and became a supporter of unique examples of cultural heritage special craftsmanship.
Since 1978, Angelo Caroli has been collecting clothes that tell stories of different eras, atmospheres, and creative visions. Today, he is an international institution in the field of vintage fashion and he offers a selection that dialogues with the most important fashion houses, universities, exhibitions, stylists, designers and fashion professionals around the world.
Vegetarian and tied to the environmental cause since an early age, he always detested waste. Therefore, he started reusing his father’s dismissed clothes. Born in 1960, he started selling vintage shirts at 17 to his friends, and he also managed to sell two of these tops to his chemistry school teacher. “That made me think that my passion could become my job,” he said, and he succeeded in his goal as he also sold some special apparel pieces to exclusive clients like Lady Gaga, Måneskin, Richard Gere, and Kanye West, to name a few.
Initially, he often traveled to Prato, a nearby city to the Livorno harbor where old clothes from the US arrived to Italy to be resold as rags or to be recycled for new fabrics and clothes. The moment that changed his life was discovering a beautiful embroidered chiffon dress from the 1920s that would have been otherwise destroyed as it could neither be used as a piece of rags nor to be recycled. Despite the fact that he could not resell it to his friends, he thought that rescuing that “marvel”—as he calls it in the movie—was the right thing, and it triggered the idea that many other unique couture and prêt-à-porter clothes should be saved and kept.
Initially, he often traveled to Prato, a nearby city to the Livorno harbor where old clothes from the US arrived to Italy to be resold as rags or to be recycled for new fabrics and clothes. The moment that changed his life was discovering a beautiful embroidered chiffon dress from the 1920s that would have been otherwise destroyed as it could neither be used as a piece of rags nor to be recycled. Despite the fact that he could not resell it to his friends, he thought that rescuing that “marvel”—as he calls it in the movie—was the right thing, and it triggered the idea that many other unique couture and prêt-à-porter clothes should be saved and kept.
The movie is an intimate story between the present and the past and the aspiration to always find that piece he still misses—and in this movie it’s a Paco Rabanne metallic dress he hasn’t managed to get hold of yet. The story runs through a vast selection of archive pictures, articles, publications and takes from his personal archives, along with present-time episodes from his life filmed and built for this biopic story by director Francesca Zerbetto and produced by Maria Martinelli and Giulia Zerpelloni, by Kamera Film Italy Production. It was made possible thanks to a series of financing, including a European funding from the Emilia-Romagna Region, Emilia-Romagna Film Commission, in collaboration with the Department of Culture of the Municipality of Lugo, the Union of Municipalities of Lower Romagna, and Baccara Discoclub.
More than a biography, the film explores the thrill of collecting and reusing: the desire to hold on to what time wears away and transform it into memory and the future.
Throughout the unfolding of its plot, it also emphasizes many other aspects. A first central element is the idea that each apparel item is like a memory box of a person’s own life and emotions–and the rarer is the item, the most elaborate is the path through which it was created or found out. For instance, he tells how he discovered a full wardrobe of made-to-measure Chanel tailleurs personally curated by Mademoiselle Coco for a client who went to Paris to have them done, or as presented while recreating an exhibition dedicated to the wardrobe of the best and most popular, and very eccentric window-dresser from his region.
Another key aspect shows how Angelo’s collecting fever is also lead by a maniac-like passion for an apparel piece’s single detail discloses–be it a buttonhole, a stitch or an augmented aspect of a fabric or a breaking and its mending standing out from its surface. Among others, William Gilchrist, a stylist know for dressing celebrities including the Rolling Stones, remembers when he got in touch with Angelo when he was looking for rare denim pieces. At the time he was fashion director for SPORTSWEAR INTERNATIONAL Magazine. Together with photographer Roberto Manzotti, they were working at “Cult–a visual history of jeanswear, American originals”, a great pictorial book on classic denims from Levi’s, Lee and Wrangler that was published in 1992 and opened the way for many other highly detailed publications about vintage jeans.
“A fundamental piece of my collection is a Levi’s jeans from 1922 I bought at auction in The US. From that time through the 1970s I have practically every model,” Caroli explains. “In the 1990s the Levi Strauss managers came from San Francisco to visit my archive and saw my denim collection for five years in a row as they still didn’t own any historical pieces. Today their archive is surely larger than mine but their visits truly made me very proud,” he pointed out alluding how he ignited the spark for Levi’s to build its own vintage archive as well for many other companies.
Among his clients were, first and foremost, Rossella Goldschmied, the ex-wife of the well-known denim guru who recently passed away, as well as C.P. Company, Stone Island, Massimo Osti, and Frank Scozzese.
“At the beginning of my career, I also collected garments that I couldn’t sell. I didn’t want to collect them for myself, but to create something that could be consulted. Companies used to throw away old garments because the idea of building an archive didn’t exist yet,” he adds.
Many other witnesses interviewed throughout the movie explain how revolutionary his approach has been. Among others, Marina Spadafora, an Italian designer and a committed fair fashion ambassador, calls Angelo as “the prince of vintage”–hence the title of the movie. “Many sell and rent vintage, but Angelo’s Vintage Archive is the best one–most organized and structured–, probably the best one of Europe,” she says.
“His contribution is extremely important. Before many others, he was sensitive to understanding the importance to reuse, recycle and recover apparel,” she continues.
He also chooses to wear only vintage clothing himself—except for underwear—and among the many brands, he favors Romeo Gigli, Pierre Cardin for men, and vintage Levi’s.
“I’m shy, but I’m an ‘gatherer’,” he says, meaning that when he has a goal, he pursues it with determination—such as his feverish search for a metallic Paco Rabanne dress from the 1960s, his favorite decade in fashion. In the film, the narrative shows how he conducts his research by contacting and meeting with many collectors, such as Cecilia Matteucci, who owns part of Maria Callas’s wardrobe. The film not only pays tribute to Anna Piaggi—from whom Angelo purchased a large portion of her wardrobe—and another fashion icon, Gianfranco Ferré, but also chronicles visits to historians, researchers, and industry consultants, as well as the “Archivio Tirelli Trappetti Costumi dal 1964,” a historical archive and costume producer for prestigious films such as, for example, “The Leopard,” “Marie Antoinette,” and “Death in Venice.”
“That Rabanne dress is my icon. I’ve gone looking for it many times. I know it will turn up sooner or later. Among thousands and thousands of garments, you always look for the one you’re missing,” explains Caroli.
Over time, his business model has evolved. Not only does he welcome promising young talent visiting his archives—whether university students, fashion school students, or young people eager to learn—but he is also constantly engaged in organizing exhibitions all over the world, with Pitti Uomo and participating in vintage trade shows. He has also created collections based on upcycling techniques, which he sold to other stores; however, since it was a very demanding project, he chose to offer only a few pieces through his own store. He has also digitized his archive because he believes in the importance of making it easier to consult and of passing on his legacy in an organized manner.
Throughout the film, Angelo also introduces his son, Alessandro, a high school student, whom he teaches how to select collector’s cards, ties, and deadstock eyewear for a vintage exhibition held annually in Lugo. Is he symbolically passing the torch to him?
For Angelo, memory and the future are inseparable, just as it is essential to know how to capture what remains of the passage of time. His work has curated the best of fashion—pieces destined to remain in the collective memory.