Search Results for: italian tailoring

Tailoring is a fierce trade with an ever-shrinking market. Which is perhaps why, if you talk to enough tailors, you’ll find they all hate each other. A tailor will tell you so-and-so is cheating his customers by using cheaper trims. Or such-and-such tailor isn’t cutting things right. For whatever reason, this sort of talk is especially common among the older tailors in Southern Italy, who are all too eager to tell you how everyone is doing things wrong except them. 

Part of this is the natural sniping that happens in small, competitive industries. The other part is about how tailors are trained. Traditionally, a tailor will enter the trade by apprenticing under a master cutter or tailor. Since their work as an apprentice is still contributing to the shop’s general output, that means things have to be done in a very careful and specific way. This lends a kind of rigidity to the learning process that, I assume, carries with the person throughout much of the career. People who do things differently are thought to be wrong, lazy, or just outright evil. 

Not all tailors are so rigid in their thinking. I’ve had some great conversations with Herrie Son, a young up-and-coming tailor located in Nashville, Tennessee – a city admittedly better known for its down-home country music than traditional suits and sport coats. Still, Herrie brings a bit of Savile Row craft to the American South. She got her start at the London College of Fashion, where she focused on handcraft tailoring, and then did some work for Thom Sweeney and Welsh and Jefferies. At the first, she learned how to cut; at the second, she learned how to make. 

It seems crazy to open a brick-and-mortar in today’s retail environment, but Jake Grantham and Alex Pirounis recently took their chances with their new store, Anglo Italian. It’s located in the Marylebone area of London, a small residential district mostly characterized by its Georgian townhouses. As Mayfair rents have increased, a lot of commerce has moved to districts such as this one. This is the same neighborhood where you’ll find Trunk Clothiers, English Cut, and Monocle’s offices. 

The name Anglo Italian obviously reflects the shop’s aesthetics – a somewhat modernized version of a mid-century style, when the Italians used to look to the English for their cues – but it’s also reflective of Jake and Alex’s personal backgrounds. Jake, a native Londoner, worked for a while on Savile Row and then Drake’s. Alex, on the other hand, was born in Biella, Italy, and got his start at Kiton (his father, incidentally, has also worked at Loro Piana and Zegna his whole life). Both met when they were employees at The Armoury, which is how most readers probably know them. Their faces have shown up often on style blogs. 

When I spoke to Jake this past May, just a few weeks before the store’s opening, I asked him if he was worried about the apparent slowdown in Italian tailoring. It seems forever ago when people were obsessed with Neapolitan shoulders and unstrapped double monks. The landscape today for men’s style is a lot more decentralized – with people dabbling in designer clothing, streetwear, workwear, and classic tailoring.  

For guys who have been interested in tailored clothing for a while, there’s been a lot of interest lately in how to dress more casually. And while there are many ways you can dress down a sports coat, even the best strategies will leave you looking a bit formal. Christian Chensvold put it well ten years ago when he said tucking in a pineapple print shirt into some old khakis nowadays can make you look overdressed in most cities. 

The problem with casualwear, especially for guys who are mainly interested in tailoring, is that the available options often fall into two categories. On the one hand, you have the sort of stuff that works for almost anyone – J. Crew and Brooks Brothers, for example, but those are admittedly a bit boring (something like what a suburban dad might wear, even if a moderately stylish one). Then there are things I think are more exciting, but they can feel niche. I’ve been wearing Margiela’s five-zip leather jackets with slimmer jeans and side-zip boots a lot lately, but that kind of combo isn’t to everyone’s taste. 

Last month, however, I bought my first big item from Stoffa: a dark brown suede flight jacket made with a removable, beige shearling collar. I’ve written about the company before. My friend Agyesh, who founded the company two years ago, worked for Isaia before starting his own label. At Stoffa, he offers a range of accessories, including some wonderful scarves that have to be handled to be appreciated, as well as custom-made outerwear and trousers. 

The Japanese are famous for their takes on American and Western European clothing – including vintage reproductions made to a fanatically high level of historical accuracy, as well as modern, whimsical interpretations on the classics. Much of what gets exported, however, is casualwear. Today, you can find dozens of retailers for niche Japanese brands such as Visvim, and Kapital, but few stocking anything that approaches tailoring. 

Ring Jacket is one of the few exceptions. As a brand, they’re relatively new, although they have deep roots. For most of the company’s 60+ year history, they’ve operated as a private-label manufacturer for top-end Japanese labels. As the story goes, in 1954, Jhoichi Fukushima decided to open a factory to produce the kind of soft-shouldered, Ivy Style suits worn by President Kennedy (and were popular in Japan at the time). In the 1980s, as Italian tailoring became more popular, they shifted to more Continental styles – still soft shouldered, but with wider lapels and rounder silhouettes.

Today, under the leadership of Kunichi Fukushima (Jhoichi’s son), the company specializes in a sort of neo-classical, Southern Italian look. In the US, they have four models – two for suits, two for sport coats. Most of what you’ll find on the racks, however, is the 184, which is something like Ring Jacket’s house style. The jacket is softly tailored, with a full canvas built in, but little to no padding. The shoulders are somewhat trim; the body short and slim fitting; the gorge high. I think it’s a more flattering cut for those who like brands such as Boglioli. 

There are a lot of great menswear videos, but for my money, none beat this clip of President Lyndon B. Johnson ordering six pairs of summer trousers. It was recorded in 1964, like all White House phone calls at the time. In it, you can hear the President talking to his tailor, Joe Haggard, about how he’d like his new trousers made in very specific, anatomic detail:

“Another thing is the crotch, down where your nuts hang. It’s always a little too tight. So when you make ‘em up, give me an inch so I can let them out there – cause they cut me; it’s just like riding a wire fence. These are the best I’ve had anywhere in the United States, but when I gain a little weight, they cut me under there. You never do have much margin, but see if you can’t leave me an inch from where the zipper (burppp) ends, round back to my bunghole.” 

I’ve never specified bunghole measurements to my tailor, but I have gotten pretty picky about my trousers over the years. One of the nice things about custom-made clothing is that you start from scratch. Details that you never really considered in ready-to-wear can now be fussed over. Should you get flat fronts or pleats? Belt loops or side tabs? What about Daks? When are cuffs appropriate? A lot of this is personal preference, but in case anyone found it helpful, I thought I’d lay out my own logic for these things. 

It takes a lot of guts to open a new men’s store nowadays. With fast trends, copycat competitors, and the ease of online comparison shopping, it’s just harder and harder to build customer loyalty. When I spoke to George Wang about this last year, on the eve of him opening BRIO in Beijing, he said he hoped his taste would help set him apart. And it’s true – many of the best boutiques are a cut above thanks to the owner’s high-level of taste. See the late Wilkes Bashford, Charlie Davidson of The Andover Shop, and Mark Cho and Alan See of The Armoury. 

This month, a man who has been inspiring others for years will be opening his own shop. Ethan Newton – who has worked everywhere from Evisu to The Armoury to Ralph Lauren – will be opening Bryceland’s in Japan with his business partner Kenji Cheung. The store’s name is taken from Ethan’s family. “Bryceland is my mother’s maiden name,” Ethan told me. “There aren’t any more males on that side of the family to carry it forward, so I decided to honor it by using it for my business.” 

When I talked to Ethan about his shop back in October, he described it as Ivy, although he meant it more in approach than aesthetics. “When I first started studying tailoring, I realized there are certain products that are just perfect in design – whether it’s a Zippo lighter or a blue blazer or a Buco J-24 jacket. Basically things that are made right and don’t need to improved on, they are as they should be. I think a lot of Ivy stuff embodies that – the perfect grey flannel suit, the perfect tweed jacket. I want a business that revolves around that spirit.” 

The appeal of soft Italian tailoring has set style trends in men’s clothing for at least a few decades now. Although the technique is commonly attributed to Giorgio Armani (particularly in the business press), it really goes back to the Rubinacci and Caraceni families in Naples and Rome, respectively. They’re the ones who took the “stuffing out of suits” by using thinner and lighter shoulder pads, reducing the weight of the canvassing and haircloth inside, and striping away the lining.

In popular writing, this technique often gets reduced to a simple description about a “soft shoulder,” but when I think of what makes this style appealing to me, it’s about much more than a shoulder line. Instead, I think of style icons such as Gianni Agnelli (who often wore Caraceni) and Vittorio de Sica (who often wore Rubinacci), as well as the many men who represent Neapolitan style today (Rubinacci, Solito, Ciardi, Panico, etc). The styles worn and created by these men isn’t just about their softer shoulder, but rather the overall “roundness” of their silhouettes.

Look at the photos below and see. The lapels are a bit wider; the chests a bit rounder and fuller; and while Voxsartoria will chastise me for saying this, a few of them look like they were designed with slightly wider shoulders as well. To my eye, this not only helps build a broader, more masculine look, but it also gives the illusion of a trimmer waist without actually needing to pinch it in. It’s this wider lapel, rounder chest, and soft, extended shoulder line that gives the casual, relaxed look that so many men love. Compare this to a number of other “soft” Italian jackets – especially the more fashion forward ones with a trimmer lapel, cleaner chest, and narrower shoulder – and you can see the effect isn’t the same.

I don’t mean to say that “clean and lean” silhouettes look bad, of course. My first love for suits – well before Man Men came around – was for the 1960s styles seen on Sammy Davis Jr. here. Very modern; very clean; and very, very smooth.