By Max Papier.
In half one of this collection, I wrote about discovering my match amongst Italy’s tailoring traditions. What has stayed with me about Florentine tailoring, nonetheless, is not only how the items look or really feel, however the tradition that surrounds them.
Once I first started making an attempt to make sense of Florentine tailoring, I did so the one means I knew how: by comparability. I observed echoes of different traditions I used to be already accustomed to, one among which was English tailoring – particularly the work of Frederick Scholte, the Dutch-born tailor behind the English drape reduce.
Scholte (1865–1948) was recognized for minimising seams wherever potential, preserving the continuity of the fabric. Eliminating entrance darts – one thing Florence has since develop into well-known for – was central to that method.
It’s arduous to know whether or not Scholte influenced Florentine tailors, or whether or not his work was seen or absorbed not directly by way of shoppers just like the Duke of Windsor, whose garments travelled always. However the resemblance was arduous to disregard. For me, it was a helpful level of reference – a means of orienting my eye.
One other reference that helped me take into consideration Florence comes from tailor Vittorio Salino, who likens the Florentine silhouette to that of rowing blazers. In his telling, Florence had a large English expatriate neighborhood within the mid-nineteenth century, a lot of whom lived there to row on the Arno. They introduced with them sporting jackets – blazers designed for motion and ease – and Salino sees parallels between these clothes and the Florentine reduce: open fronts, rounded quarters, minimal slicing.
One factor I like about Salino’s model of this story is the image it paints of Florence itself: a closed circuit the place tailors noticed the identical shoppers, handed by way of the identical rooms, and absorbed the identical influences by proximity. In that telling, Florentine tailoring unfold like a behavior – one thing picked up quietly, strengthened over time and infrequently written down.
In fashionable instances Florence has at all times been a comparatively small metropolis – one thing it’s straightforward to overlook given its outsized place in cultural historical past. In comparison with Milan, Rome or Naples, it by no means produced a Caraceni or a Rubinacci, nor did it give rise to ready-to-wear homes like Kiton or Brioni.
That smallness affected every little thing, together with continuity.
For many years, Florence was full of expert tailors – Vladimiro Fosco Mealli, Armando Di Preta, Leo Rosella, Evandro Franchi, Giorgio Giuntini, Olinto Maltagliati, Lettorio Speciale – whose work outlined town’s method. Practically all of them are gone now, not as a result of the work lacked benefit, however as a result of there was no apparent mechanism to hold it ahead.
Rosella, who died within the mid-Eighties, employed round 30 staff at his peak. Di Preta, who gained the Golden Scissors within the Seventies, was referred to as the tailor of Florence’s noble households. These had been lengthy, severe careers – typically spanning many of the post-war interval – but their ateliers simply closed as soon as the grasp stepped away.
Giovanni Maiano (under) – whom tailor Gianni Seminara of Sartoria Seminara described as his father’s closest good friend, and whose shoppers included Kenji Kaga and Kentaro Nakagomi – was one of many more moderen, closing his atelier in 2015 and sadly passing away in Might 2025.
Salino traces one small lineage from Di Preta by way of three males who skilled below him: Scardigli, Azzurri, and Masi, with Masi nonetheless working at present, not removed from Stefano Ricci’s store. However there was no formal succession – no sense that the work wanted to be preserved intact.
Maybe that’s as a result of the craft was extra social, extra collective. Salino describes an off-the-cuff salon within the Seventies: tailors assembly at Donnini Pasticceria in Piazza della Repubblica, laying clothes on tables, evaluating one another’s work, arguing about steadiness and line the way in which artists may. Listening to about this made Florentine tailoring really feel much less like a commerce and extra like a shared language – mentioned in public, earlier than being carried again into non-public workshops.
I skilled a model of this myself a number of years in the past whereas commissioning a jacket with Kotaro Miyahira of Sartoria Corcos (above). I had a summer season jacket in thoughts – daring, checked, one thing that may reap the benefits of the dartless entrance – however not one of the materials in Kotaro’s atelier felt fairly proper. He prompt that if he didn’t have it, maybe his former mentor may.
The three of us – Kotaro, my colleague Elliot and I – left his atelier close to the Arno, crossed town, and stopped at an unmarked door close to the Duomo. Kotaro rang the bell and led us upstairs into Gianni Seminara’s workshop. Kotaro defined that he had skilled below Gianni earlier than hanging out on his personal, and that the 2 nonetheless leaned on one another.
Gianni shared tales – how he as soon as wanted buttonholes completed and ran a jacket to Kotaro, who helped with out hesitation. I later discovered that when youthful tailors struggled to safe fabric from bigger mills, Gianni was typically the one who stepped in.
This tradition is a part of what drew others to Florence earlier than me. Within the early 2000s, George Wang of Atelier Brio (under) was searching for out Florentine tailors.
“On the time,” Wang recollects, “all of the dialog round comfortable tailoring targeted on Naples. In actuality, Florentine tailoring was even lighter – much less inner construction, cleaner strains.”
Later, writers like Derek Man helped convey wider consideration to figures corresponding to Gianni Seminara and Mario Sciales of Sartoria Marinaro, described by Wang as “not as full-bodied and rounded as Liverano, but additionally not as slim and slouchy as Seminara”.
If we return additional nonetheless, there are Japanese like Yukio Akamine, an early shopper of Florentine tailors like Liverano – drawn in partly by the common visits for Pitti Uomo, and partly by accessibility. These small Florentine homes had been wonderful and – on the time – extra approachable than bigger names in Milan.
Liverano ultimately turned essentially the most seen expression of this world – first amongst insiders, then extra broadly by way of The Armoury. Many individuals got here to grasp Florentine tailoring by way of Liverano’s specific steadiness of cleanliness, magnificence, softness and power.
Liverano’s historical past has been documented fantastically elsewhere – most notably in Gianluca Migliarotti’s I Colori di Antonio – so I gained’t try to summarise it right here. What issues extra to me is what Antonio Liverano, now 88 years previous, has produced.
The best way Liverano has spawned so many different small homes typifies the native method to succession. Through the years, cutters and tailors have left to determine their very own ateliers, generally prompting concern about continuity. That sample is often framed as a failure to retain expertise.
I see it otherwise. To me, this is Liverano’s legacy.
Francesco Guida, Yusuke Kabuto, Qemal Selimi, Hojun Choi of Sala Bianca, Giacomo Sacchi, Cheng Hsi Wang of Sartoria Maltagliati, Vittorio Salino, George Marsh of Speciale, Leonardo Simoncini of Poiesis and Leonardo Maltese all skilled below Antonio Liverano, absorbing not only a reduce however a mind-set, and ultimately feeling assured sufficient to face on their very own.
Many now prepare others in flip. Each Hojun and Vittorio nonetheless entrust their ending to Rosa Femia, now semi-retired, who spent many years at Liverano.
Rosa herself skilled below earlier masters, together with Rosella and Mealli. She as soon as informed me that a lot of Florence’s greatest tailors died and not using a subsequent era as a result of the previous Italian means was to not train – not less than not brazenly. Some masters would even go away the room whereas attaching sleeves so apprentices couldn’t observe.
Her late husband, Antonio Mantella, labored in a shared workshop producing clothes for each Di Preta and Rosella – a reminder that it’s additionally simplistic to only have a look at names above the door.
Makes an attempt at formal succession have not often lasted. Loris Vestrucci, who based his sartoria in 1950 and skilled with Mealli and Giuntini, was an actual a part of Florence’s heritage. An effort to protect his information with Stefano Bemer lasted only some years earlier than that store closed. But tailors skilled by Vestrucci – Maestoso Tailor in Milan and Ccalimala in Korea – now flourish independently.
The same destiny met Lettorio Speciale, whose affect survives largely by way of the inspiration it offered to the founders of Speciale in West London.
What I draw from my time in Florence is that tailoring right here isn’t one thing you inherit suddenly. It’s one thing you’re trusted with – step by step, typically with out ceremony. There are not any uninterrupted dynasties, no polished narratives of permanence. Solely folks working quietly, passing on what they’ll whereas they’ll.
Wanting again, that’s what drew me to town within the first place. Not the reduce alone, nor the softness or the restraint, however the values beneath them: garments made with out extra; information shared with out fanfare; a perception that the work issues greater than the identify hooked up to it.
Florentine tailoring doesn’t ask to be preserved. It asks to be understood – and, when you’re lucky sufficient, to be carried ahead.
Max Papier is predicated in New York and has spent the previous decade commissioning bespoke clothes from Italian tailors, significantly in Florence. He’ll develop on these private experiences in an upcoming article.
