In a previous post I promised one day I would have dedicated some space to the history of the Neapolitan tailoring school.
Considering that Tomas Maier at Bottega Veneta and Francesco Scognamiglio at Allegri have been trying to rediscover and update the principles of the Neapolitan tailoring school, I guess the time has come to briefly explore it from the origins.
Hopefully with this post I will also reopen a chapter about menswear and catch up with what has been going on during the Paris menswear shows.
So let’s start from the early beginnings of the Neapolitan tailoring school, going back to the 1300s.
One of the most ancient associations of tailors ever founded in Italy was indeed the Confraternita dell’Arte dei Giubbonai e dei Cositori (Brotherhood of the jacket makers and of the tailors), founded in 1351.
The brotherhood used to meet up in a chapel dedicated to Saint Michael the Archangel located inside the ancient gothic church of Sant’Eligio al Mercato, Naples.
When it was founded the brotherhood took care of different aspects connected with the profession, but, throughout the years, its purposes became mainly religious and spiritual. At the end of the 1400s, wool and silk industries flourished in Naples that soon became one of the most famous European courts, also thanks to the works of art produced by local painters, sculptors and architects.
The Neapolitan tailoring school mainly developed throughout these years since many master tailors were called to work for the Aragonese court.
French Bernardo Plastet became the personal tailor of Ferdinand I; Spanish Alvaro of Salamanca designed the stole of the Ordine Equestre di Nostra Signora delle Giarrette; French Giovanni Peticto was chosen as the personal tailor of the Duke of Calabria. Yet there were also a few local tailors who were rapidly becoming famous, among them a certain Pietro (his surname remains unknown), court tailor, and Antonio Cota di Castellammare, Plastet’s pupil. Throughout the 1400s the Neapolitan tailoring school flourished and local tailors were often asked to go and work in other courts, even as far as Milan.
Believe it or not, the Neapolitan tailors were also the first ones to launch ready-to-wear menswear.
In the chapel dedicated to Saint Michael the Archangel inside the church of Sant’Eligio al Mercato there were portraits of two tailors, Angelo Sicignanno and Romano di Stefano.
Historian Carlo Filangieri documented how the two tailors made suits and sold them in different cities.
Every time they sent a few suits away to be sold and the suits arrived to their final destination in perfect conditions, they would give a sum of money to the Church as a present.
No further information are given about how the suits were actually made, but, obviously, they couldn’t have been made by machines, since at the time they hadn’t been invented yet.
There was even a tailor, Bernardino Liante, who, in 1510, did a sort of contract with a customer, Giovanni Tramontano, promising his client to design for him for seven years a certain number of suits.
The activities of the brotherhood continued in the meantime: the brotherhood moved their meetings to a chapel dedicated to Saint Michael the Archangel and Saint Omobono in Largo Madonna delle Grazie. Young men who wanted to join the brotherhood had to pass an exam, showing their tailoring skills to a commission of older tailors.
In 1611 there were 607 registered tailors in Naples, they were all authorised to do the job and they were acknowledged by the brotherhood.
Yet, very soon, say from around the mid-1600s, the Neapolitan tailoring school started losing clients and prestige.
Naples quickly developed, the population rose to around 500,000 in the 1800s and poverty increased.
Between the 1700s and the 1800s Neapolitan fashion languished: painting and portraits made at the time, show artists and members of the aristocracy wearing suits considered to be completely out of fashion in important centres such as Milan, London and Paris. The Borbonic court was actually one of the main reasons behind these unfashionable trends: French fashion was indeed rejected at the time in favour of local trends and the Neapolitan tailors preferred adding flamboyant details to their suits rather than following clean and pure lines.
It was only at the end of the Borbonic era and from the Union of Italy on that the Neapolitan tailoring school found new energies. Giacchino Trifari became famous for his stylish suits at the time (he had a shop in vico Concezione in Montecalvario) and, towards the end of the 1800s, two master tailors, Raffaele Sardonelli and Filippo De Nicola, became popular.
The former actually came from Calabria, but had moved to Naples and was considered utterly Neapolitan for his tailoring style. He had a tailoring house in via Calabritto and was known for what they called his “royal line", he could indeed design elegantly distinguished suits.
The latter was instead a pupil of Trifari and was considered as one of the founders of the modern Neapolitan style together with his son Adolfo who spent a long time in London and when he went back to Naples he magnificently combined the English technique with the Neapolitan principles, creating what was unanimously considered as a classically sober, yet supremely elegant style.
De Nicola’s tailoring house in Piazza della Vittoria looked a bit like an upper middle-class family’s house: all around the rooms there were armchairs, sofas and tables with photographs of famous customers, princes and members of the aristocracy.
Adolfo used to receive his customers like a king, offering them tea and pastries and entertaining them with long chats before proceeding to measuring them up or doing the fittings. A friend of artists, poets, actors and musicians, Adolfo loved going to the San Carlo theatre and became for 50 years the arbiter elegantiarum when it came to menswear. There was also another important tailor in the 1800s, Salvatore Morziello who owned a shop in Piazza Martini (the interior design of the shop was courtesy of Gillini di Nizza).
Members of the aristocracy often met here ad the shop was popular since it sold fashionable accessories by important brands, such as Lock hats, Brigh walking sticks and umbrellas, Floris perfumes and fabrics, scarves and beaver spats.
Morziello’s shop catered for a world of elegant and sophisticated men who dressed, moved and talked like modern dandies.
The shop sadly closed down when the war broke out and Morziello decided to move to Montecarlo where he died.
Other famous shops mushroomed at the time in Naples, one of them was Roberto De Sanna’s. He wasn’t a tailor, but managed a shop-cum-tailoring house called “Trading” in the Galleria Vittoria. His master tailor was Michele Jandoli, a man with a genuine talent for cutting and designing suits.
Many other tailoring houses and shops opened after the war and new tailors arrived on the scene.
Among them we should remember Antonio Caggiula, who compiled the first cutting pattern method ever published in Naples; Giuseppe Giordano, specialised in sailor’s uniforms and suits and Peppino Miniello, who was the first tailor who got the idea of extending the jacket front darts, a detail that turned into one of the main elements of the Neapolitan style.
Throughout the 50s and 60s the profession flourished with many tailoring houses and workshops opening around Via Chiaia.
Buying a suit from a tailor guaranteed made to measure precision and style and soon the main principles of the Neapolitan tailoring schools were summarised in the following points: extended dart on the front of the jackets, soft shoulders (possibly not too padded), smooth sleeves, well-sculpted lapels that helped highlighting the figure and luxurious fabrics. A jacket, experts used to say, had to be as light as the breeze that blew over the Vesuvius. Antonio Schiraldi, originally from Bitonto, but a pupil of Morziello, was famous for making suits considered as perfect works of art; Luigi Piemontese, a pupil of Giuseppe Talarico, a cutter and collaborator of Adolfo De Nicola, was famous for his classically designed suits; Giorgio Costantino was instead considered as a pioneer for his bold colour combinations and fabric choices; Roberto Combattente started working as a tailor when he was a young child, then continued his apprenticeship in New York and later on went back to Naples where he created elegant suits, characterised by simple and clean lines.
Antonio Gallo was instead famous for producing extremely classic suits in perfect Neapolitan style. As it happened in most of the Naples-based tailoring houses, only Neapolitan men could work in Gallo’s workshops, this was indeed the only way to preserve the genuine Neapolitan menswear style. All the men employed in the tailoring houses, from the youngest apprentice to the master tailor, worked for around 12 hours a day, usually from 8am until 8pm or even 9pm.
Among the tailors who became more famous we must include also Vincenzo Attolini and Giacomo Bruno, both considered as the enfants terribles of the Neapolitan tailoring school.
Attolini studied with classic tailors such as Morziello, but when Domenico Caraceni in Rome revolutionised men’ suits opting for softer lines, Attolini fused Caraceni’s principles with the ones of the Neapolitan style, successfully modernising the latter. At the time Attolini was the main cutter at “London House”, Gennaro Rubinacci’s shop based in Via Filangeri, so Attolini’s revolution was unfortunately attributed to Rubinacci.
Giacomo Bruno wanted to enter the naval academy, but abandoned it to dedicate himself to his tailoring studies.
He worked as apprentice in Rome and Milan, then went back to Naples where he opened his own tailoring house. He filtered the Neapolitan style through his own taste and interpretation, conceiving his suits as works of art and refusing to call his workshop “tailoring house”, re-christening it as “Art and Fashion” workshop.
As it happened in many other Italian cities such as Rome or Milan, the ready-to-wear industry largely destroyed tailoring houses also in Naples.
A few ones such as Antonio Panico and Giovanni Celentano’s (the latter is based in Rome) survived to the present day, successfully bringing the principles of the Neapolitan tailoring school into the future.
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Posted by: gianluca migliarotti | October 20, 2009 at 02:33 PM