A while back a young Italian director who was working on a research about the Neapolitan tailoring school for a documentary contacted me.
He mainly wrote to say he had found my post on Neapolitan tailors somehow inspirational and I know that he recently started shooting his documentary.
I’d like to dedicate today's post to him and to all those people, fashion design students in particular, interested in tailoring.
As promised in a previous post, today I will mainly focus on the Venetian tailoring school and in particular on two tailors based in Venice.
The Doge had established that all his councillors had to wear rich robes, but also that tailors were allowed to wear special garments so that people could have recognised these esteemed citizens.
During the 1800s and under the Austrian occupation, decadence was rife in Venice and tailors somehow lost the respect they used to have.
Things got better in the 1900s when tailoring houses started working again.
At the time Calimani’s La Ville de Paris was considered as the best tailoring houses in Italy, both for quality and quantity.
Indeed Calimani was able to produce around 4,000 high quality suits a year.
Among other famous tailors there were Zanini, Dinardo and Leonelli. The latter had started as cutter at the tailoring house owned by Barbaro, considered as the tailor of the aristocracy.
In Venice, Galletti and Miatto’s tailoring house was considered as the best one. Galletti was originally from Novara, while Miatto was from Venice.
When Miatto died the tailoring house passed to Gaudenzio Galletti, who had a young son, Alberto.
Gaudenzio's son was very passionate about menswear and started following his father's work already as a child.
As soon as he grew up, he began acquiring tailoring manuals from France, Great Britain and Germany.
Though he couldn't speak any foreign languages Alberto studied those manuals, trying to understand which were the main differences between the most popular cuts in these countries, making comparisons with the Italian traditions and developing his own style.
When his father died in 1911, Alberto Galletti was 26 years old, but he was already considered as the first and best tailor in Venice.
He made suits for the local aristocracy, kept up with the new developments in the art of tailoring and was also the first tailor to open his own workshop.
In those years all Venetian tailors worked together with a cutter and a trainee who dealt with little changes and corrections, but the main work was assigned to people who worked from home, most of them were "carnielli", that is farmers from the Carnia region, who worked in Autumn and Winter in Venice helping tailors and who went back in the Summer to their region to till the soil.
The war interrupted Alberto’s work: enlisted as a soldier, he first moved to Genoa, then to Milan, where he started working for the Treccani tailoring house in Via Pattari.
Nostalgia brought him back to Venice and, in 1919, he reopened his tailoring house in Campo San Moisè, finding old and new customers.
Alberto became well known for his perfectly cut suits: in 1925 he designed a tuxedo with short tails characterised by a rather ample armhole and a curved shoulder (second image in this post).
Alberto’s jackets were characterised by three main key points: ample chest, marked waistline and a flat back.
These three points - that with the time became Alberto's trademarks - contributed to raise the shoulders a little bit, hiding any eventual imperfections in the wearer's posture.
Alberto also developed a coat for himself that didn’t follow any classic pattern or taste, but was characterised by extremely ample sleeves (see the fifth and sixth image in this post) and clearly anticipated more modern creations by contemporary menswear designers.
Alberto Galletti’s tailoring house grew, also thanks to his son Mario who joined in. In the meantime, between the two World Wars new tailoring houses opened in Venice such as Bencetti’s and Vastola’s (the latter was originally from Abruzzo and had been a trainee with Caraceni and at the Ville de Paris).
A new tailor, Bruno Cecconi, arrived in Venice. Born in 1893 in Bibbiena, Cecconi had moved to Rome with his family as a young child.
His father sent him to Vittorio Ottolenghi’s tailoring house where Domenico Caraceni was working as a cutter.
Cecconi worked side by side with Caraceni and, when the latter opened his own tailoring house first in Via Condotti and, after the war, in Corso Umberto, Cecconi followed him together with his brother Emo.
Bruno and Emo first opened a tailoring house in 1921, and, ten years later, Bruno moved to Venice where he started working for Luppi's tailoring house (directed by Vastola).
In 1934 Cecconi became the co-owner of Luppi's tailoring house and, six years later, he bought it.
Cecconi’s style was derived from Domenico Caraceni's, but it was a sort of modern version of it, characterised by softer lines and a very special elegance.
Soon also Bruno’s son Giorgio started working for his father.
Business thrived for the Venetian tailoring houses for one main reason: in Venice there are no cars, people usually walk a lot and their clothes become as a consequence very important.
Further tailoring houses were established throughout the years, but Galletti and Cecconi's remained the most important ones at least until the end of the 60s, when most Italian tailoring houses closed down after ready-to-wear became more popular.
While there aren't at the moment in Venice too many tailoring houses producing menswear, apart from Franco Puppato's, the city preserves and continues its tailoring traditions mainly in the more traditional houses working for the opera, ballet, theatre and cinema, but also among those costume designers producing extremely modern creations for avant-garde performances.
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