Last month Claudio and I wrapped up a productive week of client appointments in San Francisco/Bay Area and New York City and we look forward to returning later this year.
Next up will be a visit this month by Guido Davi in New York City.
In the meantime, safe travels to everyone!
John Ruskin in 1863. Photo credit: Wikipedia.
Happy holidays to all. It’s also a time of reflection.
I invite you to read an article I recently wrote on what craftsmanship means today and how to sustain it for the future.
If we appreciate craft and craftsmanship in a new way, my hope is that we’ll find a better way to sustain it going forward.
Palermo tailor Claudio Italiano and Sleevehead meeting our client Ethan in San Francisco. Photo credit: Timothy Archibald.
A friend reached out to let me know that this summer’s issue of Stanford Magazine has been published, featuring an article on Sicilian Reserve, Sleevehead and my recent trip to San Francisco with Palermo tailor Claudio Italiano.
My deepest gratitude to the Stanford Magazine team - Kathy Zonana’s unerring editorial nose for stories worth telling, Deni Ellis Bechard’s superb research and storytelling, Timothy Archibald’s photographic prowess, Giorgia Virgili’s impeccable art direction and Lauren Mortimer’s succinct illustrations. It was a genuine pleasure working with all of you!
We initially launched with the idea of enabling customers with their own high-quality cloth to work easily and frictionlessly with a superb Sicilian tailor.
Then last fall we introduced the Essential Bespoke line aimed at first-time bespoke customers. Similar to traditional bespoke, Essential Bespoke includes cloth. The great benefit of this new line is radically simplifying your decision process to just one item - blue or gray. We take care of everything else.
Now we'd like to give our original idea of working with customer-supplied cloth the clarity of its own name - Simply Bespoke. We've added a name but the idea remains the same.
With Simply Bespoke, you enjoy sourcing and selecting your own cloth as well as owning the process of managing how much cloth you need for your commissions.
This more hands-on approach is not for everyone but can be a very satisfying experience for quite a few!
We thank our customers, supporters and Kickstarter backers for helping us launch this summer. Moreover, we enjoyed meeting everyone in San Francisco and New York.
Best wishes for a fine and elegant holiday season and we look forward to completing your orders soon!
Black swans are the rare exceptions to the norm and defy conventional wisdom.
So why do I consider Sicily the “black swan” of bespoke tailoring, the last secret left for sartorialists?
To learn why, watch my new video below:
For those who are new to Sicilian tailors or bespoke tailoring, you may be wondering how flexible our tailor is and the kinds of features you can specify for your bespoke commission. That's a great question.
The tailor we’re working with can make clothes for a variety of body types and can accommodate a wide range of style choices. His clients run the gamut from children to adults. He has dressed men and women from across a variety of professions from business and academia to opera and the arts.
In terms of shape and silhouette, he has done quite a bit of stage/theatrical costume work so if you want retro, eccentric and unusual he can do so without batting an eye. Even more so if you want classic and conservative style.
You might have experienced or read that many tailors have a preferred house style that they are reluctant to deviate from. A house style might typically have a fixed jacket length for a specific height, open or closed fronts, a specific amount of waist suppression, a high or low button stance, a high or low gorge height and a specific lapel width.
If you’re unsure, our tailor will certainly make suggestions for your commission. But you are not constrained by them, especially if you have a clear idea of your commission or are experienced with bespoke. When I was looking for the right tailor to work with, flexibility was one of my top criteria and it's a key reason why I chose this tailor.
I came to this conclusion after spending hours talking to him and his coworkers in his workshop and viewing multiple examples of his finished work and those in progress. Based on what I saw, the tailor is fully capable of executing your choices technically and attitudinally.
For example, I went with a shorter length on the sample jacket than I normally wear even though the tailor suggested a slightly longer one. I also wanted fairly open jacket fronts. For the sample pants, I let him make his default style which tends to be slim and lower rise.
In addition, I had the opportunity to meet and chat with a local client during one of his fittings. This particular client had very specific and unconventional requirements for his evening velvet jacket. Moreover, he was challenging to fit properly because of his forward abdomen and swayback. But based on what I heard from the client, the tailor accommodated both client preferences and fit without any issues technically and attitudinally.
In sum, you will have flexibility, if you choose to exercise it, in a number of areas.
For jackets these include (but are not limited to):
For pants these include (but are not limited to):
In my view, Sicilian tailoring constitutes a third school of bespoke tailoring distinct from the two other well-known options - Savile Row and Naples. In a nutshell, Savile Row embodies sobriety and discretion in a jacket while Naples embodies exuberance (i.e. less structure). As a matter of attitude, Sicilian tailoring is more reserved than Naples but “smiles” a bit more than London. The result is a subtly different shape and silhouette of the Sicilian jacket and pants compared to their more familiar counterparts.
What accounts for these subtle nuances? Every single Sicilian tailor I have met is rooted in a specific place. Place grounds and integrates the tailor and his workshop. Place becomes inseparable from craft. This convergence of place and craft also helps paints a clear picture of what you’re wearing and why.
I think this authenticity is appealing to a certain type of person.
Because they are very localized and less known, Sicilian tailors also create a rarer product than London and Naples in terms of production output. The difference is an order of magnitude or more - hundreds as opposed to tens of thousands of suits per year.
Sicilian Reserve is trying to do something truly different from the bespoke norm. We are trying to offer affordability, preserve rarity and ensure continuity as long as it remains possible.