By Max Papier.

In part one of this collection, I wrote about discovering my match amongst Italy’s tailoring traditions. What has stayed with me about Florentine tailoring, nonetheless, isn’t just how the items look or really feel, however the tradition that surrounds them.

Once I first started attempting to make sense of Florentine tailoring, I did so the one manner I knew how: by comparability. I seen echoes of different traditions I used to be already acquainted with, one in all which was English tailoring – particularly the work of Frederick Scholte, the Dutch-born tailor behind the English drape minimize.

Scholte (1865–1948) was identified for minimising seams wherever attainable, preserving the continuity of the fabric. Eliminating entrance darts – one thing Florence has since turn into well-known for – was central to that method.

It’s exhausting to know whether or not Scholte influenced Florentine tailors, or whether or not his work was seen or absorbed not directly via shoppers just like the Duke of Windsor, whose garments travelled continually. However the resemblance was exhausting to disregard. For me, it was a helpful level of reference – a manner 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 minimize: open fronts, rounded quarters, minimal reducing.

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 via the identical rooms, and absorbed the identical influences by proximity. In that telling, Florentine tailoring unfold like a behavior – one thing picked up quietly, bolstered 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 neglect 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 the whole lot, together with continuity.

For many years, Florence was stuffed with 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 advantage, however as a result of there was no apparent mechanism to hold it ahead.

Rosella, who died within the mid-Nineteen Eighties, employed round 30 employees at his top. Di Preta, who received the Golden Scissors within the Nineteen Seventies, was often known as the tailor of Florence’s noble households. These have been lengthy, critical careers – typically spanning a lot 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 buddy, 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 via three males who skilled beneath him: Scardigli, Azzurri, and Masi, with Masi nonetheless working right now, 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 Nineteen 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 best way 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 personal workshops.

I skilled a model of this myself a number of years in the past whereas commissioning a jacket with Kotaro Miyahara of Sartoria Corcos (above). I had a summer season jacket in thoughts – daring, checked, one thing that might benefit from 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 beneath Gianni earlier than putting 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 in search of out Florentine tailors.

“On the time,” Wang recollects, “all of the dialog round delicate tailoring centered on Naples. In actuality, Florentine tailoring was even lighter – much less inside construction, cleaner traces.”

Later, writers like Derek Man helped convey wider consideration to figures resembling 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 consumer of Florentine tailors like Liverano – drawn in partly by the common visits for Pitti Uomo, and partly by accessibility. These small Florentine homes have been glorious and – on the time – extra approachable than bigger names in Milan.

Liverano ultimately grew to become essentially the most seen expression of this world – first amongst insiders, then extra broadly via The Armoury. Many individuals got here to know Florentine tailoring via Liverano’s explicit steadiness of cleanliness, magnificence, softness and energy.

Liverano’s historical past has been documented superbly elsewhere – most notably in Gianluca Migliarotti’s I Colori di Antonio – so I received’t try to summarise it right here. What issues extra to me is what Antonio Liverano, now 88 years previous, has produced.

The way in which Liverano has spawned so many different small homes typifies the native method to succession. Over time, cutters and tailors have left to determine their very own ateliers, typically prompting concern about continuity. That sample is sometimes framed as a failure to retain expertise.

I see it in another way. 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 beneath Antonio Liverano, absorbing not only a minimize 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 a long time at Liverano.

Rosa herself skilled beneath earlier masters, together with Rosella and Mealli. She as soon as instructed me that a lot of Florence’s finest tailors died and not using a subsequent technology as a result of the previous Italian manner was to not educate – not less than not brazenly. Some masters would even depart 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 take a look at names above the door. 

Makes an attempt at formal succession have hardly ever 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 via 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 unexpectedly. It’s one thing you’re trusted with – regularly, typically with out ceremony. There aren’t any uninterrupted dynasties, no polished narratives of permanence. Solely folks working quietly, passing on what they will whereas they will.

Wanting again, that’s what drew me to town within the first place. Not the minimize 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 title 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, notably in Florence. He’ll increase on these private experiences in an upcoming article.