The menswear collections may have just ended in northern Italy but elsewhere in the country the show continues. In this decade, there’s been an explosion of interest in the tailoring traditions located south of Rome, with luxury’s two biggest conglomerates – LVMH and PPR – investing hundreds of millions of euros in their “haute couture” menswear labels Berluti and Brioni, both of which source heavily from the region.
Notable for its trim silhouette – created by trimming sleeve widths, tightening and raising the arm socket, adding a pointy lapel to the jacket, and narrowing and shortening trouser and jacket lengths – this south Italian style is increasingly seen on the street, whether via trend reporting sites such as Tommy Ton’s Street Style or styleforum.net, where the hottest collector’s item is a vintage Zegna style called the “Napoli”: a suit that sports a strict English silhouette refined by slimmer sleeves and the soft Neapolitan shoulder.
The search for the origins of this style begins at Brioni’s main manufacturing plant in Penne, in the central Abruzzo region, which is home to 1,000 staff including cutters, seamstresses, buttonhole makers and stiratori – the local name for shoulder-pressers, a métier treated there with the reverence normally reserved for high priests or brain surgeons.