Rubinacci question

[pur_sang]

I'm so glad I found this forum.

I went to Rubinacci yesterday, they told me if I order a suit, someone (dont know how skilled or trained they are) will measure me, and a suit will be made in Napoli by their tailors. The person doing the measurements is neither a tailor or a cutter, this person gets the numbers and someone else who have never seen me in person will do the cutting.

I'm new compared to everyone here to all this, but my question is, how much of a bespoke experience is this? This can just as well be made to measure, and it sounds like from what I know that A&S is very different in this respect.

Thank you for your advice.

[uppercase]

It is not a bespoke experience; do not do it.

You definitely want the cutter to see and measure you personally before beginning any bespoke project. All subsequent fittings must also be done by the cutter, preferably with the owner of the tailor shop owner present.

If you can, fly down to Napoli. Do not go to the Rubinacci London, Rome or Milan shops for a bespoke suit. The Napoli cutter is better if you want an authentic Neapolitan silhouette. And ensure that Mariano Rubinacci is there personally to supervise all of your fittings.

Otherwise, do not go to Rubinacci.

[andreyb]

It is not a bespoke experience; do not do it.

That's quite a statement... according to it, most SR houses traveling to the USA do not provide a bespoke experience.

Andrey

[alden]

A very interesting conversation.

It is not a bespoke experience; do not do it.

I have to agree with Uppercase and Mr. Pur Sang.

Andrey, in the past UK travelling tailors used to send a cutter and a salesman on trips. Tom Mahon and Edwin DeBoise, to name only two, personally measure, cut and fit their clients.

Houses that send someone to take measures and photos to deliver to the cutter back home are engaged in a made to measure process. But very few houses work this way. I am surprised to hear that Rubinacci is one of them.

In the LL benchmade to measure service (BTM), I personally have taken measures and photos of LL members. Their clothes have turned out wonderfully well but I have never claimed them to be “bespoke” products.

My tailor has made the point to me several times. “From the measures I can make the calculations and cut the coat. But it is altogether a different thing when I cut having seen the client. A tailor is not only looking at numbers or the build of the man, but at his attitude, his movements, and his posture. How salient are the blades? I will know if I see the man and will have to guess if I only see numbers or a photo.”

Cheers

M Alden

[Lance]

The LL is a "continuing education program"; what a joy!

[alden]

Uppercase

I know you have a good deal of recent, first hand experience with Rubinacci. The clothes I have seen coming out of Naples made for LL members is uniformly excellent. You can like or dislike the style, but the fit and handwork is what we would expect from a first rate tailoring house.

Were the variances to be found from London or Milan more apparent in the fit, styling or handwork?

Mariano Rubinacci is not a trained tailor or at least that is what I have always understood. He is, however, the third generation proprietor of one of the best tailoring houses in Italy. He is a consummate salesman, has excellent taste, and he has to know tailoring almost as well as his tailors. Is his personal involvement not enough?

Michael Alden

[pur_sang]

Michael, is it my incorrect interpretation? The way I read it, your first response seem to agree that R is MTM-like, and your second response seem to defend it.

In my humble opinion, the cutter needs to at least be present to see the client. If it is only craftsmanship we are after, is Brioni or Kiton not enough? (Interestingly, they can even have higher prices than bespoke Savile Row!!) I don't understand how someone can cut a truly unique pattern by using numbers alone, it sounds more like using numbers to adjust an existing pattern.

I thought R is widely accepted on the forum as one of the best, and yet this post's response is coming up with some very interesting answers.

Uppercase, maybe wrongly so, but I had this feeling that you liked Rubinacci from reading some of your posts, so will you not go there again?

At the end of the day, maybe it's the beauty of Rubinacci's store, maybe it's the allure of their style, maybe that is enough for me to be their client.

[Gruto]

In my humble opinion, the cutter needs to at least be present to see the client. If it is only craftsmanship we are after, is Brioni or Kiton not enough? (Interestingly, they can even have higher prices than bespoke Savile Row!!) I don't understand how someone can cut a truly unique pattern by using numbers alone, it sounds more like using numbers to adjust an existing pattern.

I have to support this view. How does a tailor make the famous mental notes, if he doesn't meet the client? In his new book Richard Anderson describes how Brian Hall after meeting a first time customer went straight to the workroom to create a paper pattern using his "mental notes".

[alden]

Michael, is it my incorrect interpretation? The way I read it, your first response seem to agree that R is MTM-like, and your second response seem to defend it.

There are two separate issues here.

If the customer goes to LH in Naples, where the cutter measures, cuts and fits for the client, the results have proven to be excellent given the traditional bespoke process.

If, on the other hand, the customer travels to London or Milan where measures are taken by someone other than the cutter and these measures are communicated to the atelier in Naples, where the clothes are cut and prepared for a fitting that will be conducted in London or Milan etc, the process can justly be called MTM-like. In this regards, Uppercase's advice "do not do it" is appropriate. What he is saying is, "if you want Rubinacci, then go to LH in Naples to be fit."

Anyone who has studied bespoke tailoring from a business perspective runs smack into a wall. It cannot be mass produced. And when you try to mass produce it you run afoul of your own business model and ethics. Only Christ was able to feed the multitudes with three small fishes.

A great tailor can make about two coats in a weeks time. If you do the math, and you don't need a Stanford MBA to do it, you will come to the conclusion that about a 100 garments, that can qualify as true bespoke, can come from a single highly qualified craftsman in a year. So there is little possibility to scale the business and remain within the parameters of traditional bespoke. That is Rubinacci's problem. How does he expand the business to Milan, London and beyond when his tailors in Naples can only produce a very small number of quality garments? The answer is, it can't be done in a "bespoke" model and so the next best thing is quality MTM. And from quality MTM, with a mother lode of advertising we have seen lately, he is clearly trying to move to RTW and the creation of a Brioni-like, Kiton-like or Attolini-like global brand.

In some ways I see MTM and RTW as the only way forward for a business like Rubinacci, a company that is too big to be bespoke and too small to be a brand. The population of qualified tailors is diminishing every year. Most of the craftsmen are in their sixties or seventies with few viable young replacements coming into production. How will you make bespoke in a few years without tailors? Well, you had better have morphed yourself into a RTW brand in time, especially if you want your children to continue with the business or if you want to cash out of it.

My tailors in Sicily can produce one overcoat per week at the quality levels I require. In the month of August, in fact, we made a total of four garments and you can see the pictures of them on the Sartorial vacation forum. I decided to focus my tailors work on overcoats and sporting coats because I felt that a very high quality MTM make would work well for these kinds of garments. But making twenty overcoats a year would not keep Mariano R. in mozzarella di bufula much less pay the bills of London and Milan rent.

Cheers

M Alden

[pur_sang]

Michael, thank you for the clarification, I believe I know how to proceed with this now.

[Montesquieu]

Just a correction. Rubinacci's Milan shop does in fact offer a true bespoke experience. It has its own highly experienced cutter and tailoring staff, and the work is done there, not in Naples. One works in Milan with Luca Rubinacci, not Mariano. Some have argued that leads to slight differences in style, and that Milan does not offer the original Naples product. I can't personally say, having visited both shops but only purchased in Milan. Regardless, Milan offers a wonderful bespoke experience and product.

London, of course, is different.

[alden]

Just a correction. Rubinacci's Milan shop does in fact offer a true bespoke experience. It has its own highly experienced cutter and tailoring staff, and the work is done there, not in Naples. One works in Milan with Luca Rubinacci, not Mariano. Some have argued that leads to slight differences in style, and that Milan does not offer the original Naples product. I can't personally say, having visited both shops but only purchased in Milan. Regardless, Milan offers a wonderful bespoke experience and product.

London, of course, is different.

Monty

Thanks for the Milan update.

Uppercase can give us some guidance here as well. Is the styling different? It makes perfect sense that it would be different, but how much different or is it a Neapolitan cut made for more sober Milanese taste?

Michael

[andreyb]

Andrey, in the past UK travelling tailors used to send a cutter and a salesman on trips.

Michael, I don't think this was universally the case.

Here is a short excerpt from "Savile Row West" chapter of Richard Anderson's recent book:

(from pg. 88):

The length and infrequency of trips to America by representatives of Savile Row meant, of course, that American customers had either to be satisfied with fewer fittings or wait years for their orders to be done. When journeys to America were made by boat, the travelling salesman would take an order abroad and the cutters and tailors back in London would finish the suit straight out and send it to the States with no fittings in between. Results were not always ideal.

Why SR houses employed salesmen but not cutters for these visits, is very much understandable. Here is another excerpt:

(from pg. 82):

As with many other houses in and around Savile Row, as much as 60 per cent of Huntsman's business was done in America. ... In the late fifties such trips to and around America were made entirely by boat and train, which meant that the average sojourn for anyone wanting to give the vast country a good scouring lasted at least four months.

According to Mr Anderson, Huntsman employed two coat cutters (Colin Hammick and Brian Hall) and one trousers cutter (Richard Lakey) at the time. Both Hammick and Hall each had their own books of clients... letting one of them out for four months was unimaginable! Not to speak on Mr Lakey, who was unreplaceable.

Air travel age improved situation dramatically, to the point that Mr Hall eventually started to visit America on Huntsman's behalf.

But even now... Mr Anderson's own company, "Richard Anderson Ltd" visits both East and West Coasts, with Richard personally visiting only one city -- NY. Does it imply that RA's customers from the West Coast, served by Brian Lishak (who is, despite his unrivaled experience and a stellar reputation on the Row, not a cutter himself) receive a sub-standard product?

Well, I don't think this is necessarily the case. Anderson and Lishak know each other long enough, so I believe that Mr Lishak is perfectly qualified to note and then pass to Mr Anderson all the idiosyncrasies of a particular customer...

Tom Mahon and Edwin DeBoise, to name only two, personally measure, cut and fit their clients.

But they don't really have any choice... they simply don't have enough stuff to employ someone else for visits abroad.

Andrey

[alden]

Andrey

That is interesting information from Huntsman. We do travel by plane now and I distinctly recall that Poole and A&S sent their cutters once and awhile to adventures out west.

Maybe some of our American members can tell us. Do your cutters visit you in the States?

I have never been served by a traveling tailor so I don't have much experience. However I do remember being in some of the SR houses as the cutters told their traveling stories and recited their sales numbers.

In any case I don't think that the traveling tailors issue has much to do with the state of affairs we are discussing here, a European house serving European clients employing close to MTM methods. And the problem seems to be in London (not Milan or Naples) where Pur Sang visited and was understandably put off by the process described to him.

Cheers

Michael

[Costi]

Would you trust the scissors of a blindfolded haircutter who only saw your photograph once? Or the treatment prescribed by a pysician who sent his nurse to consult you? Bespoke tailoring is just as much about the personal rapport between cutter and client. Without a good anamnesis, neither the doctor nor the tailor know what to do.