WORDS
Peter Howarth
‘My first experience at the tailor, I was 30 or so,’ says Brunello Cucinelli. ‘There was a great, really skilled tailor here who was in love, passionate, about English culture; and so he made me this suit…’ He pulls a face. ‘It was so wide.’ He holds his hands apart to show what he means. ‘And I said, I don’t want it this way. And he said, but listen, you know, that’s the way your suit should be. And I said, listen, here is the money and you can have your suit and the money. I don’t want it.’
The tailor wanted to know what was wrong with his work and Cucinelli explained that it had to be taken in. And he wanted it to be cut as a double-breasted suit with less overlap of fabric. Reluctantly, the tailor agreed to do as his customer wished. ‘And then he was grumpy, he was upset, 10 days of, you know, no talking.’
The tailor in question was 65 at the time, and Cucinelli delights in the punchline of his story: ‘And then for the following 20 years he himself would wear a blazer precisely fitted just like that; he was walking around like that! And I said, ahh, Mr Lemi – so you did understand that it is more contemporary this way. And he said, “You were right.”’
We are sitting in Brunello Cucinelli’s office in Umbria, Italy. It is full of light, with huge windows looking out onto the countryside. Up the nearby hill is the medieval village of Solomeo, which is where the designer lives, and where he started his fashion business in earnest in the’80s. He has renovated the town and installed a school of tailoring to teach the craft to young people so it stays alive. A visit to this studio sees the young tailors working on jackets made in the Cucinelli way – lightweight, devoid of unnecessary and restrictive structure, and crucially, cut in a way that complements the shape of the body.
Although Cucinelli makes single-breasted jackets, his trademark silhouette is what he calls ‘one-and-a-half-breasted’. It is essentially a double-breasted jacket but the lapels are relatively narrow, and it doesn’t envelop the body in the way many traditional double-breasted jackets do. It shows all the hallmarks of conforming to the brief he gave the Italian tailor when he was able to afford his first handmade suit.
His jackets are also incredibly lightweight. He holds up a blue jacket and scrunches it up like a rag. ‘200, 300 grams,’ he explains as it unfolds, uncreased and ready to slip on. ‘30years ago, beautiful English blazers were 600,700 grams, because that was the way it was. We did not have any heating in the house.’
The approach is all about comfort and practicality for the modern world. It makes sense that Cucinelli made his name initially as a maker of cashmere knitwear, and his expertise in creating soft, relaxed pieces is now translated into a full collection for men and women. Indeed, his jackets and coats have the feel of favourite knits, rather than anything more restrictive.
But they are still elegant. Although there has been much speculation in menswear about the end of suiting and a migration towards casualwear in recent years – something that has likely been accelerated by Covid-19 – Cucinelli sees a future for tailoring in general, and men’s tailoring in particular. It is all about context: ‘If I want to go and play football, I want to wear something comfortable, sporty; but if I want to go to Wall Street or a business meeting, or I want to meet the former Prince Charles, now your king [which he did at COP20], then I think I must be elegant.’ For Cucinelli, it is not so much that the suit and jacket are old-fashioned, but that old-fashioned suits and jackets are old-fashioned.
‘What I’m saying is that it needs to be contemporary,’ he explains. And comfortable. This even goes for the most formal of outfits – witness the Cucinelli take on the tuxedo. Today, he offers tuxedo suits in blue cashmere, black or grey lightweight virgin wool and silk twill, navy cotton corduroy, light grey wool, silk and cashmere lightweight flannel, and blue cotton velvet. There is even a white Sea Island cotton corduroy tuxedo jacket.
‘When in 2008 we actually started to do tuxedos, they were inspired by the typically English style. But in grey.’ They were also cut differently. He reaches for a large photographic print of himself in eveningwear leaning against an E-Type Jaguar (‘The most beautiful car in the world’). ‘This is a navy tuxedo. It’s very tight around the waist.’ That first visit to the tailor has certainly had a lasting effect.