THE WORLD IS A STAGE

STITCH BY STITCH: ON NEAPOLITAN TAILORING, PAST AND PRESENT

ADIL BENSALEM

September 30, 2025

A walk through Naples, where climate, scarcity, and apprenticeship shape a grammar of lightness—from Vincenzo Attolini’s unarmored cut to today’s ateliers and luxury houses—showing how a craft born in Quartieri Spagnoli became a global idiom without losing its dignity or its stitches.

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Naples has always been a place of survival, improvisation, and display. The street is a stage, and appearance is part of the role. The suit, especially the jacket, is not an accessory but a necessity. It is worn in August heat, on crowded buses, in courtrooms, in alleyways. It is the grammar of citizenship in a city that otherwise resists grammar.

The Neapolitan jacket was born from climate as much as from style. The British cut—with its padding, canvasing, and rigid shoulders—was a kind of armor. In Naples it was untenable. Too heavy, too hot, too foreign. So, in the 1930s, Vincenzo Attolini, working under Gennaro Rubinacci, dismantled it. Out went the padding, the stiff canvas, the heavy lining. In came lightness, ease, breath. A jacket that could be folded in four, tucked under an arm, and carried through the city like a newspaper.

Vincenzo Attolini: the rebel tailor who dismantled Savile Row’s armor and gave men freedom of movement

Yet Attolini himself was not an isolated genius. He had apprenticed under Angelo Blasi, one of the great but less-remembered masters, a man who taught the young Vincenzo how to cut and who was himself part of a still older chain. To speak of Neapolitan tailoring is always to speak of lineages, of forgotten teachers whose gestures survive in the stitches of their students.

The Neapolitan cut is distinguished by details that outsiders at first mistake for eccentricities. The spalla camicia, or shirt shoulder, in which the sleeve is attached with little pleats, collapsing naturally into the body. The barchetta breast pocket, shaped like the curve of a small boat. The pignata lower pockets, rounded like cooking pots. Wide lapels, often with a subtle belly. Hand-sewn buttonholes that tilt with deliberate irregularity. Double stitching that announces itself. Every feature looks casual, even offhand, but behind each gesture is a century of precision.

Tailoring is geometry in cloth, but in Naples it’s also conversation.

For every famous name—Rubinacci, Attolini, Kiton—there are houses like Caliendo, founded in the 1930s by Giacomo Caliendo and still run by his descendants. Or the Gallo family, Mario and later Luigi, who quietly produced some of the most refined jackets of the postwar period. Or Gennaro Formosa, whose atelier in Chiaia carried the memory of Neapolitan tailoring through decades when industrialization threatened to eclipse it. Each of these names held to the same principle: that a suit in Naples must be light as air and resilient as stone.

The tradition survives only if there are apprentices. But becoming a tailor in Naples today is no simple inheritance. In the past, boys began at ten or twelve. They entered workshops as errand runners, pressing seams, sweeping floors, watching the masters’ hands. Progress was glacial—first basting, then buttonholes, then finally the right to cut. Ten years before one’s name meant anything. The work was repetition, correction, humility.

The spalla camicia: a shoulder that shrugs. Light, soft, collapsing—half shirt, half philosophy

Now, fewer young people choose this path. Naples is a city of high unemployment, of emigration, of youth who look north to Milan or abroad to Berlin and London. To become a tailor is to choose years of low pay and obscurity, for only the hope of mastery. The small ateliers that still take apprentices—Panico, Solito, Dalcuore, Formosa—complain that the young lack patience. The rhythm of tailoring, measured in thousands of stitches, clashes with the speed of the contemporary city. And yet some do remain.

One afternoon in Naples I met with a young apprentice tailor for coffee at Caffè Gambrinus, a place as woven into the city’s history as the ateliers themselves. Since 1860, its marble counters and frescoed ceilings have hosted poets, politicians, revolutionaries; Gabriele d’Annunzio, Benedetto Croce, Matilde Serao, and Oscar Wilde all passed through. If the tailors cut Naples into cloth, Gambrinus distilled it into words, gestures, and the ritual of espresso.

Caffè Gambrinus, Napoli: The first stitch of any Neapolitan suit is espresso—sharp, fast, and always standing up

The young man’s name was Antonio. He was twenty-two, thin as a chalk line, his hands already scarred with pinpricks. He had started at sixteen, sweeping floors in a small atelier in Vomero, sent by an uncle who thought tailoring was better than drifting.

At first he hated it. Days passed in silence, bent over hems, ironing sleeves, never allowed to cut. He would sit at a table with a needle while the master corrected every seam, every stitch, with a sigh. His friends worked in bars, or drove scooters for delivery companies, and laughed at the old-fashioned trade. But Antonio stayed. Something in the rhythm of the work appealed to him—the certainty of cloth, the slow accumulation of skill.

Over coffee—strong, dense, the kind of Neapolitan espresso that feels like an imperative—he told me what a beginning tailor earns: barely enough to cover rent if you are lucky, often supplemented by other jobs. He worked nights in a restaurant when commissions were thin. “It takes ten years before anyone trusts you with a jacket,” he said. Ten years in a city where many young people emigrate after two. Ten years in a place where the economy rarely rewards patience.

And yet there was pride in his voice when he described the first sleeve he had set that the master did not unpick. “It rolled,” he said, “like a wave.” His eyes lit up—not for money, not for recognition, but for the moment when cloth seemed to breathe under his hand.

Stacks of cloth: a library of patterns waiting to be spoken in Neapolitan

When I asked if he dreamed of opening his own atelier one day, he shrugged. “Maybe. But what matters is to learn. To make the jacket well. If I can do that, I am someone.”

Antonio’s story—half resignation, half stubborn devotion—is what keeps Neapolitan tailoring alive. Not the global boutiques, but the quiet persistence of apprentices who still find meaning in the discipline of stitches, in the intimacy of cloth.

After World War II, tailoring in Naples was shaped as much by scarcity as by style. The city was bombed, rationed, exhausted. Cloth was rare, imported fabric almost unobtainable. Tailors adapted, cutting jackets with as little waste as possible, reworking older suits, making do with fragments. In Quartieri Spagnoli, workshops sprouted in alleys not as boutiques but as survival businesses. Tailors took whatever work they could: repairing soldiers’ uniforms, altering hand-me-downs, stitching secondhand cloth into something resembling a suit.

Sartoria Ciardi’s button box: proof that God is in the details, and in Naples the details come in horn, corozo, and mother-of-pearl

The austerity of those years entered the DNA of the craft. To make a jacket light and unlined was not only a stylistic choice but an economic one. Padding cost money, canvas cost money. The Neapolitan cut’s reputation for airiness and ease owes as much to postwar poverty as to the Mediterranean climate. Even today, older tailors recall making do with “remnants,” piecing together suits from whatever could be found. Elegance was born not of abundance, but of deprivation.

In Quartieri Spagnoli, the dense Spanish Quarter behind the seafront, tailoring became part of the informal economy that sustained Naples. Families worked from home, cutting, pressing, sewing. A boy might spend his afternoons carrying finished garments to richer districts, while his mother hemmed sleeves late into the night. Tailoring, like shoemaking and embroidery, was both trade and survival strategy, part of a network of small economies that allowed the city to function when official structures failed.

Quartieri Spagnoli: Tailoring was born here, in narrow streets where sunlight barely cuts through laundry lines

This dual life—high elegance for the upper classes, survival stitching for the poor—explains why Neapolitan tailoring is both aristocratic and democratic. A Rubinacci jacket might grace a diplomat, while an anonymous tailor in Quartieri Spagnoli kept entire neighborhoods clothed with quiet skill. Both belonged to the same tradition: cloth adapted to circumstance, dignity cut and sewn by hand.

And then there is the present, when a Kiton suit can cost €25,000. The number feels obscene in Naples, a city where unemployment hovers around 20 percent, where entire families live on less than €1,000 a month, where the informal economy is not choice but necessity. To walk from Via Chiaia, past the luminous Kiton boutique, and into Quartieri Spagnoli is to pass in minutes from global luxury to local deprivation. The suit that once emerged from scarcity now signals unimaginable wealth.

Brown double-breasted jacket: proof that even formality can lounge, if cut in Via Chiaia

Kiton defends the price: every suit takes twenty-five hours, forty-five tailors, countless hand-finished details. Their factory outside Naples is immaculate, and their tailors are paid decently by industry standards. Yet the dissonance remains: The same city that sells the most expensive suits in the world is also home to streets where children go without shoes. A Kiton suit may carry Naples abroad, but it cannot disguise the poverty that surrounds its birthplace.

Even within Neapolitan tailoring there are differences—subtle to the outsider, decisive to the initiated. To say “a Neapolitan jacket” is like saying “Italian wine”: There are vineyards, terroirs, microclimates.

Antonio Panico, once Rubinacci’s head cutter before opening his own atelier, represents perhaps the most dramatic expression of the Neapolitan cut. His jackets are sweeping, bold, with a fuller chest and generous lapels. They carry something theatrical, almost operatic, but without losing the softness that defines the tradition. A Panico suit makes its presence known—not loud, but undeniable.

The half-lining: light as an August night in Naples—built to breathe, not to weigh you down

Gennaro Solito, by contrast, is quieter. His house, now guided by his son Luigi, is known for jackets of remarkable lightness, often so soft they seem to dissolve on the body. Solito tailoring is intimate, close, almost domestic in its understatement. If Panico is opera, Solito is chamber music—discreet, precise, every note clear.

Dalcuore, founded by Luigi Dalcuore, strikes a balance: sharp but not severe, elegant without ostentation. His jackets are often cut closer, a touch more cosmopolitan, worn by Neapolitans who travel, who want lightness without sacrificing formality. Dalcuore is Naples looking outward, exporting sprezzatura with a subtle polish.

Gennaro Formosa, whose workshop in Chiaia still hums with quiet discipline, is perhaps the most traditional of all. His style carries the memory of the 1950s and 1960s—a leaner shoulder, a natural drape, jackets that whisper rather than proclaim. To wear Formosa is to step into continuity, to inhabit a line that has changed little over generations.

Together they form a constellation: Panico the bold, Solito the light, Dalcuore the cosmopolitan, Formosa the traditionalist. Each house carries Naples in its seams, but tells the story differently.

Solito buttonholes: not machine-perfect, but perfectly human

If Panico, Solito, Dalcuore, and Formosa represent the intimate scale of Naples, then Cesare Attolini, Isaia, and Kiton embody its global projection. These houses have taken the Neapolitan cut abroad, reshaping it to meet the tastes—and the bodies—of men in London, New York, Hong Kong.

Cesare Attolini, heir to Vincenzo’s dismantling of the English suit, has become a symbol of refinement exported at scale. The jackets remain soft-shouldered, but the lines are cleaner, the silhouette more controlled. The chest is a touch fuller, the waist sharper—an evolution of the Neapolitan cut into something more international, recognizably southern but calibrated for boardrooms from Milan to Manhattan.

Isaia, founded in the 1920s in Casalnuovo, has taken another path: flamboyance. The red coral emblem signals a bolder aesthetic—brighter fabrics, slimmer cuts, patterns designed to stand out in Tokyo or Miami as much as in Naples. Isaia represents the playful side of Neapolitan tailoring, the willingness to embrace color, exaggeration, spectacle.

Kiton jacket: costs the annual salary of the tailor who made it—proof that Naples, too, can sell out beautifully

Kiton, perhaps the most famous of all, has turned Neapolitan tailoring into global luxury branding. Their suits are still handmade in Naples but are marketed as the pinnacle of exclusivity. The cut is softened for comfort but leans international: less drape, less eccentricity, more uniform polish. Kiton’s genius has been to transform the jacket that grew from scarcity into an object of rare abundance.

Together, these houses show how Neapolitan tailoring, once a local adaptation to heat and poverty, has become a global language of luxury. But the translation is not perfect. What is gained in reach is sometimes lost in intimacy. The jackets are still beautiful, still supple, still recognizably Neapolitan, but they no longer breathe the same air as in Quartieri Spagnoli, where the tradition began.

It was only later, watching Gianluca Migliarotti’s film O’Mast (2011), that I heard the tailors themselves explain what I had already sensed in the city. Their voices did not address the camera so much as the past—fathers, grandfathers, masters long gone. The film was less a documentary than an incantation, a reminder that in Naples, the story of a jacket is also the story of a people.

Giovanni Serino at the cutting table: pinstripes on his suit, chalk lines on the cloth—geometry meeting instinct

Antonio finishes his coffee and stands. He nods, shyly, and heads back toward Quartieri Spagnoli, where his master waits, where stitches accumulate like hours. I linger a moment longer, watching the crowd press in, tourists ordering sfogliatelle, lawyers in summer jackets, students with their eyes on their phones. A few streets away, the Kiton window glows. Between here and there lies all of Naples—its poverty, its theater, its craft, its contradictions.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. In Naples, the jacket is never just a jacket. It is grammar, survival, and theater. It is the city, stitched.

Adil Bensalem (b. 1966 in Oran, Algeria) studied Arabic philology in Rabat, then in the 1990s drifted to Naples, where he swept floors in a Chiaia workshop until someone let him baste a sleeve. He writes about material culture, labor, and style, filing essays that read like inventories of pockets and ghosts. He keeps a notebook of buttonhole shapes and maintains—without irony—that jackets are dialects and cities are looms. His work appears sporadically in small journals, his byline often under slightly different spellings.

Cover image: scissors at Sartoria Panico: heavy enough to last a century, sharp enough to split tradition in two