Ask a man whether he prefers Savile Row or Naples and you will learn more about him than an hour of conversation would yield. It is not a question about clothes. It is a question about whether he believes a jacket should improve on the body or reveal it.
The Row: Architecture
Savile Row’s grammar is military, and this is not a metaphor. Henry Poole’s father made uniforms for the Napoleonic Wars; when Poole opened a back entrance onto the Row in the mid-nineteenth century, he brought that vocabulary with him. The close, form-fitting cut. The narrow leg. The high armhole — originally so a man could raise a weapon without the whole coat lifting with him. And the structured shoulder.
Inside an English coat is a hidden architecture: a chest canvas, usually horsehair, that has been shaped with an iron and hand-padded with hundreds of small stitches so that it holds a curve of its own. Wadding across the shoulder. A shoulder pad. None of it visible, all of it load-bearing. The point is that the coat has a shape independent of its wearer. It does not ask the body’s permission. Put it on a hanger and it stands there — the silhouette persists, waiting. What it produces is a man who appears to be standing at attention even when he is slouched, which is precisely what it was designed to produce.
Naples: Refusal
Until the 1930s, Neapolitan tailors were making coats broadly indistinguishable from London’s. Then, in the workshop of Gennaro Rubinacci’s London House on Via Filangieri, a tailor named Vincenzo Attolini did something close to heretical: he took the canvas out. Padding, wadding, structure — removed. What remained followed the shoulder as it actually was. The Neapolitan house’s own description of the ambition is the most exact one available: a jacket so light and so soft that it can be folded eight times.
The signature is the spalla camicia, the shirt shoulder, where the sleeve is set into the armhole the way a shirtmaker would set it — leaving the shirring visible as small gathers, the grinze, at the sleevehead. Most tailoring traditions regard that puckering as a fault to be smoothed away. Naples decided it was the point. Look for the collar, too. The Neapolitan shoulder seam runs backward, which lets the collar sit against the neck in the way local tailors describe as the embrace of a friend.
The reasons were partly climatic — horsehair canvas in a Neapolitan August is an act of self-harm — and partly philosophical. The result is sprezzatura: not carelessness, but a great deal of care spent making something look as though no care was spent.
The Irony
The soft jacket was not an instant success. It took decades to be understood, and its reception has a familiar shape — the same shape as a steel watch nobody wanted in 1972. Note also what the house was called. London House. Gennaro Rubinacci named his workshop in homage to the city he was about to contradict, because London was then the undisputed capital of masculine elegance and he knew it. Naples did not reject English tailoring out of ignorance. It rejected it having mastered it, which is the only way a rejection ever means anything.
Choosing
The Row for authority: the boardroom, the funeral, the occasions where you would rather be read than seen. Naples for warmth, for travel, for the long lunch, for anywhere the object is to look as though you have not thought about it. Neither is more skilled. The padded English chest and the Neapolitan sleevehead are both hand-work of the highest order, and both take a decade to learn. The difference is only in what the maker believes his job is. One builds a better man. The other gets out of the way. For the contemporary expression of the softer tradition, see our account of Brunello Cucinelli at Pitti Uomo.
The house where it began is documented at Rubinacci’s official site.
Photos: © Mariano Rubinacci
