When the shearing is done, the vicuña is carried to the exit doorway of the tent and the black hood is yanked off. The animal stands frozen for a moment, blinking and sniffing the air—long enough for me to take pictures, which I do from behind a big rock—and then takes a few steps: a meandering uncertain trot, at first, then a more determined run down the hill to freedom.
It goes on all day, the wrangling and shearing. Though the work is hard, the mood is lighthearted. When an animal wriggles out of the arms of a handler, he and the crowd of onlookers laugh. Occasionally, a worker lets a child cradle a very young vicuña before it is released. The windowless tent warms as the morning goes by: more black hoods, more animals on the table, more humming clippers, more frantic hooves reaching for solid ground. The clear bags of tawny fluff mount up.
Late into the afternoon, the work continues. The campesinos have made the unusual decision to do a second roundup, and the corral is full again. We will be here for a while. I head over to the stone house and find Jane sitting on a bench. There is a big pot of something warming over a fire, attended to by a trio of local women in long embroidered skirts and flat-topped brimmed straw hats. One of them hands me a bowl of the clear broth, in which there are chunks of soft potato and a meaty knuckle of bone. “Alpaca, maybe?” Jane says, when I ask what she thinks it is. I stand by the fire and eat it—alpaca or not—grateful for the warmth of the bowl in my hands.
The temperature continues to drop as the sun dips toward the horizon and paints the altiplano in a pink honeyed light. Kids playing soccer on a dirt expanse near the house cast long shadows across the road. Jane and I get into the truck to try to get warm.
I ask her how many animals she thinks they will have shorn by the end of the day.
“Maybe two hundred. Worth about twenty-five thousand dollars.
“This was a good one,” she says. “You were lucky. Sometimes they don’t happen. An assistant of mine once walked for a few days to get to a really remote chaccu site, and when she got there they said they had done it the day before. She missed it. You never know.”
We take turns playing solitaire on her laptop and run the car to get some heat. Then we sit in silence, listening to the generator whir. It is getting cold again.
“I was just thinking,” Jane says after a while. “You know … I get so beaten down by the politics and everything. It’s sort of surprising … that all of this happened because of me, because of the work we’ve done.”
Finally, the shearing is finished and the trucks are loaded. We start the slow descent back to Huaytara. Antony flips through a CD case, selects one, and says something to Alvaro. Antony smiles and slides it into the slot on the dashboard. The music plays. It’s a liquid, ripe Caribbean-sounding jazz, and for some reason, under the high white moon on the spine of the Andes, it sounds just right. I stare out the window as we roll slowly around hairpin curves, our headlights occasionally illuminating Spanish-language road signs with exclamation points that I interpret as warnings about fog and falling rocks and narrow bridges and impending muerte.
Tomorrow, the vicuñas, shaved down to nappy plush, will be back on the steppe. The bags of fleece will be locked in a storehouse. The campesinos will return to the chaccu site to disassemble the blue tent and pack it away until next time. We’ll head to Lima. Jane will go back to her battles with the bank, and I’ll spend some time in the city on my own. I will have my first pisco sour, and my second. And in a high-end clothing store in Lima’s Larcomar, an open-air shopping complex above the fogged-over Pacific, I’ll watch a tourist pick up a vicuña scarf and rub it between her fingers and thumb. Then she’ll put it down and walk away and think nothing more about that soft, pretty thing, too expensive to buy.
As we make the last turn and drive under Huaytara’s gate, I reach down and feel around my feet and realize that I left my empty camera bag by the rock where I had been sitting. I liked that bag. I bought it at Best Buy for $35, just for this trip. I picture it up there in the dark, lid unzipped, open to the big sky. And then I decide. I won’t think of it as a loss. I will think of it as an offering.
John Cutler spent the next several days thinking about the overcoat. An idea began to take shape. He was fifty-five years old. He had no successors. He was well aware that he was the last Cutler who would ever wield the family shears. His two grown sons had no interest in taking over—and why would they? Bespoke tailoring was a dying art. Cheap offshore manufacturing and an obsession with designer labels had brought custom-made to its knees—and a lack of young people willing to put in the years required to learn the trade would finish it off.
What if he called on everything he knew about his craft to make this coat? What if he and his trusted workroom team made it entirely by hand—without a single machine stitch? What if he used the finest materials he could get his hands on? He already had the vicuña, of course, but what if he achieved that level of perfection with all the other components? Everything he used to make the coat would come from craftsmen who were as obsessed with quality as he was.
When Keith came in to be measured, John opened a bottle of wine—a buttery New South Wales Chardonnay—and told him what he was envisioning.
“I trust you,” Keith had said. “Do whatever you like.”
Then he had handed the tailor his black American Express card and said, “Take what you need.” He had not asked then—and he would never ask—how much the coat would cost.
John got to work gathering the materials that he would need. Some were easy. He already had premium silk threads and top-of-the-line horsehair canvases, which would be required to give the garment its shape.
The lining, however, was trickier. The fabrics he had on the premises wouldn’t do. They were viscose blends—hardwearing and practical, yes, but this coat was not about practicality. It was about luxury. There was no question that the lining must be silk—and not just any silk. Only a few companies in the world produced the kind of quality John wanted. Hermès was one. He considered the possibility of stitching together several of the superb scarves. Stefano Ricci was another. John sold Stefano’s ties in the shop. Perhaps he could take some apart and fashion them into a patchwork lining. Then he got to wondering—why not just ask Stefano if would sell him a length of his silk?
John had done business with the enigmatic Florentine menswear designer for years. He knew the designer’s agent in Melbourne, so he gave him a call to ask if he thought Stefano might be willing to sell him some silk. Out of the question, the agent had said. Mr. Ricci would never do that—certainly not to be used as a lining. John sensed that the agent was reluctant to even approach the designer, but he kept pressing.
Tell him it is for a vicuña overcoat, entirely handmade, John said, believing Stefano Ricci would appreciate that kind of commitment to artisanship. Tell him it will be of the highest standard. Mention that the coat is navy blue—he would defer to Mr. Ricci’s good taste as to the specifics of the lining design as long as it complemented the fabric’s hue. Two months went by, and John heard nothing. And then, one day, he got a call. It was the agent. He sounded dumbfounded. Stefano Ricci would sell him enough silk to line one overcoat. But, the designer had insisted, he must tell no one—and he must never ask again.
We are all Adam’s children, but silk makes the difference.
ENGLISH PROVERB
I am sitting in a dark-orange club chair, made from the skin of wild New Guinean crocodiles, waiting for Stefano Ricci to arrive. This is something I may never do again, so I am paying particular attention to the soft window-paned leather and to the perplexing, almost unnameable hue—persimmon, is it, or just a half shade more toward paprika? The chair, and others like it, are placed in pairs on a travertine tiled floor in Stefano Ricci’s eponymous boutique, set theatrically in the former armory of the Palazzo Tornabuoni, on one of Florence’s choicest shopping streets. Art-filled upper floors of the fifteenth-century palace, once the home of a Renaissance-era pope, have recently been converted into a pr
ivate-residence club managed by the Four Seasons. (Owners are picked up at the airport in the club’s Maserati.) With upstairs neighbors like that, and a retail block that includes Bulgari, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and Cartier, it is obvious why Stefano Ricci opened his flagship store here in 2009. The location is ideal for snaring the kinds of customers—think petroleum-rich princelings—who crave the sixty-one-year-old designer’s exquisite handmade menswear.
From my seat, I can see the Stefano Ricci spring 2011 collection, displayed with spare and artful precision on burled-walnut tables and in tall wardrobes. There are lavender-and-lime striped Egyptian-cotton dress shirts, dimpled ostrich bomber jackets, tissue-weight wool suits, slender pointy shoes, and trays of tonally grouped whorled silk ties—all set off by silver elephant-tusk sculptures and large vases filled with exuberant, waxy-looking tropical blooms. A well-groomed salesman stands with his hands clasped behind his back, and a security guard hovers near the door. Both have smiled at me, but I get the distinct feeling they harbor a certain dubiousness about my presence. There are no customers in the store on this unusually warm morning in late March. I shift my position in the squared-off chair and jiggle my foot. Outside, a church bell rings and groups of tourists walk by heading toward the Duomo, a few blocks away.
And then Stefano Ricci arrives. His entrance into the store is operatic—an audible sweeping in. He is short and wide, with a spectacular mane of longish salt-and-pepper hair swept back and curling past his collar, a full white beard, and dark, playful eyes behind rimless glasses. His suit is a wonder of fluid navy wool, cut just so to broaden the shoulders and skim the ample torso: a bear in a man-suit.
“Mrs. Noo-nan,” he says in a little song that trails off into a sigh. I rise to shake his hand and the hand of Filippo Ricci, Stefano’s trim twenty-seven-year-old son and the company’s R&D manager, who is at his side, looking efficient and thoroughly exfoliated. I sit back down. Stefano takes a chair behind a desk, and Filippo takes the chair next to mine, pulls an iPad from a black leather case, and puts it on his lap.
“You don’t mind if I smoke,” Stefano says, pulling a cigarette from a pack. He points one finger skyward toward the stained-glass panels forty feet overhead. “High ceilings.” An elegant blond woman places coffee in a very small porcelain cup on Stefano’s desk, adjacent to his right hand. He looks at me and takes a long draw on his cigarette.
“So,” he says. It took months of emails to get this meeting arranged. I’m still not sure what he is willing to do. I’m hoping for at least twenty pure minutes of Stefano Ricci time. I clear my throat and ask him how he got started in the menswear business.
As a boy in Florence, Stefano was an enthusiastic doodler, filling the margins of his school papers with small figures, paisleys, and swirls. He also had an unusual obsession with neckties—Hermès neckties, to be specific—and by the age of twenty he had amassed 150 of them. His mother, who was in the clothing business, connected the odd dots and suggested that young Stefano put some of his drawings on his own neckwear. He started making silk ties and found that he couldn’t stop.
“It was like a fever,” he tells me.
Even after forty years, every design starts with Stefano noodling around on paper with a fountain pen—often late at night, in a miasma of smoke, with opera music blaring. His ties are made entirely by hand, using only the best raw silk and the most labor-intensive printing process. The finished products are vivid wonders that beg to be fondled: luminous, soft, and supple, but substantial enough to produce a beefy Windsor knot and a deep, authoritative dimple. The designer’s neckties, which start at $200 for a basic model and go as high as $35,000 for a limited-edition one studded with diamonds, are considered by many tie aficionados to be the best in the world.
“My passion … is to design ties, for the opportunity to play with color and with warp and weft,” Stefano says. “I am not an artist. I am not talented. I am a technician of cloth. And I must say that I do everything from start to finish. It is one of the privileges of the profession.”
From neckties, Stefano moved on to shirts of the finest Egyptian cotton—always with his signature octagonal mother-of-pearl buttons and contrast microstitching on the collar and cuffs. He branched out to crocodile belts and platinum cufflinks and silk robes. Every item is made one at a time by a team of two hundred artisans, either in the designer’s small factory just outside Florence or in nearby ateliers.
Like other Florentine fashion designers who preceded him—Salvatore Ferragamo, Guccio Gucci, Emilio Pucci, Roberto Cavalli—Stefano Ricci grew up in a world where the virtuosity of the artistic hand was a daily fact: not just in the city center’s architecture, paintings, and sculptures but in tiny workshops across the green waters of the Arno River. There, in the Oltrarno, shoemakers, carvers, tailors, weavers, and goldsmiths were carrying on the legacies of the medieval craft guilds, formed, in part, to assure the quality of the work. Their predecessors’ skills had helped make Florence the epicenter of fashion and style during the Renaissance, a position the city held until the seventeenth century, when Paris began to overshadow it in all things cultural.
In 1951, Giovanni Battista Giorgini, a savvy local straw-hat exporter who was determined to get Florence back on the sartorial map, staged a small fashion show in his villa and invited American apparel buyers. Eight buyers and one journalist for Women’s Wear Daily stopped in on their way home from seeing the Paris collections. WWD ran a front-page article about the show and the emergence of Italian style.
The ripple of interest generated there had turned into a tidal wave by the time Giorgini presented a larger show in July 1952, this time in the Sala Bianca of the Palazzo Pitti. Buyers were dazzled by the refined but relaxed clothing—and by the scenery, the food, and the parties. It didn’t hurt that the clothes were about half the price of French fashions, or that several of the featured designers and couturiers, including Contessa Simonetta Visconti, Princess Giovanna Caracciolo, and Marchese Emilio Pucci, were bona-fide aristocrats—even if, as the fashion historian Nicola White points out, some were in financial straits following the war. On a hot July evening, under the crystal-and-gold chandeliers in the white ballroom of a palace that had been home to grand dukes and kings, the Americans fell hard for the romance of Giorgini’s ahead-of-its-time marketing message: that craftsmanship mattered, that heritage mattered, that provenance mattered. “Made in Italy” was on its way to becoming what it would remain for the next sixty years—a label that instantly conferred quality, sophistication, and connoisseurship—and stamped your visa for entry into la dolce vita.
In 1955, the Pitti show attracted five hundred buyers and two hundred journalists. A menswear-only version of the show debuted in 1972; Stefano Ricci was there with his first homegrown neckwear collection. Neiman Marcus ordered his ties, as did Bergdorf Goodman and Harrods and Holt Renfrew. Over the next thirty-five-plus years, Stefano showed time and again that, besides being a talented designer, he had sharp marketing instincts and a nose for new money. He was one of the first European luxury brands to open in China, starting with Shanghai in 1993, then adding stores in Beijing, Chengdu, Hangzhou, Macau, and Xi’an.
“Everybody thought I was crazy [to go to China],” he says.
By the summer of 2011, Stefano had boutiques all over the world—some owned, some licensed. Uniform in their décor—always the croc, the dark wood, and the tile—the stores are designed to feel like international branches of an exclusive men’s club. His jet-setting customers seek the stores. Stefano could map out their travels by looking at where they placed their special orders.
“We already had a store in Beverly Hills, but we are opening a new one, much bigger, in the fall,” Stefano says. “Filippo, show madam.”
Filippo taps the screen of his iPad and turns it toward me.
“It’s the most famous spot in Beverly Hills,” he says. I recognize the wedged-shaped store, at 2 Rodeo Drive, that had been the Gianfranco Ferré boutique.
Stefano doesn
’t like to say who his customers are, but it has been reported that Hosni Mubarak, Nelson Mandela, Tom Cruise, Robert De Niro, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Sultan of Brunei, and Prince Moosa of Bangladesh all wear Stefano Ricci. Most Ricci devotees are not celebrities, however; they are anonymous, worldly rich men who have developed a craving for the particularly potent sartorial crack that Stefano Ricci pushes.
“I design my clothes for people who don’t need my clothes,” Stefano says. “They are attracted by the idea of having something special. They try once, and they want more, because they feel good in what they are wearing. Thanks to God, they get addicted—they want to possess.”
The Stefano Ricci empire grew even as the recession deepened and the costs of silk, cotton, wool, and leather soared. Second-tier brands scrambled to cut costs by skimping on details and hoping no one would notice. Stefano went the other way, designing his products to be even more labor-intensive, more extravagant in their materials, more niche.
“Even if my loyal clients go through a crisis, they don’t avoid doing things for their own pleasure,” he tells me. “They still want to feel that energy, that power. You still want to look good. And, honestly, if you have a billion dollars and you lose half a billion, your lifestyle doesn’t change.”
By 2010, worldwide sales of luxury goods were surging again, fueled by double-digit growth in China and signs of recovery in the United States and in some European markets. The number of millionaires in Asia surpassed Europe in 2011 and was expected to surpass those in North America in the near future. By 2012, Chinese consumers would account for more than 20 percent of global luxury sales. Much to Stefano Ricci’s delight, Chinese men were the ones driving the spending spree, shelling out $1.1 billion annually for high-end apparel. And their tastes were changing; once obsessed only with buying instantly identifiable status labels, they were starting to develop a deeper understanding of and appreciation for the craftsmanship and heritage behind a product.
The Coat Route Page 7