Measuring Up

By Sarah Raper Larenaudie/Milan

PERFECTLY TURNED OUT in a chalk-stripe navy bespoke suit, Umberto Angeloni, chief executive of Brioni, is urbane, courteous and buttoned up. So it comes as a surprise when, after settling a visitor into a chair in his office, he suddenly begins to strip.

"There are places you could get into trouble for this," scolds Brioni's communications director, Alessandra Alla. But not Milan, so Angeloni, 53, continues peeling off his vest to demonstrate what is special about a Brioni suit. He pulls up the lapel to display a cashmere backing (as opposed to the traditional felt) and a special thread to hold a boutonniere in place. He shows off a barely perceptible extra chest seam that requires a painstaking matching of stripes. He points out secret pockets and buttonholes stitched to look as good on the inside as out. (The buttonholes are stitched by 80 women by hand, a skill that requires two years of training. "One bad punch, and you have to throw away the sleeve," he says.) Finally, Angeloni unsnaps the cuff of his pants, a detail that allows for easy lint removal.

Brioni's bespoke suits start at $4,800, require several fittings and take on average 32 hours to craft. Some 70 optional details are proposed. "Not all of them are absolutely necessary, but I know the ateliers can do them, so I ask for them," he explains.

That's precisely what attracted Brioni's most famous client, James Bond. "I was looking for top English tailoring for Pierce Brosnan, and I could not find anyone who could make the number of suits I needed in the way I wanted," says Lindy Hemming, the costume designer who has kept 007 looking sharp in his past five films, including the newest installment, Casino Royale. Spies make for demanding customers. "I need 20 suits exactly the same for Bond but also the stand-ins, the stuntmen," she says in a phone interview from the Royale movie set in Prague where filming has just begun with the new Bond, actor Daniel Craig.

Hemming says there were several "hello-goodbye" meetings with Italian men's labels before she found Brioni. "This is not a product-placement deal, and that's what's quite extraordinary. I explained my dilemma, and Mr. Angeloni said, 'I don't see any problem,' and no money has changed hands."

Brioni, headquartered on the Via Gesu in the heart of Milan's shopping district, was founded in Rome in 1945 by tailor Nazareno Fonticoli and his entrepreneurial Roman partner, Gaetano Savini. Fonticoli had been trained in the Abruzzo school of tailoring, which blends cutting and stitching techniques borrowed from Savile Row with softer, Mediterranean-inspired lines. The pair's Sartoria Brioni on the Via Barberini was named after the Croatian islands of Brijuni, a glamorous golf and polo getaway favored by Italian aristocrats in the 1920s and '30s.

The shop attracted Cinecitt`a stars and coincided with a growing international interest in Italian fashion. The real genius of Fonticoli was to recognize the importance of the fast-growing ready-to-wear suit business and develop assembly systems that would allow Brioni to make more suits in fewer hours without abandoning the company's signature hand detailing. Brioni introduced a line of off-the-rack suits in 1960. Angeloni, who trained as an economist and married into one of the families that own Brioni, took over in 1990. He has pushed to transform Brioni into a lifestyle brand by adding women's wear and accessories. "Artisans continue to offer bespoke tailoring, but we are the only international lifestyle brand to offer the service," he boasts.

Although the bespoke service (the term comes from the English tradition of setting aside a client's fabric, which was said to be "spoken for") is limited to Rome and Milan and accounts for only 3% of Brioni's sales, Angeloni says it's what differentiates the brand from others. Today most of the company's business is in off-the-rack suits, priced from $2,600 and available in the same quality fabrics and with the same buttons used for the bespoke versions. A quarter of the company's 1,600 employees worldwide are trained tailors. About 20% of sales are made-to-measure suits that start at $3,800 and require 25 hours of work. For those suits, company tailors begin with a standard jacket but customize it to the client's measurements.

Downstairs at headquarters, the pattern for Nelson Mandela's pant legs flutters on a rack, and two master tailors look over a camel-colored coat in vicuna before it is sent to a client. "The fabric alone is about $4,800, but it will never, ever wear out," says Alessandro Corso, who grew up in a family of tailors. His colleague Simone Lovino is busy pressing a suit for a client who has returned it because the collar is riding up. "The collar is perfect. He doesn't need a new jacket; he needs a new dry cleaner," he says. Both men completed the four-year training course at Brioni's tailoring school and were tapped for an extra year to qualify them as master tailors. They say they can spot a Brioni suit at a distance because of the shape of the buttonhole, the gentle roll of the jacket collar and the light-handed topstitching. Both say they enjoy the contact with clients and have got more comfortable with the unusual requests, like the gentleman at a Paris hotel fitting who needed a special pocket. "Waist level, something heavy. He didn't say, and I didn't ask, but I assume it was a handgun," says Lovino.

Angeloni shows off the adjacent paneled fitting room, designed to evoke a library. "Our client is looking for one-of-a-kind products. They want small scale, not 200,000-sq.-ft. stores with untold goods," he says, noting that there are 25 dedicated Brioni stores worldwide, all staffed by trained tailors, and 400 stores that sell Brioni alongside other brands. "We haven't diversified beyond our core customer. Real luxury should not be so ubiquitous."