SMALTO REDUX

Francesco Smalto, pictured above, passed away last month.
I once had the opportunity to examine one of the coats made in his Paris atelier, and posted a video showing some of the work being done. Those who fetishize hand work should absolutely love his stuff, though the styling may not be for everybody.

Kirby recently reached out to me to offer another, more recent example of their work, Kirby of the Hanger Project, whose website sells luxury wooden hangers and Saphir shoe polish. Yes, I am willing to trade links for bespoke clothing.

This example was made for a member of the royal family of the country in which Smalto was residing when he passed away, and whose taste in clothing can be said to be somewhat flamboyant. A 3 on 3 double-breasted model with a huge amount of padding in the shoulders, and a rather firm chest, cut out of a stripe which we might normally associate with trousers to be paired with a morning coat. The photo below is of me modeling the coat.



Their house label set in their trademark teardrop pocket, one of the little touches that at once speak of uncommon attention to detail and an attempt at "luxury branding". The back of the pocket is also shown.





The bottom of the center vent is tacked by hand with the trademark S for Smalto, a little touch that I like.



Other details which are unusual to see in bespoke clothing but are typical of luxury houses are branded jacquard linings, and corozo buttons with FRANCESCO SMALTO etched in the back.



The client's initials are hand embroidered on the lining, in addition to the usual label inside the pocket with the client's name, order number and date of order (not shown).




The buttonholes, as expected, are good, but I have seen better examples of the boutonnière milanaise







The lining has been entirely inserted by hand with a semi-decorative stitch. Here is shown the inside of the vent.



Now for the more nerdy stuff.

As we saw on the last example, the top collar is done in two pieces, a bit of engineering not commonly found in bespoke tailoring.



All the seams have been overcast by hand, which is somewhat unusual as one might expect to find them either pinked or serged which would be much faster than doing it by hand. But I respect their choice. The lapel and collar, on the other hand, have been padded by machine, then the edges taped rather carefully by hand.




The chest, however, has been very thoroughly padded by hand on both sides.



An absolutely enormous amount of wadding in the shoulder but a light, single-ply piece of canvas in the cap of the sleeve-





And a very liberal amount of haircloth in the chest.



Students of tailoring should take note of the split, or vee, in the smaller piece of haircloth along the roll line- the fullness created by doing this is carried over the shoulder point, though this split is normally applied neck to the neck and not quite so far down the chest.

To avoid the vees we usually see in the shoulder part, the canvas has been seamed along the hollow part, not only to create the necessary length over the shoulder point, but to rotate the hairline in that part on to a semi bias. This creates some give over the shoulder but also some support- it is common to turn the haircloth piece in the shoulder on a similar angle. What is not clear to me is the purpose of the cross-cut piece of inch-wide haircloth running straight up the hollow part of the front shoulder. This may be due to a particular shape on the client's anatomy.



Very wide outlets have been left on the shoulder seam-


The back neck and armhole have been stayed with lining instead of silesia (or, as we will soon see from a Neapolitan tailor, canvas)





The vents are reinforced with wiggan, which has been felled, along with all the hems, with an extremely fine thread and a very delicate stitch. Someone in their shop has very good hands.


Overall the workmanship is excellent, with an inordinate amount of attention to detail overall, something which should lend Paris' tailors a much higher level of esteem on the world stage- by comparison, many of the better-known Italian houses are over-rated. But that will be the subject of another discussion, coming very soon, thanks to a long-awaited donation by voxsartoria...

Gilbert Feruch

Custom shirtmaker CEGO's Carl Goldberg shared a few garments from his father's wardrobe with us, one of which is a DB jacket (pants long lost) made by Gilbert Feruch, some time in the seventies, I think.

I gather he was something of a futurist, and the V&A museum has a Nehru suit that he made on display. Other than that, I know practically nothing about him. What I find most interesting about this garment is that had he removed the label, I would have sworn it was a Smalto, the garment we recently looked at. There are so many details which are virtually identical that it is impossible that the two were not somehow linked at some point in their careers. I won't speculate on that link but if someone has more information I would love to hear it.

While I was surprised to have seen a two-piece top collar on a piece of bespoke work, here is another one.



The buttonholes are fairly good, though they may have seen better days, particularly the Milanaise which looks to have had a flower or two through it.





This is how buttons should be sewn on.



Like the Smalto, the pocket jets have been stitched by hand. The breast welt and its facing have also been constructed by hand, and sewn through the chest piece.



While the interior finishing on many of the coats we have looked at has seemed like an afterthought, Feruch is clearly making a statement here.



Again, pocket jets done by hand



The lining has been inserted by hand and stitched up in an identical fashion to the Smalto.

Even this diagonal tack is identical.



While the Smalto had wiggan in the vents, this one has silesia, but cut and inserted identically to the Smalto



The real differentiator between the two is that the Smalto had been padstitched by machine, and this one has been done by hand.



Note how the direction of the stitching was reversed to help with the peak of the lapel



The collar has been padded by hand with a piece of silesia on each end.



The chest and shoulder pad have also been done by hand, and the same kind of cut and reversal of the direction of the grain as I found in the Smalto.



The final detail was that the facings had been drawn on entirely by hand, while the Smalto (like so many others) had been done by machine. And for those who still care, the sleeve was set by machine and the shoulder seam sewn by machine. Absolutely everything else on this coat had been done by hand so clearly they were not looking to save time or cut corners- if they thought there was any benefit to doing these steps by hand they would have been done by hand. But they were not.

Other than the few steps which had been done by machine on the Smalto coat, steps which may have come later to help bring costs down as the Smalto is much more recent than the Feruch, these two coats are so close that they could have been made in the very same workshop.

Intriguing, no? Thoughts, anyone?

And thank you, Carl.

FRANCESCO SMALTO HAUTE COUTURE

I've linked this video before, but here it is again.



Sometimes promotional material can push the envelope a bit in order to look good, and I admit that a few moments during this video I found myself thinking "Oh, really?"


Well, yes. Really.

Thanks go out to Des Esseintes for donating this coat from Francesco Smalto.

A few posts back I remember lamenting the fact that certain houses get way overhyped and others don't have anywhere near the recognition they deserve. Well, this is another of the latter. Perhaps because they have fallen to the all-too-common over-licensing of their name that they are more known for their scents; one is also tempted to think that the quality may not be the same as it was when this coat was made back in '91, but the video was posted in 2008 and shows identical techniques.

You can find a bit of background info on Smalto here

Men's tailoring is often focused on the understated, the invisible, but in this garment the details call attention to themselves; in this sense it is very influenced by haute couture whose finishing and execution are often shows of virtuosity rather than self-effacement. The main label, as shown above, has been incorporated in a clever pocket which would be just about impossible to replicate in a mass-production setting, and is just one of the many indications that this is a very special garment. That said, most of those clues are on the inside, not the outside.

Something less obvious, but which should be pointed out, is that this garment had spent several weeks crammed into a shipping box. It is not a heavy, sturdy cloth but rather something more delicate, and yet this is how it looks straight out of the box, no pressing or steaming-



The shape of the lapel and collar is rarely seen outside of France.

Readers are, by now, aware of my thing for buttonholes and these are very good, worked using finer thread than I have ever been able to find; note the pickstitching along the vent and the little bar tack. Note also that the gimp ends have been worked inside the cloth rather than being concealed under the ends like I do.



This buttonhole on the front is as close to perfection as I have ever seen



and oddly, the second buttonhole is straight rather than keyhole, an acknowledgement of the fact that this button must never be fastened.



The lapel is sporting the "milanese" buttonhole, the mechanics of which I have finally figured out (it came to me while driving home, of all places).



The pocket jets have been sewn by hand, something that is almost never seen anymore.



The inside pockets (there are four of them) have also been bound by hand. Notice the hand pick stitching along the edges of the lining and flap, and the hand-made buttonhole on the flap.





The lining has been inserted entirely by hand. While most English tailors prefer a small, invisible stitch to fell the lining, it is more common in Italy to use a decorative top stitch, like this one, however they are usually much wider in their spacing. These are very tight, another way of saying "we have spared no time nor effort in the creation of this garment". I, personally, prefer a neater, more discrete finishing stitch, but this is actually a more solid stitch.



The vents.



A few diagnol stitches



The pleat at center back has been finsihed with a big S for Smalto



I was astounded to see a two-piece top collar, something which is rarely, if ever, seen on bespoke work because it requires a bit of engineering in the pattern. The blurb I linked to did mention his visiting clothing factories in the U.S. so he may have borrowed a technique.



To the right of the personal label is the name Georges (I obscured the client's name). I imagine that this was either the cutter or the person who created the garment.



As I get the lining open, we see then vents have been reinforced with wiggan.



The large inlay has been pick stitched to one side



And the smaller seams in the body and sleeve have been lightly overcast by hand to prevent fraying, a detail I have never seen on a men's tailored garment but would be more common in ladies' couture. This is more commonly serged or pinked on men's garments.




Rather than a loose basting stitch, the facing and pockets have been secured with a cross-stitch.



The lapel's underside is heavily dimpled which would indicate hand pad-stitching. And since, until now, virtually everything has been done by hand, one has no reason to suspect otherwise. So I was quite surprised to find that the lapel and collar had been padstitched by machine.





It is perhaps not apparent in the photo, but the chest has been padstitched by hand the entire length of the felt.

Likewise, the shoulder pad is entirely hand made.



The edge tape has been sewn in by hand as well.



Considering the amount of work done by hand everywhere else on the garment, one can assume that they see no added value in padding the lapel and collar by hand. Liekwise the sleeve setting and shoulder seam have been done by machine (have we seen enough proof that this is really not necessary to do by hand yet?)

Here we can see the reverse of the pad stitching of the chest, as well as the seam that was taken to build some shape into the shoulder, instead of teh more common vees. Note the direction of the grain in the upper piece.



I could feel a nice amount of structure in the chest so was not at all surprised to find two layers of haircloth, one on a slight bias (refer back to my drape experiment) and the other cut out of the scye , à-la Anderson and Sheppard. Smalto had clearly seen a lot of things in his carreer.




I can honestly say that it's been a while since I saw a garment with such a personality. One might not agree with all the choices made, but it shows a definite point of view and I can certainly respect that, and find it refreshing for some reason. What was even more fascinating to me in discovering a lot of these very distinctive details was that, a few weeks later, I recieved a garment made by another French tailor which resembled the Smalto in many of them. There is certainly a strong link between the two and I am hoping that readers in Paris (or elsewhere) who may have more knowledge of the history of these two tailors will fill us in on them, once we have had a look at the second garment.

A la prochaine!