Sartoria napoletana · dal 1978 · su misura
Naples builds a jacket by removing things: the padding, the lining, the stiffening, three hundred grams. The trouble with an argument made of absences is that you cannot photograph one. So this page opens the coat instead.
01 — Il taglio
And what each one costs to remove
Every one of these makes the coat lighter and the work longer. That is the part the trade does not advertise: subtraction is the expensive direction.
There is none. The sleeve head is gathered into the armhole in fine ripples and that gathering is the entire shoulder. A Savile Row coat builds a shoulder; this one borrows yours.
Usually absent, sometimes half. Removing it costs more, not less: every internal seam then has to be bound and finished by hand where nobody will ever look.
The canvas floats rather than fuses, and it is soft enough to take the shape of one chest over about four years. It is not there to impose a shape. It is there to remember one.
A fully built English coat of the same cloth finishes around 1,010 g. The lightest thing we make finishes at 740 g. That difference is the whole argument, and you can feel it on a stair.
The name
Every other tailoring tradition cuts the breast pocket square and level. Naples cuts it as a shallow crescent that rises toward the shoulder — a little boat, in a city built around a bay. It is drawn freehand in chalk against the client’s own chest at the second fitting, which is why no two of ours have quite the same curve.
It is also the only curve on this entire website. Everything else here is a straight line between two chalk marks, because that is what tailoring is.
02 — L'interno
The strata, and the four decisions that set them
The right front is what the world sees. The left is swung open, the way Ciro holds a coat across the board to show you what is in it. Change any of the four below and the inside is rebuilt — the canvas grows or stops, the lining closes over it, the shoulder changes shape, the pick stitch moves.
The hatched fields are the canvas and the haircloth chest piece. The coral dashes are what a tailor puts in by hand — the bound seams of an unlined coat, and the impuntura along the lapel.
€4,540the jacket alone
“Begin this jacket” — carries the specification into the order below. Note that the lighter coat is the dearer one: taking the lining out adds fourteen hours of hand-finishing.
03 — Le prove
What actually happens in the room
Ciro will not cut from posted measurements. The first fitting has to happen in front of him — in Naples, or on one of four trunk visits a year — because a Neapolitan coat is fitted to a posture, and a posture does not travel in a tape measure.
04 — Il maestro
Ciro Lanzetta has cut on this board since 1978 and has not made a whole coat himself since 1994. He says so before anyone asks, because the alternative is letting people assume otherwise.
The jackets are made by three giacchettaie — Rosaria, Anna, and Carmela — who work at their own tables in the Chiaia and on the Vomero, which is how Naples has organised this trade for a century. Trousers go to Salvatore, a pantalonaio, two streets away. Ciro cuts, fits, and takes the blame.
Between them they finish about 90 coats a year. Rosaria has made roughly 1,400, and can tell whose pattern a coat came off by looking at the armhole.
05 — Pronte
Finished, unclaimed, alterable
Three coats made for commissions that ended. A sleeve, a hem, and a waist we can move; a shoulder we cannot. If one is near your size, it can be fitted in an afternoon.
No. 341
Cut for a client in Milan who changed size before the second prova. A 310 g hopsack, entirely unlined, spalla a camicia, 12 mm impuntura down both edges. The lightest coat on the rail.
No. 336
A winter coat: 340 g flannel, half-lined across the shoulders, mappina shoulder. Made for a trunk client in London who took the trousers and left the jacket.
No. 329
A 280 g tropical wool for heat — no lining, half canvas, and no pick stitch at all, because at this weight a visible edge stitch reads as noise. The plainest coat we have made in two years.
06 — Ordinare
An order request, not a checkout
No card is taken on this page. Ciro reads this, tells you whether your date is possible, and proposes a first fitting — in Naples or on a trunk visit. Nothing is cut until you have stood in front of him once.