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The shop attracted Cinecittà 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 vicuña 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."