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Do you have a family member who is an artisan-tailor — or perhaps worked as one in the past? If you do, we’d love to hear about their life’s work and what this individual means to you. Please share your anecdotes and recollections.
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This is absolutely wonderful. Such talented and warm hearted men, loving their art.
I have the pleasure of having the book written by Irene. It is outstanding. I so enjoyed hearing her read the poem she had written.
Hand in hand the two arts meet, that of creating a masterpiece from cloth, and that of creating a poem and a novel.
I had a close relative Lino Capella who was the master tailor for Dunhill Tailors in Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. He trained dozens of apprentices from the old country and made clothes for many Hollywood stars of the 50s and 60s. Everything was hand made and hand stitched – even the button holes. When I watch the TV series Mad Men I get flashbacks! I once went with my mother to visit him and tried on a winter coat – it fit like a slip and I felt like a princess. He always had a straight pin on his lapel – because you never knew when you might need one. He was a true artist.
Irene Musillo Mitchell shares a passage from her book, Anna Marilena’s Four Sorrows, which is inspired by her experience getting fitted by her father, a tailor from Basilicata, Italy:
When it was time for a fitting, he summoned Marilena or me to the sewing room, and we stood stiff and silent as he scrutinized the suit or coat he made us. As young as we were, we understood that to create our father’s outfits, which everyone admired, high seriousness and hard work were as necessary as going to school. The fittings took place in the adjacent parlor, for the sewing room was no more than a pantry. If Gian Andrea had just used the steam iron, the smell of steamed cloth floated into the parlor.
“Stai diritta!” he would say. He spoke to us in Italian or English, as one language or the other rose to his lips. Sometimes, especially when I was called in from playing outside, I found it hard to stand straight and still. “Stai ferma!” he said crossly, or it seemed that way. Standing back, as one does observing a painting in a museum, he would look sharply at the jacket or coat. Sometimes a jacket did not fall quite as he wished, and he would pull and tug at it until it conformed more precisely to the figure, or he would adjust and readjust a tentatively-fastened collar on a coat until it lay perfectly around the neck. Sometimes the stiffener in the collar scratched my neck, but I did not say a word.
“Gira!” I would turn around, though too quickly, for he would intercept, “Piano!” and his eyes followed a skirt, how it fell, its hemline, its hemline pleat. “Cammina!” Wearing the almost finished suit, I walked stiffly away, turned, and walked toward him, while he appraised the total effect. When the fitting was over, which he indicated by a nod of the head or some other dismissive gesture, I knew from a certain calmness overspreading his face and an easing, like the relaxing of a tense body, that the suit met his Berninian or Cellinian eye.