By Max Papier.

In part one of this series, I wrote about finding my fit among Italy’s tailoring traditions. What has stayed with me about Florentine tailoring, however, is not just how the pieces look or feel, but the culture that surrounds them.

When I first began trying to make sense of Florentine tailoring, I did so the only way I knew how: by comparison. I noticed echoes of other traditions I was already familiar with, one of which was English tailoring – specifically the work of Frederick Scholte, the Dutch-born tailor behind the English drape cut.

Scholte (1865–1948) was known for minimising seams wherever possible, preserving the continuity of the cloth. Eliminating front darts – something Florence has since become famous for – was central to that approach.

It’s hard to know whether Scholte influenced Florentine tailors, or whether his work was seen or absorbed indirectly through clients like the Duke of Windsor, whose clothes travelled constantly. But the resemblance was hard to ignore. For me, it was a useful point of reference – a way of orienting my eye.

Another reference that helped me think about Florence comes from tailor Vittorio Salino, who likens the Florentine silhouette to that of rowing blazers. In his telling, Florence had a sizable English expatriate community in the mid-nineteenth century, many of whom lived there to row on the Arno. They brought with them sporting jackets – blazers designed for movement and ease – and Salino sees parallels between these garments and the Florentine cut: open fronts, rounded quarters, minimal cutting.

One thing I like about Salino’s version of this story is the picture it paints of Florence itself: a closed circuit where tailors saw the same clients, passed through the same rooms, and absorbed the same influences by proximity. In that telling, Florentine tailoring spread like a habit – something picked up quietly, reinforced over time and rarely written down.

In modern times Florence has always been a relatively small city – something it’s easy to forget given its outsized place in cultural history. Compared to Milan, Rome or Naples, it never produced a Caraceni or a Rubinacci, nor did it give rise to ready-to-wear houses like Kiton or Brioni.

That smallness affected everything, including continuity.

For decades, Florence was filled with skilled tailors – Vladimiro Fosco Mealli, Armando Di Preta, Leo Rosella, Evandro Franchi, Giorgio Giuntini, Olinto Maltagliati, Lettorio Speciale – whose work defined the city’s approach. Nearly all of them are gone now, not because the work lacked merit, but because there was no obvious mechanism to carry it forward.

Rosella, who died in the mid-1980s, employed around 30 workers at his height. Di Preta, who won the Golden Scissors in the 1970s, was known as the tailor of Florence’s noble families. These were long, serious careers – often spanning most of the post-war period – yet their ateliers just closed once the master stepped away.

Giovanni Maiano (below) – whom tailor Gianni Seminara of Sartoria Seminara  described as his father’s closest friend, and whose clients included Kenji Kaga and Kentaro Nakagomi – was one of the more recent, closing his atelier in 2015 and sadly passing away in May 2025.

Salino traces one small lineage from Di Preta through three men who trained under him: Scardigli, Azzurri, and Masi, with Masi still working today, not far from Stefano Ricci’s shop. But there was no formal succession – no sense that the work needed to be preserved intact.

Perhaps that’s because the craft was more social, more collective. Salino describes an informal salon in the 1970s: tailors meeting at Donnini Pasticceria in Piazza della Repubblica, laying garments on tables, comparing each other’s work, arguing about balance and line the way artists might. Hearing about this made Florentine tailoring feel less like a trade and more like a shared language – discussed in public, before being carried back into private workshops.

I experienced a version of this myself a few years ago while commissioning a jacket with Kotaro Miyahara of Sartoria Corcos (above). I had a summer jacket in mind – bold, checked, something that would take advantage of the dartless front – but none of the fabrics in Kotaro’s atelier felt quite right. He suggested that if he didn’t have it, perhaps his former mentor might.

The three of us – Kotaro, my colleague Elliot and I – left his atelier near the Arno, crossed the city, and stopped at an unmarked door near the Duomo. Kotaro rang the bell and led us upstairs into Gianni Seminara’s workshop. Kotaro explained that he had trained under Gianni before striking out on his own, and that the two still leaned on each other. 

Gianni shared stories – how he once needed buttonholes finished and ran a jacket to Kotaro, who helped without hesitation. I later learned that when younger tailors struggled to secure cloth from larger mills, Gianni was often the one who stepped in.

This culture is part of what drew others to Florence before me. In the early 2000s, George Wang of Atelier Brio (below) was seeking out Florentine tailors.

“At the time,” Wang recalls, “all the conversation around soft tailoring focused on Naples. In reality, Florentine tailoring was even lighter – less internal structure, cleaner lines.”

Later, writers like Derek Guy helped bring wider attention to figures such as Gianni Seminara and Mario Sciales of Sartoria Marinaro, described by Wang as “not as full-bodied and rounded as Liverano, but also not as slim and slouchy as Seminara”.

If we go back further still, there are Japanese like Yukio Akamine, an early client of Florentine tailors like Liverano – drawn in partly by the regular visits for Pitti Uomo, and partly by accessibility. These small Florentine houses were excellent and – at the time – more approachable than larger names in Milan.

Liverano eventually became the most visible expression of this world – first among insiders, then more broadly through The Armoury. Many people came to understand Florentine tailoring through Liverano’s particular balance of cleanliness, elegance, softness and strength.

Liverano’s history has been documented beautifully elsewhere – most notably in Gianluca Migliarotti’s I Colori di Antonio – so I won’t attempt to summarise it here. What matters more to me is what Antonio Liverano, now 88 years old, has produced.

The way Liverano has spawned so many other small houses typifies the local approach to succession. Over the years, cutters and tailors have left to establish their own ateliers, sometimes prompting concern about continuity. That pattern is occasionally framed as a failure to retain talent.

I see it differently. To me, this is Liverano’s legacy.

Francesco Guida, Yusuke Kabuto, Qemal Selimi, Hojun Choi of Sala Bianca, Giacomo Sacchi, Cheng Hsi Wang of Sartoria Maltagliati, Vittorio Salino, George Marsh of Speciale, Leonardo Simoncini of Poiesis and Leonardo Maltese all trained under Antonio Liverano, absorbing not just a cut but a way of thinking, and eventually feeling confident enough to stand on their own. 

Many now train others in turn. Both Hojun and Vittorio still entrust their finishing to Rosa Femia, now semi-retired, who spent decades at Liverano.

Rosa herself trained under earlier masters, including Rosella and Mealli. She once told me that many of Florence’s best tailors died without a next generation because the old Italian way was not to teach – at least not openly. Some masters would even leave the room while attaching sleeves so apprentices couldn’t observe.

Her late husband, Antonio Mantella, worked in a shared workshop producing garments for both Di Preta and Rosella – a reminder that it’s also simplistic to just look at names above the door. 

Attempts at formal succession have rarely lasted. Loris Vestrucci, who founded his sartoria in 1950 and trained with Mealli and Giuntini, was a real part of Florence’s heritage. An effort to preserve his knowledge with Stefano Bemer lasted only a few years before that shop closed. Yet tailors trained by Vestrucci – Maestoso Tailor in Milan and Ccalimala in Korea – now flourish independently.

A similar fate met Lettorio Speciale, whose influence survives largely through the inspiration it provided to the founders of Speciale in West London.

What I draw from my time in Florence is that tailoring here isn’t something you inherit all at once. It’s something you’re trusted with – gradually, often without ceremony. There are no uninterrupted dynasties, no polished narratives of permanence. Only people working quietly, passing on what they can while they can.

Looking back, that is what drew me to the city in the first place. Not the cut alone, nor the softness or the restraint, but the values beneath them: clothes made without excess; knowledge shared without fanfare; a belief that the work matters more than the name attached to it.

Florentine tailoring doesn’t ask to be preserved. It asks to be understood – and, if you’re fortunate enough, to be carried forward.

Max Papier is based in New York and has spent the past decade commissioning bespoke clothing from Italian tailors, particularly in Florence. He will expand on these personal experiences in an upcoming article.