The Coat Route (13 page)

“He’s crazy,” he says.

We make our way through the streets of Fiesole, heading back to the center of Florence.

“So, what will you do tomorrow?” Filippo asks.

“I thought I’d go to the Uffizi,” I say. I want to see those women in silk.

“Oh, I can arrange it for you. My friend is the administrative director there. You won’t have to wait in line. Go in the back door. Ask for Giovanni. He’ll take care of you.”

“You know everyone,” I say.

“It’s a small town.”

We come across a bridge and ahead of us the façades of the medieval stone palazzos along the inky Arno River are illuminated in fans of
limoncello-
colored light.

“Ah. Look,” he says.

I can hear the pride in Filippo’s voice, as if he had a hand in designing this, too.

“Isn’t it beautiful?”

J
ohn Cutler already had pattern pieces for Keith Lambert in storage. These templates would be a solid place to start for the creation of an overcoat pattern. He went downstairs to the workroom and looked through the lightweight brown cardboard patterns he kept hanging in alphabetical order until he got to the
L
’s. He pulled Lambert’s from the rack
.

Back upstairs, John unrolled a piece of fresh pattern cardboard on his worktable and pressed it flat with a warm iron. He then placed the back section of Lambert’s existing jacket pattern on the cardboard and held it down with weights
.

John consulted the notes he had made when Keith stopped in to be measured for the overcoat. Because the garment would have to fit over a suit, the tailor had asked Keith to keep his jacket on while he measured. The width of the back would have to be one to one and a half inches wider than the jacket; the sleeve length, half an inch past the jacket, with the hand held straight down. The “round” measurements—the chest, waist, and seat—had been determined in two ways. First, over the jacket, with two fingers inside the tape for a slight ease, then with the jacket off, adding two inches to the measurements taken over the shirt. If he had done it correctly, the second set of numbers would match the first
.

John took his sharpened 2B lead pencil and, using the pattern piece as his guide, marked the center of the back. Then he ran the tape measure down to what would be the full length of the coat. He
made pencil lines at the waistline and the chest, squaring them out for symmetry. He marked the width of the neck, then moved on to the shoulders, allowing for three-quarters of an inch fullness to be eased onto the shoulder in the making. This would allow the overcoat to pass smoothly over the shoulder blades. He calculated the crucial depth of scye—the depth of the armhole. Then, with a piece of flat tailor’s chalk, he drew lines from neck point to shoulder end and then down to the scye and the waist. He continued, freehand, drawing a line down to the bottom of the coat. Then he removed the jacket pattern
.

The tailor stood back and studied the result. Something was not quite right. He drew in a little more curve in the shoulder line—to add a bit of theater—then altered the shape of the side-seam line to put more ease in the waist. Finally, he added a fraction more across the back. Yes, that was it. He used his paper shears to cut out the pattern piece. He had the back
.

He now turned to the front section and began marking it out: the neck point, the depth of scye, the waist. The length of the coat in the front would be one inch longer from waist to bottom than the back. He made some adjustments to the front edge, then drew a line from the front of the armhole down the full length of the pattern, making allowances to ensure that the coat would fall properly. He added half an inch to the side seam at the chest and waist, and three-quarters of an inch at the seat level, then drew the side-seam line from the chest, through the waist and the seat, and on to what would be the bottom edge of the coat
.

He set the collar stand at one and a quarter inches, then made a line from there to the top button, six inches above the waistline. He marked the second button, and the spot where the lapel would break. The lapel edge, the armhole shape, and the underarm dart were all drawn in freehand. The welted side pocket was sketched in to accommodate
the position, hang, and size of Keith’s arm and hand. Then the bottom edge was joined in a soft curve from the front to the side seam. Everything looked right except the lapel. John made a slight change to the curve. That was better. He cut the pattern and set it aside
.

Then it was on to the sleeve. The width of the cuff and sleeve was critical, of course, since the coat must slip easily over the jacket—but not be so wide as to appear sloppy. When he was satisfied, he cut out the sleeve pattern piece
.

Now he was ready for the cloth. He spread the length of vicuña out on the cutting table and stood back to admire it. It really was extraordinary. John had acquired it in 1984, on the occasion of the firm’s one-hundredth anniversary. Ashley Dormeuil, a principal in the Paris-based Dormeuil, one of the world’s top merchants of premium cloth, was visiting some of his Australian accounts, as he did every two or three years. The tailor had a long relationship with Dormeuil; in the late 1960s, he had even worked at the company’s London office for a time
.

Ashley Dormeuil had given John a plaque to commemorate his firm’s centennial, and had asked if there was anything else he could do for him. John had thought it over for a bit, then said that there was, in fact, something. He recalled that when he worked for Dormeuil there had been rolls of pure vicuña locked away in a vault. He asked if there might be any left. Ashley told him that he would see if he could unearth some. If he did, he said, he would be happy to sell it at a reasonable price. Ashley went back to Paris, and a few weeks later John received three long boxes in the mail. They were overcoat lengths of pure Dormeuil vicuña—one natural, one black, and one navy
.

O
n an overcast fall morning in Paris, Frédéric Dormeuil, a thirty-year-old executive with his family’s luxury fabric business, is driving down the Avenue de New York and telling me a funny story about an experience he had with a Vietnamese tailor who tried to sell him counterfeit versions of his own Dormeuil cloth. This may not seem like the most amusing of topics, but in Frédéric’s hands it is a one-act play
à deux:
the plummy Englishman meets the hard-selling Hoi An shop owner. Just as he reaches the climax, his cell phone buzzes and he checks the caller ID.

“Sorry,” he says, then dives into a conversation in hyper-animated French.

While he talks, I look out the car window at the Eiffel Tower, looming industrial and gray above the Seine, and at the symmetry of the linden trees, their leaves like yellow paddles, which line the broad street. Frédéric hangs up and plunges back into the story: “And he was showing me the cloth—of course, he had no idea who I was or where I worked—and saying ‘Nice, nice! Dor-may! Dor-may! Must buy!’ And the name woven into the selvage
of the fabric was Dormeuill—with
two l
’s. I left him my business card.” His phone buzzes again.

“Terribly sorry,” he says. He glances from phone to road and back to phone, then props the device on the steering wheel and uses his thumbs to type and his fingers to drive. After he sends the text, he looks over at me, and says, “Now, where were we?”

Actually, I’m not so sure. I feel as if I’ve been around the world a few times since Frédéric picked me up at my small hotel near the Arc de Triomphe to drive me to Palaiseau, the Paris suburb where Dormeuil has its headquarters. Frédéric, who has the oblong face, ebbing hairline, lanky frame, and boarding-school elocution of a young British royal, is a whirlwind in a double-breasted suit. As the commercial director of Dormeuil Mode (his uncle, Dominic Dormeuil, is president), he handles all the international marketing, and oversees its just launched menswear line, which is already being sold in more than fifty countries. That means he travels almost nonstop. One week it’s Shanghai for a trade fair, the next it’s New Zealand to inspect the merino flocks, India for a luxury conference, New York for a salute to the tuxedo, São Paulo for a store opening.

“I once flew round-trip to Japan from Paris in a day,” he tells me, changing lanes and speeding past a slow-moving truck. “That was a tough one.”

His travels, I am quickly learning, have given him a wealth of material on which to unleash his Streep-ian linguistic skills, which he does repeatedly, with caffeinated gusto, as we head south.

Frédéric Dormeuil comes from a long line of indefatigable traveling salesmen. He is the sixth generation to hit the road for the company, which was founded in 1842 by his great-great-great-grandfather Jules Dormeuil, a twenty-two-year-old Frenchman
with muttonchops, who had the idea of importing English wool to Paris. Encouraged by his early Channel-straddling success, Jules and the family members who soon joined him spun the globe and started packing. They loaded big leather cases with fabric samples—meltons, whipcords, cheviots, and serge—and lugged them onto railcars or ships bound for Yokohama, Casablanca, and beyond. When they arrived, they wrestled the trunks onto wheezing buses, or strapped them onto the backs of donkeys or camels, and set off in search of men and women who wanted clothes—and tailors who needed good cloth. They were sometimes away from home for years.

Dormeuil’s headquarters, a boxy low-rise in an industrial park, gives no hint of the rigors—or romance—of the dusty road. It is not until I trail Frédéric through the lobby, past the low blond-wood tables and potted ferns, and down to the basement cutting room that I get a taste of that. Dormeuil’s entire collection is stored here. There are miles of cloth woven with yarn spun from the world’s great fluff: merino wool, cashmere, mohair, and vicuña. Near a bank of windows, a few men stand over unfurled cloth on long worktables, holding shears so oversized that they make me think of long-winded mayors and small-town ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

Woolen mills produce cloth in what are called pieces, seventy meters long, and one and a half meters wide, Frédéric tells me as we walk along the bins of rolled fabric. Almost all of the firm’s cloth is woven and finished in West Yorkshire, England, which has been a center of textile manufacturing for centuries. Bulk buyers take the whole roll, but tailors need only small amounts at a time. They rely on merchants like Dormeuil to warehouse stock and provide a “cut length” service, from which they can order only what they need—generally, 3.2 meters, or
roughly four yards, for a suit, less for jackets and trousers. Dormeuil cutters process about four hundred lengths every day, starting in the morning, with orders that have come in from Asia, the Middle East, Russia, and Europe, and finishing the day with requests from the United States.

“It’s a real skill,” Frédéric says. “You’re holding these massive scissors, and every time you must cut perfectly straight lines through all kinds of different-textured materials, some of which are extremely expensive. You have to know what you are doing. Ideally, you should have a passion for it. But it’s getting harder to find people who have the skills
and
the passion. I’m afraid the glamour of a local bar job can often be more tempting.”

After the cloth is cut, it is packaged and shipped overnight to the customer. I take a look at the labels on four wrapped bundles on a cart close to me. They are headed to tailors in Milan, Azerbaijan, New York, and Tokyo.

Beyond the cutting tables are rows of tall metal library shelving. The company archives are preserved here, in hundreds of sample books. Some of the volumes are labeled in French, some in English: “Été 1889,” “Winter Suitings 1914,” “Ladies 1936.” In one aisle, there are books devoted to blacks for mourning and whites for tennis. Frédéric takes a few volumes down from the shelves and brings them over to a table for me. Each lined page has a dozen or so small squares of cloth glued down its margin—some are frayed, some half-attached, some snipped back to nearly nothing. Next to the swatches are comments and numbered codes, written in flowing fountain-pen ink, indecipherable as hieroglyphics.

There are pages of solids and tweeds and florals. I linger over one array of sober charcoal-gray checks, which at first glance seem identical. But, looking closer, I see a thin vein of blue in the
weft in one, a filament of maroon in the warp of another. Study any of these scraps long enough and each becomes an intricate grid, the careful work of one man who puzzled over the design for days before deciding that this line should bisect that one, unless, hang on … wouldn’t it be that much better if they never met?

“Fantastic, aren’t they?” Frédéric says. “People from couture houses pay us visits to see what we were doing in the nineteen-twenties or thirties, and costume designers working on period films come to make sure they get the look just right.”