In a nation where dressing well is virtually a second religion, Mario Caraceni was regarded as the grandmaster of Italian tailoring. His devotion to fine attire, however, almost ended his career, and his life, before it had hardly begun.
When Italy was in a ferment in 1943 as it awaited the Allied invasion, the 17-year-old Caraceni was sheltering in a farmhouse outside Ortona, in Abruzzo. His family hailed from the town and his tailor father had returned there after having shut his Paris atelier when France and Italy went to war.
One evening a light was seen flashing from the farm building. The suspicions of the soldiers sent to investigate at once fell on Mario since he was wearing a garment inextricably associated with the English, a Burberry raincoat. He was denounced on the spot as a spy and condemned to be shot.
Wanting to look his best for his execution, Mario asked his sister to fetch his hat. One glance at the label inside confirmed the firing squad of the justice of their verdict: Lock & Co, Hatters, St James’s Street, London. Fortunately for Caraceni, the sentence was remitted until the next morning and he and his sister escaped during the night.
Caraceni always remained an admirer of English clothing, although the family denied a story that his grandfather Tommaso learnt his skills in part by examining suits made by Henry Poole of Savile Row. These were said to have been brought to the elder Caraceni for repair by friends of an Italian living in London in Edwardian times who had acquired them from him as hand-me-downs.
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Be that as it may, it was Mario’s uncle Domenico who made the family’s name when he opened an atelier in Rome before the First World War. In time his clients came to include not only Italian aristocrats but also the likes of the actor Douglas Fairbanks and the Duke of Windsor.
Domenico encouraged his younger brother Augusto to follow suit in Paris, then the centre of fashion. Based in the Avenue d’Iéna, by the mid-1930s he was dressing celebrities such as the actor Charles Boyer and the dancer Josephine Baker. His son Mario, although born in Naples in 1925, grew up and was educated in Paris until the outbreak of war with Italy when he was 14.
Domenico, by then viewed as the father of Italian tailoring, died in 1940, and on the return of peace Augusto decided to re-establish himself in Milan, the financial capital of Italy. Mario proved to have inherited the family’s cutting skills, and in 1972 took over the running of the business at Via Fatebenefratelli 16.
Although various branches of the family set up their own ateliers, it was Mario who came to be considered, by cognoscenti, his uncle’s heir as Italy’s finest maker of suits. His father had started with clients who remained faithful from his Paris days and Italian grandees, but in Mario’s time this widened to embrace a clutch of fashion designers, among them Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Karl Lagerfeld and Gianfranco Ferré. The television personality Mike Bongiorno was another prominent patron.
Caraceni was known in Italy for having cut the tails that Eugenio Montale wore to receive the 1975 Nobel prize in literature. Others who visited the studio included the Moratti family, industrialists who previously owned Inter Milan football club. There were also all the Agnellis. From Gianni Agnelli, the head of Fiat who was known as l’Avvocato (the lawyer), Caraceni adopted the habit of wearing a pocket square in a shade that complemented rather than matched his tie.
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There was l’Avvocato’s brother Umberto, too, and Umberto’s sons: Andrea (now chairman of Juventus); and the ill-fated Giovanni, whom Mario dressed for his wedding. When Gianni died in 2003, he bequeathed his 200 Caraceni suits to his dandy grandson, Lapo Elkann, nowadays ever en grande tenue.
Caraceni’s style was something of a halfway house, not as fussy perhaps as the Neapolitan and using a heavier construction, though not as stiff as the classical English look, with its roots in military tailoring. Mario Caraceni always held that the test of a good jacket was that one should be able to fence in it, meaning that the sleeve should be able to move independently of the body of what the Row terms a “coat”.
While the finicky Caraceni had demanding standards and could be tough with his staff, he was always willing to help out others and set up free courses for aspiring tailors. Despite his own accomplishments, he was personally modest. “What counts in one’s work,” he remarked, “is not fame but substance.”
When he was once brought a suit made by a rival and asked what he thought of it, he pointed out the good rather than the bad points, thereby gaining its owner’s custom in future. He received numerous awards and was given an Italian knighthood in 2005.
He and his wife, Rachele, known as Lina, were married in 1951 and were inseparable. He would sing her La vie en rose every day. He also liked to give voice to La Marseillaise and to the British national anthem. Lina died in 2017 and he is survived by their two daughters, Maria Pia, a doctor, and Rita Maria, who works for the family firm, as do his son-in-law and their two children. He had made them promise never to move the business from its present site.
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Mario Caraceni retired in 1998, although he still came in regularly to keep an eye on things, perhaps hoping that the Prince of Wales (who favours Anderson & Sheppard in London) might pop in. Caraceni once said that to take a fitting from him he would travel to Greenland if summoned.
Even as his health failed, he remained elegantly dressed to the last, insisting on putting on full fig on days when he got up.
And he always wore a hat.
Mario Caraceni, tailor, was born on November 8, 1925. He died of pancreatic cancer on July 14, 2021, aged 95