The altered state of tailoring

An old-school tailor faces down corporate casual

Mario Bosco looks like your shop teacher in junior high school — except he dresses much better. He dresses better than just about any man you’ll meet. The dapper devil is in the details. A simple silk-blend button-down rests lightly on his slim shoulders. His shirt cuffs reach to a discreet point about an inch above the joint of his thumb. They are fastened with emeralds, still in the indeterminate shapes they were in when pulled from a river bottom in Brazil, but polished smooth and held in small 14-karat gold settings. His trouser hems touch the bridge of his feet, encased in simple black leather loafers and they “break” — fold a bit — a hand’s-breadth above his ankles, so that when he sits down you do not see his socks above his ankles.
There was a time when a man’s pants-leg break said something about him. Now it’s hard to remember just what it said. Was it a statement of self-respect? Respect for others? Attention to detail? A brittle facade to hide an arrogant neurosis? Or is it a quaint remnant of an earlier time, a different world?
Mario Bosco, a tailor, knows better.
The world, he will say, his brown eyes peering mournfully through thick glasses, hasn’t changed. People are still conscious of class and as concerned with income as ever. It’s the status symbols that have changed. A tailored suit is not on the wish list of conspicuous consumers because it is not a conspicuous luxury. It’s a subtle clue to one’s lifestyle. That kind of subtlety doesn’t do a thing for conspicuous consumers. They like labels like Hugo Boss, the interlocked Gs of Gucci and much farther down the rack, the blaring patriotic oom-pah-pah of Tommy Hilfiger.
The tech economy is synonymous with another kind of status symbol — sartorial sloppiness. Look at Bill Gates, who brings frumpy to a whole new level.
And even as the New Economy beings to sputter, the fashion revolution — or devolution — still claims casualties.
“It was this corporate casual that did it,” says Bosco, the accent of his native Sicily making it sound as though he’s going to swear out a vendetta on Corporata Casualle. “It was the end for tailors.”
Bosco believes himself to be the last real tailor in Atlanta. He’s not. There are still some determined artisans clinging to the corpse of the trade, but Bosco’s feeling of impending extinction says something about yet another part of our culture being left behind in an increasingly impatient world.
Ouside his shop at 2959 Piedmont Road, traffic is a blur of cars and SUVs. Inside is a cramped reception area. On the wall hangs a poster of a woman getting dressed next to a tailor’s dummy — she and the dummy have identical contours.
Photographs of famous clients also adorn the gray walls. There’s an autographed glossy of Elton John (“He sent in a piece for a little alteration, nothing big, just something simple. He has short arms.”), and another of former Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson (“I did one suit for him. He’s a good dresser. I had to let the torso out. And take in the shoulders.”). The smell of starch rises from an ironing board, where Bosco’s Korean-born assistant pushes a heavy iron. Bosco’s business is mostly alterations. This time of year he’s busy taking in and letting out tuxedos and evening gowns to be worn at holiday galas. He rarely makes suits from scratch anymore. Not enough people request them. He’ll send the measurements for his clients’ suits to New York City, where shops are set up like assembly lines. When the suit comes back, Bosco makes alterations and adjustments of style.
If you want a suit from Bosco, you can expect to pay between $4,000 and $6,000. People pay that kind of money only for weddings and funerals. Plus, it’s time consuming; it takes Bosco about 40 hours to make a suit. Figure in the time he must devote to working on other things, alterations and the like, and a customer may have to wait a few weeks for a suit. Most people don’t want to take the time.
It used to be different.
Bosco left his native Italy in 1957 at the age of 18 to move to Brazil. He lived in Brazil for more than 11 years. He made friends in high places. He was doing well. But there was a girl problem, a heartbreak and then restlessness for what would come next. Brazil had not been the answer to all his worries.
“I was looking for a change in my life,” he says. “I came to the U.S. illegally.”
He went to work in New York City for a tailor on the Lower East Side. He earned $119 per week. After two weeks, another tailor promised he would “make (him) legal” if he came to work for him for $68 a week. He took the pay cut. He worked from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m. and after months, his new boss admitted he couldn’t get Bosco his papers. So he left, going to work for a tailor from the Middle East who paid him $106 a week. That lasted two weeks.
“The third week, he didn’t pay me at all,” he says, adjusting the espresso maker in his shop as it whirs and hisses over a small darkening cup. His assistant takes a phone call, his accent fumbling a bit as he repeats a word here and there. Bosco hesitates for a moment, listening in, then continues.
He left this third job and went to work for a tailor who paid him the seemingly princely sum of $225 a week — if Bosco would also deal with the shop’s customers.
“He wanted to be left alone to drink,” Bosco says. “He was drinking Manhattans at 10 in the morning.”
Six months later, he had $2,000 saved up to open a shop, a partnership this time, with another tailor at 48th and Madison Avenue. But things were far from perfect. He had married a Brazilian woman during his tenure in the sweatshops and she died after a long illness. (“There was something wrong with her stomach,” he says, looks away and shrugs. “I don’t want to talk about it no more.”) He was left to build a business and raise his daughter, who was just 7 years old.
One day, he met an actor who told him about the up-and-coming city of Atlanta — how Ted Turner was putting the place on the map and there were no real tailors there yet.
“Then, one day, I was tired of New York. The temperature was too cold,” he says. “It was depressing being there. And I remembered what he said.”
In 1975, he and his daughter moved to Atlanta. He leased a shop at 68 Peachtree St. with only $75 to his name.
“It turned out that there were at least nine other tailors like me,” he says. “And when I talked to them, they all told me, ‘You can’t make it here.’ ”
But he did. He sewed right through the 1970s, with the shiny shirts and wide lapels right up into the 1980s, with the boxy shoulders and the double-breasted suits. Business was good.
Then, in the mid-90s, something changed. Bosco is OK with cosmic oddities. There once was a time when, for no apparent reason, he simply forgot how to speak Italian. He had to buy books and relearn it. Then he lost his sense of direction. It’s terrible. He doesn’t drive much to unfamiliar places. But this, this strange thing with the business, this was a mystery. Bit by bit, he found he wasn’t signing up new young clients. While he had been busy measuring and stitching, keeping up with each season’s new lines and cuts like generations of tailors before him, a generation had grown up in front of keyboards and computer screens, adept at a technology that eluded their elders. They were not caught up in keeping up with the Joneses. They wanted security and comfort and freedom.
Their potential employers knew it and told them they could wear what they liked at work.
Sure, there may come a time when sloppiness falls out of fashion altogether, considering the wrinkles and stains it’s collecting: crashing markets, flash-in-the-pan companies, things reminiscent of the junk bonds and cocaine chaos of the ’80s.
But people like Allan Schoenberg aren’t so sure. “I think it’s here to stay,” says Schoen-berg, spokesman for Internet Security Systems, a company founded by a 28-year-old, casually-dressed wunderkind named Chris Klauss with an estimated personal worth of about a half billion. Klauss, like his spokesman, doesn’t get his suits tailor-made. Instead, he buys them off the rack and takes them to a tailor to be altered, if they need it. He wears suits only for social occasions and unusually important business functions. Mostly, he wears khakis and button-downs.
“Being able to dress casually at work is just expected,” Schoenberg says. “It’s like stock options. I think it would be a hard sell to work for a tech company that required you to wear a suit.”
For Mario Bosco, however, there’s a kind of magic to wearing a suit. When they really want to dominate, he says, young businessmen need to fasten their cuff links, pull on a jacket that hangs like a second skin, wear trousers that match the jacket perfectly and that break, just so, with a razor-sharp crease.
“When I dress like this, just everyday, people call me Mario.” He opens the door onto the parking lot in front of his shop and speaks with a gleam in his eye, watching the world hurtling by in graceless aggression beyond the curb. “But when I wear a suit, people call me ‘Mister.’ ” u