Silvae: kiton

Sunday June 21, 2015

Kiton / chiton

The Kiton company was founded in 1956 by Ciro Paone and Antonio Carola under the name CIPA (formed from the first letters of the name of Ciro Paone), so the company is younger than Brioni and a little older than Caruso. However, jackets and suits have only been on the market since 1968, when Caruso went beyond operating two employees. The company name Kiton is derived from the Greek chiton (χίτων), a shirt-like undergarment. Over there you (man) carried the Himation, which the Romans called Pallium. I don’t know what the gods wear on Mount Olympus (certainly not Olymp shirts), but Ciro Paone’s company, which does not belong to a group like Brioni, has long been at Mount Olympus. The only thing to complain about is that their products are expensive. Not only gods can wear Kiton, now Kiton Donna also has a line for goddesses.

Although the Kiton company comes from Naples, they also want to be present in Milan and have just bought a palazzo. Who previously owned Gianfranco Ferré, but the company is now broke, now the Palazzo Ferré has become the Palazzo Kiton. It’s not a really nice building. Wasn’t there an empty ➱Palladio villa somewhere? That would have been more stylish. The purchase price was probably below the originally requested 28 million euros. For the sum, you would probably also have had Olympus, ➱Greece is cheap at the moment.

But you have a lot of space: four thousand square meters. You can exhibit everything. Art like this. If it’s art.
Collecting art is considered chic in the clothing, the owner of the Sör shops has a huge collection of old Dutch. Ciro Paono would have loved to display the entire wardrobe of the Duke of Windsor he admired in his new palazzo, but unfortunately his competitor Joe Barrato of Brioni snatched most of it away at the Sotheby’s auction in Windsor.

But he got this orningMorning Coat from Scholte. The pants are from Forster & Son. The Duke of Windsor didn’t like Scholte’s pants: I never had a pair of trousers made by Scholte. I disliked his cut of them; they were made, as English trousers usually are, to be worn with braces high above the waist. So, preferring as I did to wear a belt rather than braces with trousers, in the American style, I invariably had them made by another tailor. Paone also got a kilt and an evening dress from Valais. He shouldn’t be sad that he didn’t get everything. Now Brioni is having trouble with the moths.

With these second lines, that’s one thing. Zegna has this brand Gritti, Van Laack used to be Regent’s second line (i.e. back when they were still being manufactured in Poland). Isaia, who in my opinion are always overrated, have a second line that is hardly known (and difficult to obtain). Her name is Michelangelo, is actually the same as Isaia, only cheaper. Paone once said that a bad and a good suit have something in common: they are never cheap. Kiro Paone is now eighty-two, he has had a wheelchair since the stroke years ago, but he is still in his factory every day. He is still elegant, it would not occur to him to wear jogging pants.

He eats lunch in the factory canteen, he always did. His employees are his family. He started with twenty tailors in 1956, and today there are probably four hundred and fifty. It has become a huge factory that produces tens of thousands of suits a year. Now you have shops all over the world, you have one flagship store in New York (and in the Bal Harbor Shops in Florida between Hermès and Louis Vuitton). Also in Moscow, where this new money elite (where you don’t really know how they got their money) is keen on Kiton suits. When dancing around the golden calf, you cannot choose your dance partner.

The breath of the great wide world of the rich and beautiful leaves a certain skin goût. Like the gruesome ➱After Shave that Kiton launched. You can buy it from Rossmann. Otherwise there is nothing from Kiton at Rossmann. I don’t know whether Kiton had to make jeans now either. But they have fun red enamel buttons, and Antonio De Matteis, Ciro Paone’s nephew, is convinced that the man needs something like this: We didn’t make jeans because we thought they were the next wave. We offer them as a service to our clients. The Kiton consumer is a connoisseur, a gentleman, someone who wears a suit during the week but loves to throw on a beautiful cashmere sports coat with a pair of jeans on the weekend. These things cost $ 870 in the US, but are cheaper here.

Someone from the textile industry whispered to me that the jeans were always made by Jacob Cohen, that reassures me a lot. Because with the jeans I get along just fine. The fabric of the Kiton Jeans comes (like Jacob Cohen) from Japan. Probably woven on the over 100 year old looms that the Japanese bought from the Americans: Kiton’s denim is made in Japan, which it calls the world’s best. It’s produced from organic cotton on antique, laboratory-intensive looms. I don’t believe in all this luxury jeans hype. When it was really warm recently, I wore my Brioni jeans, which are made of very thin denim. It cost me 8.27 € on ebay, for the price the part is OK. I can not help that the seller the as Briori instead of Brioni Jeans had set.

Ermenegildo Zegna also offers shoes under his name. Tony DiNozzo in the series Navy CSI raves about it, he is probably the only one. It doesn’t have to be that a company tailors the suits and also sells shoes. But as the Kiton company insures: It was then a short step which led Kiton to enhance its offer and provide its clients a complete range of products. Indeed, this aim inspired the creation of the shoe, knitwear, eyewear and womenswear lines. When Bernhard Roetzel asked Ciro Paone in 2003: Will there be a Kiton shoe one day? answered the: Guess how old the shoes are that I’m wearing? They are 25 years old. That is how I would want the Kiton shoe to be. It would be necessary to buy a shoe factory. Presently I don’t plan to do that. They now exist. The shoes are said to be made by Berluti in Paris, that’s what they look like.

At the company, I always remember Christine Deviers-Joncour, the mistress of the French minister Roland Dumas. Berluti had bought him shoes with the Elf Aquitaine group’s credit card. That was of course not a bribe. Dumas later claimed not to know Mlle Deviers-Joncour at all (this is similar to John Profumo and ➱Christine Keeler), but they both went behind bars. I think let’s stay away from Berluti and Kiton shoes. The shoes from Northampton are enough for us.

I had the first parts of Kiton in my hand when ➱Kelly thought about whether he could make Kiton tasty for his customers. Germany was one of the first markets that Kiton reached out to decades ago. ZapHeinrich Zapke in Hanover and ➱Fritz Unützer in Munich (Kiton is fantastic) were among the first to offer Kiton. In 1990, half of the stores selling kiton worldwide were located in ➱Germany. You now have your own shops in Düsseldorf and Munich. But you are not in the Designer Outlet Neumünster yet, that is reserved for Zegna. Nothing happened with Kiton in Kiel, Kelly’s shop was well stocked with Zegna (which at the time was of a much higher quality than today), Chester Barrie, ➱Daks and Caruso.

The first piece I owned from Kiton was a tie. Quietschegelb, sevenfold. Had me 3.95 in the second hand shop, which unfortunately no longer exists today. D-Mark. The tie was unfortunately the victim of an exploding tip-ex bottle, but I got it back so that you can hardly see any of it. Something like that cannot happen on the computer, of course, because hardly anyone touches Tipp-Ex on the screen. But this is from the days when publishers asked for a typed manuscript and not a USB stick. Back then, the publishers also had editors who read everything. Today they print everything on the USB stick without asking.

Five years ago, Kiton bought a majority stake in the Carlo Barbera weaving mill for over three million euros. Luciano Barbera, who was always elegant, was allowed to stay with the company. His own Luciano Barbera collection (which has existed since 1971) remained unaffected by the deal. Luciano Barbera’s father, who founded the weaving mill in Callabiana in 1949, had just turned ninety-nine at the time. Barbera fabrics are among the best that are woven in Italy, but are also among the most expensive. Which just led to the company’s financial imbalance.

Luciano Barbera has described the establishment of the company in a nutshell on his website: In 1950, Carlo Barbera, my father, took over a fabric mill near the town of Biella. The hilly town, part of the Piedmonte region, is cold and damp but that’s unfortunately why it was – and is – the home of the finest fabric mills in Italy. All the same, upon his arrival, my Dad threw out half of the looms he found on site. Rip, thump, crash! The trash-haulers of Biella groaned under the burden of his rejects. What he mad? Remember, he was already inheriting the best machinery in Italy. No, he just wanted better. His targets were royalty: English Lords, Dukes, titans of industry, this at a time when war-ravaged Italy had a GDP roughly the size of Madagascar’s.

It may be convenient to have a home supplier for the fabrics, but Kiton emphasizes that they also use fabrics from other weavers in Italy and England. The ancestors of Paone, who comes from a family of fabric dealers, once sourced their fabrics from England and Scotland. Today they have become ever thinner and thinner, and the few British people in Yorkshire can hardly keep up with the Italians, whose specialties are fabrics over Super 120. Gregor von Rezzori is said to have once said in an interview that the Italian suit is as light as a fazzoletto, a linen handkerchief. And as a Kiton’s clerk said: If you wear a suit that may look nice but does not adapt to you, it is as if we women are lying in bed with a beautiful man and nothing moves: then it is not a kiton.

And such lightness is the ideal of Ciro Paone, then he calls once Questo è poesia, certo! out. Such a poem made of extremely delicate wool with a fiber diameter of 11.9 microns then costs a five-digit sum. If a suit costs as much as a used Rolls Royce or a teinSteinway grand piano, then one wonders: does that have to be? Recently there have been suits in which the number of hours worked by the tailor is noted. K50 then means that it took fifty hours for this suit to finish, including ironing. These number gimmicks are a bit silly now; Schneider used to calculate forty hours for a suit anyway. Of course there are also some sewing machines at Kiton, but the old machines from Dürrkopp look as if they came from the industrial museum.

Ironing with the old, heavy steam irons is the alpha and omega of the Sartoria anyway. Buttonholes are sewn by women, they can do it better. Says Cito Paone. One hundred stitches in five minutes per buttonhole. They don’t earn as much as the tailors either. Tom Wolfe once mentioned (read more here) the Cypriot seamstresses who made buttonholes and can’t speak any English on Savile Row. Everything that is special is labor-intensive, you go to the lower wage groups. When I put my beautiful new lieutenant’s hat with the silver on the cap for the first time, my old sergeant whispered to me: Everything made in child labor in Pakistan. The hat was never the same. But Kiton doesn’t go to Pakistan, of course, the Made in Italy is sacred to them. They pay all workers and tailors far above tariff and also train tailors, these workers are their capital.

As with Caruso, there is little advertising. There is none models, made famous by the company. There are no scandals either. Not like the shirt maker Borelli, who had the financial police in the house for tax evasion and sneaking subsidies (and has been part of the Giampaolo company since then). Or Francesco Smalto, who not only supplied African dictators with clothes, but also with hookers. There is no such thing at Kiton. Even with a K80 suit, no call girl is included in the price. Somehow the company is pleasantly boring. And little can be said about them, their products are just good. Not only good, of course, that’s Kiton’s motto ll meglio del meglio più uno. The best of the best, plus one.

My first yellow kiton cashmere ➱Sakko cost me 39.95 in a thrift store. D-Mark. It was brand new. When I hung it up on the balcony and brought it back in in the evening, there was a seagull shit on it. Can happen near the Baltic Sea. But you can’t do that anymore see. Not from the tip Ex on the tie either. Perhaps this is the ultimate proof of quality: Tip Ex and Seagull Shit.

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Sunday June 21, 2015

Kiton / chiton

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