Caruso: The Best Kept Secret In Menswear
Playful Elegance
On one hand you’ve got the classic, formal navy suit. On the other hand, you’ve got the creations of fashion houses, forced to say something new every season, often are a bit hasty. And then there’s Caruso.
Caruso views elegance not as a show, but as a way of living, through joy and lightheartedness. It’s made for men who want to express their personality, refined choices and their point of view, but with a nonchalance and ease. A result is a soft and wrapping jacket, that interprets the Italian’s know how, in the most contemporary way.
Breaking Clichés
In 1958, tailor Raffaele Caruso moved from Naples to Soragna and brought the great Neapolitan school of tailoring with him. With the help of his wife, he built his own atelier, in which he created made to measure suits for the local entrepreneurs and the people of the region.
Thanks to his huge talent, his sons and his managers’ business abilities, Caruso’s atelier expanded to Fabbrica Sartoriale Italiana, a 500 employees company. During the 1990’s, the factory got noticed by Dior, Lanvin and Francesco Smalto among other fashion houses who found unique quality standards and unmatched flexibility.
The company then became the point of reference for luxury brands' creative directors and designers, expanding via high-level word of mouth, until it became a co-creation and production hub for the world’s best fashion brands.
In 2010, after Raffaele Caruso’s demise, the seat was taken by the former Brioni CEO, Mr. Umberto Angeloni, who decided to invest in the company for its exceptional production care and price ratio. Today, the CEO Marco Angeloni and the new management develops the brand further with the total look, and to continue in gracefully breaking clichés.
A Sartorial Factory
Sartorial quality and industrial technology shouldn't be in contrast with each other. If machinery is guided by the knowledgeable hands of someone who draws and makes the most beautiful garments in the world, the results are amazing, while keeping the customer’s best interests. On the another hand, a 100% handmade item of clothing can’t compete when it comes to time and costs. That’s why Caruso puts technology at the service of production scale, while skilled craftsmen curate and hand-craft all the details that improve comfort, customisation and durability.
In the creative atelier, Caruso designers and the fashion houses' stylists imagine, test, discuss with model makers, counting on a kind of experience that relies on 60.000 jacket models made throughout the years. This is why Fabbrica Sartoriale Italiana is chosen by the most successful luxury brands, combining a single integrated production hub with the aspects of artisanal creative atelier – a modern sartorial factory.
Where Style Meets Lifestyle
Soragna and its human capital are important ingredients in Caruso’s success, an area that still manages to express high levels of creativity in food, opera music, and the search for beauty. Innovation is a known fact in this area: throughout the medieval hamlets, there are specific excellences, even in very small distances. Tireless workers, yet able to pair their strong duty ethics to an unparalleled savoir vivre, and a talent to find the fun in small things.
A love for the beauty, the innovation and the things well done, make Soragna and its people perfect combination for a brand such as Caruso.
Handmade In Soragna
The fully canvased jacket is Caruso’s key product. The most adaptable and dignifying item of clothing in the male wardrobe, which makes a wearer confident and comfortable in every situation, that gives unparalleled softness, comfort, breathability and freedom. It’s the Raffaele Caruso's Neapolitan tradition combined with Soragna's lifestyle that puts itself at the service of the modern man.
The structure of fully-canvased jacket is made of horsehair, masterly basted, that maintains the body form like a memory, like no synthetic material can do. The result becomes a tridimensional jacket that accompanies with absolute freedom arm and shoulder movements. The more you wear it, the less you feel it. It preserves its structure even after years of using, and it requires little maintenance.
Around the jacket, Caruso built it's own clothing ecosystem, turning the Playful Elegance into a total look: Trousers, formal and light coats, leather clothing, unlined and unstructured jackets, knitwear and the shirts, in a palette of plenty playful color shades.
The Production Details
Caruso refuses the tendency to show off. Instead, a lot of soul, care and comfort is added to everyone wearing a Caruso jacket.
THE EYELET is always presented in a milanese style: a particular form, hand trimmed with 3,2 feet of silk, that gives it a noticeable volume.
BEHIND THE LAPEL you’ll find a handmade bartack stitch: it helps to sustain the stalk of the flower you’ll adorn yourself with.
THE COLLAR includes extra fabric: it’s then hand sewn, in order to make sure it doesn’t get teared up. And the internal piping has got silk profiles, used to make the hidden parts more beautiful.
THE SHOULDERS feel welcomed and glorified, finding their natural space, all soft and comfortable.
THE ARMS want to move, to rise, to roll up the sleeves.
THE TORSO can stretch freely, to get cozy on couches, armchairs and longues.
THE FABRIC breathes, open to welcome breezes and gusts of wind, for a sensual pleasure. Caruso jacket simply allows you to rediscover your own body language.
The Path Of Sustainability
Sustainability is a path and the road is still long. Since 2019, the energy that powers Fabbrica Sartoriale Italiana is produced only by renewable sources and the jackets are plastic free and biodegradable. All of their raw materials are traced and certified so the value created by Caruso and Fabbrica Sartoriale Italiana falls back on Soragna’s community and and it's people.
Through the competence of their people, the research on the materials, the care for hidden details and the fabrics made by the best textile companies, Caruso turns raw materials into exquisite and original products. Only three animals (wild Mongolian horses’ hair, Gobian camels’ neck hair, Merinos sheep’s wool) and a plant (hemp) is used. No synthetic components, no glue, nothing artificial.
Constantly working with fabric producers and their customers, playing with thickness, toughness and microstructures, in order to bring little evolutions of their philosophy in each new season, Caruso jacket is intended to last a lifetime. Not only for its quality, but also because it nimbly moves through trends, avoiding excesses and classics. Always as distant as possible from a world that forces fast fashion as a lifestyle.