The studio on Via Morimondo sits behind a door you could walk past twice
The studio on Via Morimondo sits behind a door you could walk past twice. Inside, Giuliana Marchetti adjusts the collar of a tuxedo jacket for the third time in twenty minutes. The silk grosgrain band rests a hair's width too high. She unpicks six centimetres of hand-stitching without comment.
Marchetti, sixty-two, has worked for Tom Ford since the label's Milan atelier opened in 2006. She does not cut patterns. She does not sketch. She builds the tailored pieces that appear on runways and, eventually, in flagship windows — the sharply cut dinner jackets, the lean trousers with their signature low rise, the shirts that manage to suggest a body without clinging to it. Her title, première d'atelier, translates poorly. In practice, she translates Ford's sketches into three dimensions, then refines them until they stop looking like approximations.
The jacket in question is a women's tuxedo, single-breasted, with a shawl collar faced in midnight satin. It debuted in Ford's autumn 2018 collection and has been produced, with minor variations, every season since. On paper, it is not complicated: wool gabardine body, silk lining, grosgrain at the lapel edge. In Marchetti's hands, it requires forty-three hours of work.
She learned the trade at a technical school in Bergamo, then spent two decades at Gianfranco Ferré, where she advanced from sample hand to head of the tailoring atelier. When Ford approached her in 2005, she hesitated. The designer had left Gucci the year before and was launching his own label with backing from Domenico De Sole. There was no atelier yet, no established workflow, no certainty the venture would last. Marchetti took the job because, as she told Women's Wear Daily in 2012, Ford knew what he wanted and could articulate it without vagueness. "He doesn't say 'elegant,'" she said then. "He says 'move the dart two millimetres toward the side seam.'"
The tuxedo jacket begins as a flat pattern, adjusted to the model's measurements. Marchetti cuts the shell fabric herself, by hand, using shears she has owned for thirty years. She does not trust a junior cutter with gabardine this fine — the weave is tight enough that a misplaced notch will show in the finished garment. Once cut, the pieces move to a machinist, who joins the major seams. Then the jacket returns to Marchetti.
What follows is a sequence of steps that resists photography. She shapes the chest canvas by steaming it over a tailor's ham, then secures it to the shell with a pad stitch — a running stitch that catches only a thread or two of the outer fabric, invisible from the right side. The lapels receive a strip of linen stay tape, hand-sewn along the roll line to prevent stretching. The collar, cut on the bias, is eased onto the neckline with a gathering stitch so subtle you would need a loupe to detect it. The sleeves are set by hand, their heads eased into the armscye with a distribution of fullness that gives the shoulder its shape. If the sleeve pulls even slightly across the bicep, Marchetti removes it and starts again.
She works alone, in a room with north-facing windows and a cutting table that predates the atelier. There is no music. The other hands — three machinists, two finishers, an apprentice — work in the adjoining room. Marchetti prefers silence. She can hear, in silence, whether the fabric is behaving as it should under the needle.
The grosgrain at the lapel edge is stitched by machine, but the placement is determined by eye. Marchetti pins it first, adjusting the width of the facing until the proportion feels correct, then bastes it in place and checks the jacket on a dress form. If the grosgrain sits too far from the edge, the lapel looks heavy. Too close, and it reads as an afterthought. The target is three millimetres from the folded edge. She measures nothing. After sixteen years of building this jacket, she no longer needs to.
Ford himself appears in the atelier two or three times during a collection cycle. He does not linger. He examines the toile, marks adjustments in tailor's chalk, and leaves. Marchetti translates those marks into structural changes — a deeper armscye, a narrower waist, a sleeve that tapers more sharply from elbow to wrist. Occasionally he asks for something that cannot be done within the laws of tailoring. A lapel that lies flat without a roll line, for instance, or a sleeve that fits closely without restricting movement. Marchetti explains why it will not work. Ford listens, then either withdraws the request or insists. When he insists, she finds a way.
The tuxedo jacket's shawl collar is a case in point. Ford wanted it to sit close to the neck without gapping, even when the wearer moved. A shawl collar, by design, is a continuous curve with no seam at the back of the neck. It relies on the bias grain for flexibility, but bias fabric stretches under its own weight. Marchetti's solution involved a strip of silk organza, hand-stitched inside the collar and invisible from either side, that stabilises the curve without adding bulk. The technique is not documented in tailoring manuals. She arrived at it through trial, and it remains specific to this jacket.
The atelier produces roughly two hundred pieces per collection. Marchetti herself completes twelve to fifteen jackets, each one a variation on a theme Ford has been refining since his Gucci years. The tuxedo, the lean trouser, the white evening shirt with French cuffs — these are not innovations. They are refinements of codes established elsewhere, executed with a degree of precision that makes the original look approximate.
Marchetti does not sketch. She does not give interviews unless the house requests it. She has no public profile beyond a handful of mentions in trade publications. When the tuxedo jacket appears on a runway, her name does not appear in the show notes. This does not trouble her. She told Il Sole 24 Ore in 2019 that she prefers it this way — the work speaks, or it does not, and her presence in the narrative is irrelevant.
Ford turns sixty-three this year. The label he built has expanded into beauty, eyewear, and fragrance, but the tailoring remains central. Whether Marchetti will remain beyond Ford's tenure is unclear. She has trained the apprentice, a woman in her early thirties from Puglia, but the transfer of knowledge is slow. A pad stitch, done correctly, requires feel as much as technique. You cannot teach feel in a manual.
For now, the jacket continues. Marchetti finishes the buttonholes by hand, sixteen stitches per millimetre, the thread waxed to prevent fraying. She presses the completed garment on a buck, using a cloth between the iron and the fabric to avoid shine. Then she hangs it on a padded hanger and moves to the next piece. The atelier does not pause for reflection. There is another collection in eight weeks, and the toiles are already late.
