Forty years at the machine

Salvatore Ruggiero has made suits in the same Naples workshop since 1986. He does not intend to stop.

The workshop is two rooms above a bakery. Ruggiero sits at the window because the light is best there and because, he says, the machine has always been there. He learned on it. His apprentice learns on it now.

A suit takes him sixty hours. Most of that is hand work: the canvas, the shoulder, the buttonholes. The machine is for the long seams only. He is suspicious of anything that speeds up the rest.

You can make it faster. You cannot make it better faster.

Salvatore Ruggiero

He makes about forty suits a year, for people who mostly do not live in Naples. There is a waiting list. He does not keep it in writing.