Cesare Attolini

This is the house that owns the invention twice over. Vincenzo Attolini took the padding, the canvas and most of the lining out of the English jacket in the 1930s, while working as head cutter for Gennaro Rubinacci — which is to say the Neapolitan jacket was invented inside another man's shop. His son Cesare then devised the Neapolitan system, one tailor to one operation, in the early 1960s. Every other Neapolitan house in this archive is downstream of an Attolini, including the one Cesare's own son left to found.

A note on the founding date, because it is asked about constantly. The house dates itself to 1930, but 1930 is the date of the style, arrived at inside London House. No independent source gives a year for Vincenzo's own premises. We write "the 1930s" and leave it there.

What to look for is the hardest problem in this document: Attolini is the reference everyone copies, so most published "Attolini signatures" are simply descriptions of Naples. The three-roll-two on a natural shoulder is the closest thing to a house look, and the double row of hand backstitch on the lapel edge should be present.

How it wears now: closer and more athletic through the chest than a Kiton, with a compact armhole. The lean interior is where it fails first — check the armhole piping before you check the outside.