FIORAVANTI COUTURE MEN'S VINTAGE PURE-WOOL (3) BUTTON LUXURY BLAZER (USA)

(3) BUTTON CLOSURE (3) BUTTON CUFFS (3) INTERIOR POCKETS FULLY LINED TAILORING: Shoulder to Shoulder 22" Armpit to Armpit 23" Sleeve Length 25" Jacket Length 31.5" No Flaws! William Fioravanti (Bill to those who knew him best) was born in 1926 and raised in Brooklyn. His father, a Neapolitan tailor, gifted his son a thimble at the age of nine and, throughout his life, William would use his father’s shears. In 1946, after serving in the Navy, William apprenticed with Ernest A. De Rose – an Italian-born custom tailor to the likes of the Rockefeller family, who had premises on East 52nd Street. In 1951, shortly after De Rose’s passing, Fioravanti set up his own business on the fourth floor of 45 West 57th Street. Customers would take an elevator from street level and push open a heavy wooden door to reveal an “Italianate” space which, according to Alan Flusser’s 1981 book Making the Man, looked like it had been “transplanted from the Via Veneto”, furnished with “antique table and chairs, leather and tooled-gold walls, and Tiffany-style lamps”. Steve Wynn, the developer of numerous Las Vegas hotels including the Golden Nugget and Bellagio, and presumably not a man accustomed to having to check his overdraft limit, once quipped: “You may go to Mr. Fioravanti rich and famous. But you only leave famous.” With custom prices starting more than $3,000 in the nineties and $6,000 in the noughties ($18,000 plus if your tastes and wallet extended to Super 200 or cashmere clot