“The construction is the same,” says the impeccably dressed Trabalza of his and Centofanti’s suits. It is a subtle nuance, but a wider pattern allows the tailor to make minor alterations that define the suit’s silhouette. Aloy’s method involves cutting the pattern (the paper model for each piece of the suit from which the fabric is cut) wider than most tailors do to allow for more flexibility when tweaking the final garment. “Anyone who graduated from that school had to be an important tailor,” says the 87-year-old Centofanti, who adds that he has never met another tailor in the United States other than Trabalza who studied there.Įven today, Aloy’s unique style of pattern making continues to influence both tailors’ work.
A few years later, Trabalza, who was born in Perugia, received the same training at the Aloy school in Milan. Centofanti studied at the school in Rome in 1935, when he was 17 years old. During its heyday in the 1930s and ’40s, Aloy’s now-defunct namesake tailoring schools were reserved for only the most promising young talents. As youths they learned a similar method of suitmaking while training with master tailor Rocco Aloy of Torino, Italy. Several years after that first meeting, the men, now two of America’s most prominent tailors, discovered that their backgrounds had even more in common. That shared experience helped them forge a friendship that has lasted for 25 years.
During the course of their conversation, Trabalza learned that Centofanti, an Italian-American, had spent his adolescence in that same town of Chieti, where, a few years after Trabalza had passed through, he acquired some of his earliest training from Nicola at Carlo Vico. In 1980, he joined the U.S.-based Custom Tailors and Designers Association (CTDA), the oldest trade organization of suitmakers in America, and met fellow tailor and then chairman of the group, Joe Centofanti, who owns a shop in Ardmore, Pa. Lacking the necessary tools to do so, Trabalza found a local tailor shop, Carlo Vico, and convinced its head tailor, known simply as Nicola, to allow him to work there until he completed the task.Ībout a decade later, Trabalza moved to the United States, eventually settling in Los Angeles, where he opened his own shop. Aware of what Trabalza’s profession was prior to the war, his captain, who wore riding pants, requested that the private make him a new pair. In 1940, a young tailor named Giacomo Trabalza was serving in the Italian army and stationed near the tiny hillside town of Chieti in Abruzzi.
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