Paris ★

The Parisian shoulder

The thing everyone photographs is the shoulder. The Parisian houses build it, sculpting a rounded, slightly raised line with a pronounced roll where the sleeve meets the body, and then cut the chest extremely clean beneath it, so that the drama sits entirely at the top of the garment.

Cifonelli is most associated with this, to the point that the treatment is sometimes called a Cifonelli shoulder. Camps de Luca, the other great Parisian house, is known for a different signature: a fishmouth notch on the lapel and an approach to hand finishing that is exacting even by bespoke standards.

A small trade

There are not many Parisian bespoke houses, and several of the important ones were founded by immigrants: Cifonelli came from Rome, Joseph Camps from Spain. The French trade contracted severely in the second half of the twentieth century and what survived did so by being distinctive rather than by being large.

The consequence for a customer is a long waiting list and a price at or above the London level. It is also, in practice, the reason the Parisian houses travel so much: a significant share of their work is commissioned at trunk shows in New York, Tokyo and elsewhere.

Shirts and leather

Charvet, at 28 Place Vendôme, has made shirts to measure since 1838 and holds a range of shirting cloth that has no real rival. It was the first shop of its kind (before Charvet, a shirt was made at home or by a dressmaker) and it remains the standard against which bespoke shirtmaking is measured.

Hermès and Berluti anchor the leather end. Berluti's bespoke shoemaking and its patina work, colouring finished leather by hand in layers, are a distinctly French contribution to shoemaking, and a divisive one: admirers call it painting, sceptics call it decoration over construction.