From Ginosa to the Whole World

Ginosa, Puglia. Since 1955.

There is a version of this story that starts with a slogan. I would rather start with a widow.

In 1955, in a small town in Puglia called Ginosa, a young woman lost her husband and had a family to feed. She could sew. So she started making shirts to measure, at home, one at a time, for people who lived close enough to walk over and be measured. That was the entire business plan. Seventy years later it is more or less still the business plan. The only thing that changed is how far people travel.

The woman was Angelo Inglese's grandmother. By 1970 the kitchen table had become a proper workshop with a few Puglian artisans around it. In the nineties her grandson took over, and here is where the story could have gone the boring way. The obvious move for an ambitious Italian shirtmaker in 1995 was Milan. Angelo stayed in Ginosa and made the world come to him instead. His own line about it is better than anything I could write: they never left Ginosa, they let the world come to them.

It worked. The shirts now go to Europe, the United States, Japan and China, and every single one of them is still cut and finished in the same atelier on Via Isola Caprera. Not partly. Not the important bits. All of it, by hand, in one building in Ginosa.

What that looks like in practice is almost comically detailed. Swiss cotton. Buttons of Australian mother of pearl. Hand embroidery. Pocket squares whose hem stitches have proper names, ventaglio, cavallino, smerlo, galletto, regina, because at some point somebody decided that twelve different ways of finishing an edge by hand was a reasonable number to keep alive. It is not efficient. That is the point. Nobody has ever invented a machine that can do this faster, mostly because nobody with a factory would want to.

The polos are named after Agnelli, JFK, Mastroianni and Elvis, which tells you fairly precisely who the house thinks you should be looking at when you get dressed. I find this funny and slightly heroic. It is a level of confidence you only get from seventy years of not caring what the season is doing.

Then there is the perfume. Acqua di Ginosa was composed by Angelo himself, in small batches, in the maison. Mediterranean herbs, sea air, citrus. A shirtmaker doing fragrance sounds like a stretch until you notice it is the same instinct as everything else: make it yourself, in your own town, in quantities you can actually oversee. In 2023 they also opened an atelier in the metaverse, which is either the least or the most Ginosa thing they have ever done, and I genuinely cannot decide.

This year they are moving into Palazzo d'Alconzo, a historic residence in Ginosa, reborn as atelier and salon. Seventy years of work finally getting a room that matches it.

G. Inglese is one of the first houses we brought onto Flavio's, and that was not an accident. We got the family on the phone early on, and it was one of the nicest calls we have had since we started. Warm, unhurried, generous with time. You can tell quite fast whether a house is proud of its numbers or proud of its hands, and this one is proud of its hands.

Which is more or less the whole reason Flavio's exists. We are not trying to build the biggest shop in Europe. We are trying to keep a small number of workshops busy, the ones where the work is still slow, still done by people, still done in the place it has always been done. Craft like this does not disappear in a dramatic way. It disappears quietly, when the last person who knows the stitch retires and nobody was buying enough to justify teaching it to anyone else. Almost everything we look for is sitting in one place here. A family that never sold. A town that never got left. A workshop where the cutting table has outlived three generations of hands.

You can buy a shirt from a lot of people. There are very few places where buying one keeps a seventy year old gesture in motion for another day.

G. Inglese is our Brand of the Month for September.

Shop the G. Inglese collection