Domenico Spano, a New York customized clothier who outfitted captains of trade and Hollywood stars, and whose personal dandyish type made him a extremely recognizable peacock on the streets of the town in addition to in newspaper style pages, died on Oct. 23 in Manhattan. He was 79.
His daughter Elisabeth Spano stated he died in a hospital of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.
Mr. Spano, who glided by the nickname Mimmo, was born within the Calabria area of southern Italy. However though he grew up in a rustic identified for its illustrious style historical past, he made his title in New York as a champion of traditional American type, as epitomized by the timeless class of silver-screen legends like Fred Astaire, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Cary Grant and Gary Cooper.
Together with his personal head-turning outfits, rendered in colourful patterns and daring prints and full with felt fedoras, paisley scarfs, suspenders, bow ties and an ever-present carnation in his lapel, he would turn into a fixture in street-style columns like The New York Occasions’s “On the Road,” written and shot by his good friend, the photographer and fashion-world establishment Bill Cunningham.
In a 2014 column, Mr. Cunningham celebrated what he noticed as “indicators of a brand new peacock revolution,” citing Mr. Spano as “a star of the motion.”
“He likes my type as a result of it’s typical American,” Mr. Spano stated of Mr. Cunningham in a 2012 interview with GQ journal. “Everybody’s all the time attempting to look elsewhere for inspiration, however we’ve got such wonderful heritage right here. Hollywood within the ’30s, we had been dictating the type everywhere in the world.”
He tailored his personal sartorial thrives to go well with the wants of billionaires, chief executives and main males like Al Pacino and Anthony Hopkins — first as a salesman and supervisor for customized clothes at Dunhill and Alan Flusser, later as a designer of customized fits and different objects for Bergdorf Goodman and Saks Fifth Avenue, and at last at his personal atelier on West 57th Road.
With fits that in recent times began at round $6,000, the Spano look was not low-cost. However for some shoppers, cash was no object.
Mr. Spano instructed the menswear web site Film Noir Buff {that a} billionaire shopper as soon as flew him to the Caribbean in his personal 737 jet to lounge round his new villa and pattern from his wine cellar so Mr. Spano may get a way of the life-style that his creations — in the end $283,000 price of linen fits, dinner jackets and the like — would inhabit.
Quoted within the 2013 guide “I Am Dandy: The Return of the Elegant Gentleman,” by Nathaniel Adams and Rose Callahan, Mr. Spano recounted a time when a Japanese buyer needed an actual copy of a beloved outdated inexperienced herringbone cashmere jacket. Mr. Spano knowledgeable him that the material wanted was not out there. “I’ve to make a minimal of 70 meters on the mill,” he knowledgeable the shopper. “The jacket solely requires two meters.”
Undeterred, the shopper ponied up the required tens of 1000’s of {dollars}, utilizing the leftover 68 sq. meters to upholster his personal airplane.
Domenico Spano was born on Aug. 17, 1944, within the city of Scigliano, the center of three youngsters of Salvatore Spano and Elisabetta Oliva.
As a result of he got here from a protracted line of navy males, there was little in his background to recommend the profession he would go on to have. He even adopted within the steps of his forebears in 1970 by graduating from officer college in Florence for the Carabinieri, the Italian navy police drive.
Love, nonetheless, despatched him in a really totally different route when he turned infatuated along with his future spouse, Rina Gangemi, an American who was finding out in Florence. “Three days after we met, I instructed her I used to be going to marry her, go away all the pieces and follow her to this country,” he stated in a 2013 interview with the style website Keikari. “By nature I’m an incurable romantic.”
The couple married in 1972 and settled in Jersey Metropolis, N.J. Mr. Spano took a job as a bookkeeper along with his father-in-law, Joseph Gangemi, a customized clothier in Midtown Manhattan, earlier than putting out on his personal.
As a tradition-minded haberdasher dedicated to a genteel yesteryear look, Mr. Spano discovered himself swimming towards the tide in a method world dominated by baby-boomer informal. “My era was the worst,” he stated. “Lengthy hair, leisure fits, flared pants. It was a horrible era.”
He additionally needed to remind people who he was not a tailor. “As a matter of truth,” he instructed Keikari, “I don’t know tips on how to sew a button.”
Along with his daughter Elisabeth, Mr. Spano is survived by one other daughter, Cristina Spano; a granddaughter; and a sister, Tina Spano. His spouse died in 2003.
All through his profession, Mr. Spano’s instincts ran towards the summary. “I dream 24 hours a day,” he was quoted as saying in “I Am Dandy.” “Dreaming is affordable. It doesn’t price something.”
“Generally,” he added, “I dream that I’m in these Thirties motion pictures. I can’t be the man like Humphrey Bogart with my accent, however I can play a lowlife or gangster.
“I really feel dangerous for individuals who don’t dream.”
