Death takes an Italian tailor – and robs the world of rare dignity

Raffaele Candilio worked above a Chinese importer of waving cats in Soho, and had the manners of a gentleman of another time and place

Raffaele Candilio's in Soho (Google Street View)

The death of an Italian tailor might not be calamitous in Catania or Cagliari, but the loss to Soho is immeasurable. We don’t have Italian tailors we can spare here. Each day the London district loses a little more of its essential self – to developers, gentrifiers, scaffolders, diggers of trenches for cables we don’t need, cleaners-up and dumbers-down.

There’s a simple arithmetical logic at work. Build more unaffordable and not always architecturally sympathetic apartments, watch the rents rise, the tarts leave, the small shops, production offices and design studios close down, and hey presto, we have another fashionable London suburb indistinguishable from the rest. Given such depredations, it’s cruel of death to want its share as well.

Raffaele Candilio was the alterations tailor my wife and I went to no matter how large or small the job. He would remodel a suit or just sew on a button. You would go up the rickety stairs to his workroom above a Chinese importer of waving cats, and find him sitting cross-legged on his work table, sewing. Sometimes Pavarotti would be singing. Not in person, but it was almost as good as.

Other people I have spoken to in the days since he died contest my description of him. He was never sitting cross-legged on his work table when they went to see him. Well, we all have our memories. That’s how I see him, anyway: a slight, delicately made man, light of bone and temperament, easy and weightless in the world, but precise and sharp – a tailor of genius who floated above the clumsy inattentiveness of the mundane world.

I loved his workroom and would sometimes take along a garment that didn’t need altering just so I could visit him, listen to Pavarotti and look at postcards of his native Naples, Rocky Marciano and some football team I didn’t recognise pinned to his walls. Nostalgic myself, I am a sucker for other men’s nostalgia. So, I think, was he, because while he often had Italian friends visiting him, the small staff he employed appeared to be of every nationality. Whether that meant that songs about returning to Sorrento got to them as well, I can’t say. Though you could smell the grief of exile in there, I never saw them cry. At least not until last week.

There, in my mind’s eye, he sits on his table, and when I enter with an armload of trousers he makes a quick gesture with his hand, which means that I am to climb over the cardboard boxes in the back room, draw a simple curtain to cover my modesty and change into whatever I want altering. None of this is necessary. He knows what needs doing, how many inches on or off, just by looking. “Just estimate it, Mr Candilio,” I say. “I trust you.” He lets his head fall to one side fatalistically. Yes, I trust him. And yes, he trusts himself. But things go wrong. And customers complain. So just change into your trousers.

In my case, this was partly to prove a point. I believed my legs were longer than he knew them to be. “Best try them on,” he’d say. And even then I felt I owed it to the dignity of my person and stature to quibble with him over half an inch. “All right,” he’d concede, changing the chalk mark, but I suspect that when it came to doing the job he trusted his estimate over mine and took the half-inch back off again.

He was an appraiser of appearances, would let you know if he thought something you’d asked him to do would ill become you. Politely – because he had the manners of a gentleman of another time as well as of another place – he would quickly run his eyes over you and give his opinion with the faintest inclination of his head. He had fine, aquiline features and at such a moment you felt you were being looked at by a hawk.

He was interviewed by a national newspaper when Fabio Capello took over as manager of the English football team. Since the Football Association’s offices were in Soho Square, the journalist thought it would be a good idea to ask some of Soho’s Italian residents what they thought of him. About Capello’s managerial skills, Raffaele had little to say. But he liked the suits. “I have seen Mr Capello on the TV,” he said, “and I am quite impressed with how he dresses. But then most Italians know how to dress. Without meaning any offence, the same cannot be said of a lot of young English people.”

A critical father, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn. Presumably all fathers from Naples are. And perhaps a critical husband as well. Only a couple of weeks ago, in the course of a conversation about the desirable length of a woman’s skirts – and no, we weren’t being dirty old men, we were simply discussing a dress my wife had brought in for him to lengthen – and no, not at my prim behest – he talked about his own wife’s instinctive modesty. He even drew an imaginary line high on his chest, to show her preferred height of neckline.

I stepped away from that conversation out of embarrassment and respect. His wife died a few years ago, and I was inclined to think that there was a sadness about him thereafter. Often I would see him on his own in Soho after work, always elegant and handsome, but a little lost, I thought. But I am a conjugal sentimentalist and am upset by the sight of a once-married man out on his own. No wife to go out with or go home to is no life to speak of. I might, therefore, have invented him forlornly wandering Soho, as some say I invent him, out of the same idealised sorrow, sitting forever cross-legged on his table.

Soho is the poorer, as is everyone who knew, and respected and, yes, loved him, whatever the truth of where he sat or what he felt. Another social comfort dropped away. Another good man gone. And with him something irreplaceable – not just industry and skill, but a rare sort of honour.