The suits, shirts and ties to be worn by Vance at the inauguration ceremonies were hand-made in the Cincinatti shop founded by Romualdo Pelli, who immigrated from Italy in the 1960s.
Vance has been a long-time customer of Romualdo’s.
“Are you kidding? A country boy who came from Italy from a town of less than 15,000 inhabitants. I would never have dreamed of it,” the tailor told a local TV station in the Ohio capital recently.
Steered by a family friend who had deemed him too fragile for other professions, Romualdo has been sewing since he was eight years old and lived in Formia, on the Tyrrhenian coast between Rome and Naples.
In 2008, the Wall Street Journal listed him among the few “master tailors” left in the United States.
Master tailors are tailors who learned the art through a long apprenticeship and still appreciate the importance of tailoring by hand.
Today, given his age, he limits himself to “supervising” the orders of celebrities like Vance who come to the shop.
He sold ownership of the business a few years ago.
Pelli’s other clients have reportedly included the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, actor Robert Redford and Henry Heimlich, the inventor of the noted first aid technique used to treat people who are choking when food has gone down the wrong way.
ANSA
