Beneath five rows of buzzing fluorescent bulbs, custom tailor Fred Mazzei is cutting a suit. He moves his five-pound pair of ironclad shears with amazing accuracy, making his way through two layers of fabric at a time with a succession of sharp snaps. He stacks the pieces on an adjacent wooden table in two piles, pants pieces and coat pieces; the pants will be sent out to be made, but the coats will all be sewn together in-house.
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In Mazzei’s large front room, where the finished suits hang, customers come and go throughout the day for fittings and to place new orders. Three walls, which hold hundreds of virgin bolts of woolens, lead through an L-shaped labyrinth to the fitting room, which leads into both Mazzei’s office and the production room. The many yards of materials are displayed like classic novels on an English professor’s shelves. Rows of spotlights direct white light on the fabrics, dramatizing sky blue and grass green summer polyesters, gray flannels, a dark burgundy Indian silk, blue and brown wools for winter, and striped sharkskins (tightly woven wool fabric with a marbled finish) for interviews.
The walls in Mazzei’s shop are covered with tailoring and civic awards–from the Sons of Italy, the Custom Tailors & Designers Association of America, Inc., the Joint Civic Community of Italian American War Veterans, and the Columbian Club of Chicago. There’s a 1978 photograph of Dr. Theodore Fuxa, then the Italian consul general in Chicago, presenting Mazzei with an Italian order of merit. Walls of framed photos serve as testimonial to his clientele: customers have included former governor Richard Ogilvie, baseball’s Charlie Finley, violinist Franz Benteler, and capitalist Henry Crown; Mazzei has dressed Irv Kupcinet, Milton Friedman, Flip Wilson, and Richard J. Daley.
After Mazzei has finished designing and cutting, he hands the parts over to Frank Perri, his head man for 25 years, to piece together. Perri prepares the coat for an initial fitting in two weeks. He bastes the coat together with thick white thread almost like string, using stitches big enough to be ripped out easily later. A grid of stitching lines covering the front and back of the coat holds a support layer of canvas in place; later the canvas will be reattached to the coat with tiny invisible stitches. After the first fitting, Perri takes the coat apart again, re-marks it, and reconstructs it with necessary alterations. A Mazzei suit leaves 625 N. Michigan only for Perri’s wife, Antoinette, to finish, a three-hour process of inspecting the garments and doing fine handwork on the buttonholes and pockets. Mazzei guarantees delivery in six weeks.
The majority of early Chicago shop owners were Jews, and the workers were mostly European immigrants who came to America to practice their trade. “In Italy you did two types of work,” Mazzei explains. “Either you were a tailor and a musician or a tailor and a barber. You always did more than one in case you needed it.” Mazzei, who commutes from Melrose Park, is proud of his Italian heritage. He’s never forgotten sailing the Atlantic from southern Italy as a six-year-old boy and reuniting with his father, a construction laborer who immigrated and sent for his family after becoming a citizen.
Perri and Klein sit in the production room in the back of the shop, among patterns, pincushions, thread, irons, canvases, sewing machines, and needles, all within arm’s reach. The room might look cluttered to an outsider, but Perri and Klein know where everything is. An ancient EMVD radio plays in the background, but there’s no lunch whistle here. “I go if I feel like it,” Perri says. “I don’t have to punch a card.”
