Sanjust di Teulada

Piero (1923-1966). One of the last great Italian dandies. Manager of Dalmine, managing director and chairman of Siderexport, and then Insurance Brokers Marsh and McLean Italian, he loved a little touch of disorder in the way people dressed, a sign of supreme snobbery. It was better if the suit had some small defect and so he always refused to have the third fitting with the tailor. He liked striped shirts in strong colors and used to buy fabric in Genoa from Crovetto. He had 200 pairs of shoes and loved those that were over 30 years old. He had them made to measure at Gatto’s. He never wore a pullover under his jacket which he always wore open. Hats (he never left the house without one) he would crush on purpose. He often carried gloves, but rarely wore them, preferring to hold them in his hand. He never failed to wear a tie which he thought of as a state of mind. He liked the buttonhole on the lapel of his dinner jacket to be trimmed in red.He was the one who started the fashion for wearing watches on the cuff, not as an affectation but out of necessity. He described the following to Luigi Settembrini and Chiara Boni in the book published by Mondadori Vestiti, usciamo [Get Dressed, We’re Going Out]: “We were boys in Rome and Gianni [Agnelli] was a friend of ours and we saw him often. A number of us were short of money, including me, and I therefore could not afford to own more than four or five shirts. In order not to ruin the edge of the cuff by having it rub against the metal strap of my watch, I always wore my watch over my left cuff. Gianni liked it and copied me. Although there was no question of him not having enough shirts.”He had a nose for good tailors, even those that were still waiting to be discovered. He was the one who offered surety for Domenico Bombino’s tailor’s shop; he had met Bombino at the Bar Giamaica in Milan, the legendary café in Via Brera. He told the person interviewing him that he knew Bombino was talented as he had sewn a counter-buttonhole for a flower under his lapel. In addition to Bombino, his tailor was Donini-Augusto Caraceni. When dressing Sanjust, the tailor started with the shirt which laid out on the bed to be able to build around it the outfit for the day. In the same text, he also said: “To dig back into the origins of my relationship with style, it is perhaps necessary to know that I was born as the sixth boy into a family of nine children and for years wore the clothes handed down from my older brothers…. I remember the first time that I wore a new suit was when I went to the Naval Academy and from that moment on a lust was unleashed.”