Where Ralph Buys Blouses

By CATHY HORYN
Published: May 22, 2008

AT 7 most mornings, including a lot of Saturdays and Sundays, Pat Capolupo is in his garment factory, Pat & Rose Dresses, on West 37th Street. Rose is Rose Panebianco, his sister, and for the last 40 years they have made the drive together from Cliffside Park, N.J., where they live two blocks apart.

Randy Brooke/Wireimage, left; and Biasion Studio/Wireimage, right
SHOP TO RUNWAY Outfits by Marc Jacobs, left, and Ralph Lauren, right.
She usually prepares a lunch for them — the other day it was baked zucchini — and the only other comfort of note in his drab office is a Lavazza espresso machine. Maybe because is it the only bright object in the place, it says “I’m Italian”— more than the Italian soccer poster taped to the wall, more than the postcard-size picture of the village in Calabria where Mr. Capolupo was born in 1937.

Last Thursday, Mr. Capolupo was finishing a cup of a coffee as I stepped into his office. The bell signaling the end of the lunch hour had not yet rang, and his 45 employees — seamstresses, button-machine operators, pressers — were relaxing at their work tables. Some read foreign-language newspapers. Geovanny Carreno, a presser from Ecuador, had the Mets game on his headphones and continued to listen as he delicately applied short bursts of steam to a purple satin Ralph Lauren ball gown. If you buy beautiful American clothes, there is a good chance that some of them were made at Pat & Rose.

Despite the steady and dramatic decline of garment worker jobs in New York — from 335,000 in the 1950s to 25,000 today — and the impression that one factory is as good, or bad, as another, some of the best designers depend on Mr. Capolupo. He makes clothes for Ralph Lauren, Marc Jacobs and Sophie Théallet, and in the past, Calvin Klein, David Cameron and Isaac Mizrahi. Mr. Capolupo is sort of the backbone of what remains of the Italian clothing makers who once dominated the Midtown garment district.

“Pat & Rose are really the only game in town that’s left,” said Buffy Birrittella, the executive vice president for women’s fashion and advertising at Ralph Lauren, which has made clothes with the factory since the mid-70s. There are other high-quality manufacturers in New York, like Ferrara, a suit maker, and Rocco Ciccarelli, a tailor, who is in Long Island City, but Mr. Capolupo’s specialty is blouses, shirts and trousers.

“Nobody can make a shirt like Pat’s — the way he sets the collar,” said Danuta Denuree, the production director at Marc Jacobs, which has relied on Pat & Rose since the designer’s Perry Ellis days. It is one of 10 factories in New York that produce his women’s collection line.

One advantage of having a factory close by is that a design house can see a sample from Mr. Capolupo the next day and make changes. But it also means that Mr. Capolupo is more connected to the design process than, say, an agent in Hong Kong. A factory like Pat & Rose may not look like much, with the old Singer machines and the blazing yellow lights, but it is pleasant to think that, in at least this one respect, there is no hocus-pocus about fashion.

“People talk, they make nice talk,” Mr. Capolupo said. “But in the end, in this business, you either know what you know or you don’t.”

He finished his coffee and went out on the factory floor. He is trim and stands quite erect, as if from long habit of measuring people in the reflection of mirrors. He has wispy hair and a liver-spotted complexion. Even though he has lived in this country for 45 years, he speaks in broken English. He said that when he opened his first factory, on Eighth Avenue, all of his workers were Italian. On weekends, he played cards with Italian friends, and at first he lived with his sister and her husband, speaking a Calabrese dialect.

Any time he went to see a pattern maker at Ralph Lauren, he spoke Italian. Mr. Lauren, who began in men’s wear, hired Italian tailors, like Elio Sicilia, who was called Pop, and his son Giovanni, who is in his 80s and still goes to work.

Like them, Mr. Capolupo has tailoring in his blood. He was 11 when his father, who grew grapes and chestnuts, apprenticed him to a local tailor. After that, he went to Florence. He never married.

“I always thought about it,” he said as he stood next to a cutting table. “But then the years go by and you start to really work. I’m married to Pat and Rose the factory.”

Mr. Capolupo said he will make about 2,000 fall garments for Marc Jacobs, and perhaps twice that number for Ralph Lauren. The orders, known as tickets, are still coming in. Last Friday, Mr. Capolupo received an order from Ralph Lauren for 57 blouses — a glamorous long-sleeved style to be cut in pale silk and delivered at the end of June.

On the cutting table were tissue-thin stacks of silk pieces; these will be made into Marc Jacobs blouses with a soft tie. There were also oblong stacks of black velvet and gray flannel, for trousers by Mr. Jacobs. Although a ticket might call for 400 garments, some are for much smaller amounts. Mr. Capolupo flipped through a ticket for just five dresses, each in a different size. That means each dress must be cut separately.

“Does that matter to you?” I asked.

“It matters,” said Mr. Capolupo, pushing the ticket across the table. “But what are you going to do? What they give you, you make. You charge them a bit more.”
DEPENDING on the complexity of a style (last year Mr. Jacobs had a pants style with 15 zippers), Mr. Capolupo may charge around $50 for a pair of trousers that could sell at retail for $800. It will be much more for a sample or a small quantity.

HIGH-END EFFORTS At Pat & Rose Dresses, a seamstress at work near a row of Ralph Lauren blouses.

A Marc Jacobs tag is stitched inside a pair of pants at the factory.
He stopped at a table where six middle-aged women were stitching hems by hand. The women, whose backgrounds are a mix of Greek, Italian and Chinese, looked up at me with expressions of curiosity and annoyance. Mr. Capolupo said the average hourly wage in his factory, which is a union shop, is $15, although experienced workers who are fast can make more than $20 an hour.

Thirty years ago he paid $350 a month to rent a factory loft. Today, for somewhat more space, he pays $11,000. “For $11,000 a month, you have to ship a lot of pants,” he said.

The next time I went to see Mr. Capolupo, he introduced me to Gordon Hefner. “I moved to New York 10 years ago from Norfolk,” said Mr. Hefner, who is around 30. “I needed a job.” Now, in addition to running his own boutique downtown, he helps Mr. Capolupo manage the work.

“Everybody might make the same shirt but we might do the collar differently or our sewing is different,” Mr. Hefner. “I do know that compared to some factories we are a bit more time consuming. We do things the slow way. Sometimes the companies complain about that. They don’t want warehouses full of late beautiful clothes. So you have to work at a pace to keep the work in the factory.”

I wondered about the difference between the money Mr. Capolupo gets for a pair of pants and the price the stores charge.

“Marc Jacobs and Ralph Lauren do pay a lot to produce their garments,” Mr. Hefner said. “They use high-quality fabrics.”

He touched a pair of navy pants on his table, by Mr. Lauren. “This is cotton from Japan,” he said. “This part is silk. The thread is German. It’s expensive. If it costs a designer $75 in total to make a garment, they charge the stores $150. The stores sell it for $300.”

“But a pair of designer pants costs twice that,” I said.

“A lot of it is branding,” Mr. Hefner said. “Some customers want to buy expensive stuff. Also, it cost a lot to run a fashion company. The staff, the rents, the shows. Every time you open a magazine, you see a Ralph Lauren ad. That costs money. People pay for the marketing when they buy the magazine, plus when they buy the garment. But they live the life of wearing those clothes. It’s worth it to them.”

I asked Mr. Hefner if it made him cynical.

“No,” he said. “Fashion is fashion. You can either buy a $50 pair of pants or a $500 pair. They’d probably both be just as durable but there wouldn’t be fashion. There’d just be stuff.”

Ms. Denuree of Marc Jacobs said that while costs of living make it challenging to produce clothes in New York, “experience like Pat’s can’t be taught overnight.”

Talking one afternoon with Dario Colonna, a friend from Ralph Lauren, who dropped by with a sample, Mr. Capolupo said he doubted that the old ways would continue much longer.

Mr. Colonna suggested that manufacturing in Europe may hold less allure for Americans with the dollar so low against the euro. “They’re going to be coming back here to make clothes,” he said.

Mr. Capolupo frowned. “Yeah, but there will be no more Pat & Rose,” he said.

He could sell before that happened.

“But who would buy?” he said.

Mr. Capolupo shook his head and continued: “It’s my business. I built it in my way, from what I know. Really, there’s nothing to buy.”

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