REFLECTIONS: FIVE YEARS OF MESCIU GIGI
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The disappearance of familiar rituals and forms often inspires nostalgia for the past. Yet the greater challenge may be learning how to carry forward their underlying spirit into a world that has fundamentally changed.
A pale brown ball held together by a couple thousand stitches was enough to change my life. Indoors or outdoors, leather or synthetic, some version of it followed me everywhere. Or rather, I followed it. I chased the sound of its bounce, the smell of its leather, the feeling of it leaving my fingertips and returning again. There was something liberating in that rhythm. For brief moments, basketball allowed me to step outside myself. It taught me not only how to express myself, but how to move in relation to others. There was structure, spacing, discipline, but within it, freedom. And somewhere inside that tension, I encountered something transcendent.
It is strange how something so small can cast such a long shadow over a life. That rhythm carried me across the world. It brought me to Italy, to a language I did not yet fully understand, to a culture I had only partially inherited. Eventually, it brought me to Lecce. And from Lecce came something I could never have predicted: the founding of Mesciu Gigi.
None of it feels incidental in retrospect. Certain places alter the trajectory of your life before you fully understand why. Lecce was one of those places for me. And from that experience, our philosophy slowly emerged: not to respond to the world as it once was, nor as we nostalgically wish it to be, but as it truly is now. Because elegance, much like basketball, is not obedience masquerading as refinement. It is freedom moving intelligently within form.
Only a decade ago there were roughly 24,000 tailors throughout the United States. Today there are closer to 17,000. For many people, that decline symbolizes something larger: the erosion of standards, ritual, formality, even civilization itself. And admittedly, there is something emotionally compelling about that argument, especially for those of us working within a tradition of craft. But I believe that reading of history is incomplete.
Too often, people attempt to preserve elegance through repetition alone. As though the mere preservation of old forms can somehow preserve the spirit that once animated them. What follows is usually a kind of cultural narrowing. Small circles arguing endlessly over increasingly esoteric distinctions detached from the conditions that once gave those distinctions meaning. The result is not preservation, but paralysis. A fixation on appearances without understanding the life that once existed beneath them.
At the same time, the opposite extreme offers little clarity either. Modern sportswear and streetwear are often framed as liberation: comfort, fluidity, individuality, ease. And in many ways, they are. But when personal expression becomes entirely detached from shared form, coherence begins to dissolve. Everything becomes self-referential. The individual expands while the shared language collapses. So we are left between two failures: rigidity and incoherence.
The truth is that modern life has genuinely changed. Technology has untethered us from many of the structures that once organized daily existence. A man can work from his apartment, answer emails from a train, take meetings from an airport lounge, speak to someone across the world while walking alone down the street. Communities are less fixed. Routines are less stable. Expectations are less universal.
A hundred years ago, a suit was worn almost everywhere, even at the beach. Fifty years ago, it remained standard in professional life. Today, it is largely reserved for moments of significance: weddings, ceremonies, important evenings, occasions that ask something greater of us. This is not simply moral decline. It is contextual transformation.
Dress is not static. It responds. It adapts. It speaks differently depending on the world surrounding it. The question, then, is not how to restore a vanished society, nor how to abandon structure entirely, but how to create elegance within modern conditions. That question sits at the center of everything we do at Mesciu Gigi.
We do not long for a world that no longer exists, nor do we surrender ourselves to one without form. Elegance, to us, is not rigidity. Nor is it self-indulgence. It is attentiveness. It is the ability to respond appropriately to circumstance while still preserving beauty, dignity, and individuality. Aristotle writes that virtue consists in acting “at the right times, with reference to the right objects, toward the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way.” That idea has always resonated with me because it requires judgment rather than formula. No two situations are identical. No two people are identical. Taste, like virtue, requires sensitivity to context. Clothing should operate similarly. A garment should not impose life onto the wearer. It should support the life they already live. It should move with them across environments, obligations, moods, climates, and moments. That requires humility from a designer. It requires listening rather than dictating.
This philosophy becomes tangible in product itself. Take materials, for example. Every fabric contains within it a set of possibilities. In traditional luxury, many materials remain revered because they are historically proven, familiar, commercially legible. And while we deeply respect those traditions, we are often more interested in materials that still feel open-ended. Guanaco, chinchilla, noble fibers that remain relatively unexplored in contemporary clothing excite us precisely because they contain undiscovered potential. They offer opportunities to refine, experiment, and push forward without chasing novelty for its own sake. Innovation, at its best, should deepen tradition rather than sever itself from it.
The same logic guides our approach to outerwear. The sport coat once functioned as the defining outer layer of everyday dress because people lived lives that required it daily. Today, most people move through entirely different environments. They commute differently. Travel differently. Work differently. A single day may involve a café, an office, a flight, dinner, and hours spent in transit between them. Naturally, clothing evolved alongside those changes. The shirt jacket is not a sport coat, nor should it pretend to be. But its popularity reveals something important about contemporary life: people increasingly need garments capable of moving fluidly between contexts. Outerwear now often carries the responsibility once held by tailoring.
What interests me about outerwear is that it remains relatively free from the suffocating traditionalism that sometimes burdens classic menswear. It is practical, direct, adaptive. But at its best, it also becomes symbolic. Product is never purely functional. Objects absorb intention. They communicate values, aspirations, attitudes toward living. A beautifully made coat does more than protect someone from weather. It changes posture. Movement. Presence. It alters the emotional experience of daily life, however subtly. But long before I understood any of this intellectually, I experienced it instinctively through place. Through Lecce.
Luigi, the namesake of Mesciu Gigi, in Lecce.
Years ago, I asked an Italian relative of mine a simple question: “Qual è la città più bella d’Italia (What is the most beautiful city in Italy)?” “Lecce,” he answered immediately. At the time, the answer meant almost nothing to me. It became one of those small conversations that disappears into the background of memory. Then years later, unexpectedly, I found myself staring at a basketball contract in that very city. What initially felt like coincidence slowly began to feel like inevitability. And once in Lecce, another encounter would further alter the course of my life. Through basketball, I met Luca. Through Luca, I encountered Mesciu Gigi. At first it was simply conversation. Ideas exchanged between two people from different backgrounds trying to articulate a shared intuition about beauty, craft, and meaning. Then time passed. The world slowed down. The conversations deepened. Gradually, something clearer emerged. At the center of it all stood Luigi.
Luigi represented something profoundly honest to us. Not simply technical mastery, though he possessed that too, but a way of approaching life itself. He carried seriousness without pretension. Precision without vanity. Dignity without performance. We did not see him as a relic from another era. We saw him as a standard. And so Mesciu Gigi was built around several convictions. First, that product should genuinely serve people. Not through rhetoric, but through use.
Second, that the cultural and artisanal spirit of Southern Italy is something living that deserves to be shared generously with others. And third, that clothing can still point beyond itself toward deeper forms of meaning: family, tradition, place, community, beauty.
Five years later, we are still in motion. There is no final form. No finished vision. Only refinement. What I am most proud of is not simply what we have built, but who we have built it alongside. Our artisans. Our collaborators. Our clients. The people who have trusted us enough to participate in the process with us.
Yes, we have grown. We have expanded our offering across ready-to-wear and made-to-measure. We have traveled across continents. We have opened a home in Lecce within Palazzo Tamborino Cezzi. But none of those things feel like conclusions. They are simply further opportunities to continue refining the work.
And as we look ahead, we do so with conviction rather than certainty. We will continue building in Washington. We will continue refining our approach to tailoring, materials, hospitality, and experience. We will continue searching for better ways to serve the people who place their trust in us. But more importantly, we will continue asking what this work is ultimately for. Because if clothing serves only itself, it is not enough. Our ambition is not simply to produce garments, but to create resonance. To bring people into closer contact with the things that matter most to them: tradition, beauty, family, ritual, friendship, place. To create environments, objects, and experiences that add meaning rather than subtract from it.
In the end, I always return to the same sound. The bounce of a ball on a quiet court. The echo that follows. The instinct to respond, to adjust, to continue moving. That rhythm shaped my life. My hope is that Mesciu Gigi can do something similar. Not by imposing itself onto people, but by meeting them where they are. By offering something thoughtful, adaptable, enduring, and real. And perhaps, through that, creating echoes of its own.
