To define Gianfranco Orrù’s work as “tailoring” would certainly be accurate, although not exactly exhaustive, because he is, at the same time, a tailor and an artist – a new portmanteau needs to be coined to embrace his many talents, but “tailartist” or “artor” don’t quite cut it. But neologisms aside, he is the perfect blend of the finest men’s tailoring traditions combined with an innate need to experiment, something that also leads him to create attire for the fairer sex. His adventures in couture began at age fourteen, when he decided to apprentice himself to Pietro Demurtas in his atelier in order to discover the secrets of the trade. Within five years, he realized that his path in life could be no other.
When you cross the threshold of the elegant premises on the first floor of Via Dante in Cagliari, Sardinia, the original home to the atelier, you step into a world of fine fabrics and mannequins; and if the light is right, it bounces off the “Golden Scissors”, the recognition of years of hard work and sacrifice awarded to him in 1998, when he was inducted into the Accademia Nazionale dei Sartori, the tailoring Hall of Fame. Today, Orrù is on the board of the Academy, and alongside his work in the atelier, he is also a lecturer on a number of professional training courses. He represented Italy on behalf of the Accademia Nazionale dei Sartori at the Shanghai EXPO in 2010: he was a resounding success, with people pressing their faces up against the windows of the stand in the hope of some kind of witnessing some kind of tailoring revelation. And his experiences abroad do not begin and end in Shanghai: in 2013, he travelled to Krasnoyarsk in Siberia to explore new markets, presenting a collection at the historical Surikov Museum; in 2014, he gave numerous lectures there at the local university on Italian tailoring and fashion, consolidating his international influence.
In the photo, we see a tobacco-coloured corduroy fabric. Details that catch the eye are certainly the strip of lining used to keep the vents closed, and the retina (a kind of stitched net) between the collar and the lapel, which prevents the lapel from opening up. Last but not least, the 6x2 double-breasted jacket has the final row of buttons at the same height as the pockets.
Words by Mr G. Onano
