Rome studio notes — fittings, fabrics, the small things.

We don't usually fit in Rome. Milan, yes; Porto, of course; occasionally a hotel suite in Paris or New York. But this August the mill we work with in Biella sent two new gabardines down with a Roman tailor, and so we followed.

The studio is on the third floor of a 17th-century palazzo, one window onto a courtyard, one onto the alley. No air conditioning, no music, no decoration. A long table, three mannequins, a steam press. It is, in other words, perfect.

Eight fittings in five days. Two of them turned into pattern revisions. One of them — a small adjustment to the back of the shoulder on the Studio Suit — will quietly change the way our jackets sit, forever.

We left with two suit lengths, a kilo of espresso, and the conviction that the things you cannot photograph are the things that matter most.