There is a phrase you hear whenever serious men talk about the summit of tailoring, and it belongs to one house: il meglio del meglio più uno, the best of the best, plus one. It was the personal motto of Ciro Paone, the founder of Kiton, and it tells you everything about the man and the house he built. He did not want to make an excellent suit. He wanted to make the finest suit in the world, and then push it one notch further, past the point where anyone else would have stopped. This is the story of how a fabric salesman from Naples did exactly that.
Cloth in the blood
To understand Kiton you have to understand that Ciro Paone was born into cloth. His family were fabric merchants going back five generations, Neapolitans who had been buying wool in England and Scotland since the mid-1800s and selling it to tailors as far away as Argentina. Fabric, as one of his colleagues put it, was practically hot-wired into his DNA. Paone began his own career the same way, selling fine cloth to the master tailors of Naples, and it was there, at the counter, that he noticed the problem that would define his life.
In the 1950s, machines arrived that could turn out ready-made suits quickly and cheaply, and Paone watched his tailor clients begin buying inferior cloth just to compete on price. The great Neapolitan craft, the hand tailoring that had taken generations to perfect, was quietly dying. So Paone made those tailors an extraordinary offer: come and work for me, and I will give you the finest materials in the world, so that you can keep making garments entirely by hand. That promise became a company.
A name from the ancient world
In 1968, in Arzano, a town on the edge of Naples, Paone founded the house and gave it a curious name: Kiton, from the ancient Greek chiton, the simple, elegant tunic worn by the men and women of Greece and Rome. The choice was deliberate. It cast his very modern enterprise as the heir to a classical ideal of effortless, refined elegance, and it nodded to Naples itself, a city where Italian and Greek culture have always mingled. He began with fifty garments a day in a small workshop, and he did not do it alone. He launched Kiton alongside three of Italy's most celebrated tailors, a statement of intent that this would be a house built by masters.
The obsession made visible: the K-50
If you want to see "the best of the best, plus one" made real, look at the K-50. It is named for the fifty hours of handwork that go into a single suit, twice the twenty-five hours of Kiton's standard line, which is itself already among the most labour-intensive in the world. The K-50 is cut and made to order by a single master tailor so skilled that he works without a pattern, chalking the cloth straight from the client's measurements and beginning to cut. Because only he can make them, Kiton produces fewer than fifty of these suits in a year. They are built from the rarest fibres on earth, superfine merino, baby cashmere, vicuña, and they can cost as much as a car. They are, quite deliberately, the most exclusive ready-to-wear suits in the world.
He did not want to make an excellent suit. He wanted to make the finest suit in the world, and then push it one notch further.
Owning the cloth, teaching the craft
True to his origins, Paone was never content to merely buy great fabric. In 2009 Kiton bought the historic Carlo Barbera woollen mill in Biella, so the house could develop its own exclusive cloths, ultra-fine wools measured in single-digit microns, cashmere and silk blends found nowhere else. Kiton is nearly unique in the industry for developing almost all of its own fabrics. And Paone worried about the other half of the equation too: the hands. In 2000 he founded a School of Haute Couture in Naples to train the next generation of tailors, taking on young people of sixteen to twenty-one and teaching them the endangered art of Neapolitan hand tailoring. Most of them go on to work at Kiton or elsewhere in the trade. He was not just making suits. He was keeping a craft alive.
The Neapolitan soul
What makes a Kiton jacket feel the way it does is Naples itself, expressed through a construction called spalla camicia, the "shirt shoulder." It is a soft, natural shoulder with little or no padding, so the jacket drapes on the body rather than sitting on it like armour. Against the structured formality of British or Roman tailoring, the Neapolitan jacket is light, easy, and alive, and Kiton's is among the very finest expressions of it. This is elegance that moves with you, luxury you feel more than you see.
The patron saint of Naples
Ciro Paone died in 2021, at eighty-eight, still visiting the factory daily to the end. One fashion writer called him the patron saint of Neapolitan tailoring, and it fits: through the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, it was Paone's charisma and vision that rallied the tailors of Naples and made the city sartorially important again, rescuing an art that had been on the edge of vanishing. The company remains family-run today, led by his nephew Antonio de Matteis, with the third generation already involved, and it holds to the founder's vision without compromise.
I love Kiton for the same reason I love everything worth writing about here. It is proof of what happens when a person refuses to let excellence die for the sake of speed or price, when someone cares enough to keep the difficult, beautiful, handmade thing alive. The best of the best, plus one, is not really about a suit. It is about a way of doing things.
You can visit the house here: Kiton.
Dress for yourself, not the room. And if you ever get the chance to wear something made entirely by one pair of devoted hands, take it.
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