A Hundred Years on Mulberry Street

The Feast of San Gennaro is a hundred years old this year. It started in 1926 — Neapolitan immigrants on Mulberry Street, one statue, one day. This year it runs eleven days, September 17th through the 27th, with the grand procession on Saturday the 26th. If you're reading this in New York, it's still going on right now.

I go most years. I go for the zeppole like everybody else. But the thing I actually stand in front of is the photographs — the old ones they hang up along the street, black and white, men on that same block in the forties and fifties.

Look at them sometime. Guys at a street fair, eating off paper plates, and they're in jackets. Ties, most of them. Hats a lot of the time. There was no dress code at a feast. That's just what you put on to go out.

My grandfather Gaetano was in Newark in those years, not on Mulberry Street, but it was the same world — the same music, the same food, the same idea of what a Saturday night was for. There's a photograph of him with a cigar that I've looked at more times than I can count. He danced. He took his time getting ready.

I don't have a clean theory for what changed. Somewhere between that photograph and now, getting dressed stopped being part of going out. Nobody voted on it. It just drifted. I notice it most at things like this — a hundred-year-old feast, a street that hasn't moved, and everybody in it wearing whatever was closest to the door.

Which is the whole reason I started making clothes. Not to dress people up like the photographs. The fifties aren't coming back and I'm not interested in costume. But the posture in those pictures — the sense that the night was worth something and you'd answer for how you showed up to it — that part I want.

Everything I make is cut here in New York. The suits are full canvas, made to order with a master tailor on the Lower East Side. Four to eight weeks, built for one person, and it takes that long because there's no way to make it take less. The ready-to-wear is drawn in house.

If you're in the city this week, go. Mulberry Street between Canal and Houston, 11:30 in the morning until 11:30 at night, later on the weekend. Three hundred vendors. The procession is Saturday the 26th. A hundred years is a long time for a street to keep doing the same thing on purpose.

Wear a jacket.

— Charlie