Conclave is a stitch-up for leading tailor

CARDINALS start choosing a new Pope next week, but the successor to John Paul will be all sewn up well before the secret conclave opens.

In a cobblestoned street behind Rome’s Pantheon, tailor Filippo Gammarelli is adding the final stitches to an item that Monday’s meeting will not start without - the white vestments which the new Pope will wear when he first appears to the world.

Because Mr Gammarelli has no clue who that pope will be, he is making three versions of the silk and wool outfit, in small, medium and large, to clothe the most lean or corpulent cardinal.

“We deliver the three sets to the Vatican before the conclave and that is the last we hear about it until the new Pope appears on the balcony of St Peter’s,” Mr Gammarelli, the fifth-generation of this famous tailoring family, said.

“The nuns make any temporary alterations but we go back to the Vatican the day after to fit the vestments properly.”

Gammarelli’s is probably the world’s most elite personal tailor. Its tiny door, on a cobblestone square, has never lowered itself to taking orders for an English earl’s shooting tweeds or a tuxedo for a US billionaire.

Since its founding in 1798, the tiny shop, piled high with damask silk bolts, has restricted its services to the highest echelons of the Catholic Church. Its trade is chasubles and mitres, stoles and lace surplices, Roman collars and cardinal red socks, packed thick into its dark wood cupboards.

“If we diversify too much we are simply not able to guarantee the quality to our customers,” said the sprightly 63-year-old whose family has numbered five Popes among its former clients, including John Paul.

An undelivered zucchetto, or skullcap, for the dead Polish pontiff sits on a red silk stole in the window out of respect. By the end of this week, it will be briefly replaced with the three sets of papal vestments, wide enough for Milan’s papal pretender Dionigi Tettamanzi and narrow enough for his leaner rival Camillo Ruini.

“We would not even expand into nun’s clothes, their requirements are completely different,” Mr Gammarelli said.