A letter from Florence, written the morning after.

There is a courtyard in Oltrarno where the morning light arrives at exactly seven minutes past eight, falls across the work tables, and stays for forty-three minutes. We have measured it. We arrange the cutting around it. The senior tailors will not begin a buttonhole before the light is on the cloth; they say the silk thread reads differently in shadow, and after thirty years on the bench you stop arguing with men who say things like that.

I came to Florence the first time at twenty-two. I had a list of ateliers in a leather notebook and an honest belief that I could persuade one of them to teach me. None of them did. They would let me sit, and watch, and bring espresso, and after a few weeks they would let me press a sleeve. Slowly the work became something I could feel in my hands before I could see it on a pattern. That is, I think now, the only way it is ever taught.

We do not improve the Aurelio. It does not need improving.

When we built the house, the first decision — long before a single garment — was to refuse the season. We will not chase a trend, and we will not abandon a piece because it is two years old. The Aurelio coat is the founding garment. It will be reissued each spring, in this colour, without amendment, until the founder has nothing left to say about it. Probably forever.

The second decision was harder. It concerned the question of who Marko Donquez is for. The honest answer — the one we settled on after a long argument across a kitchen table in Brooklyn — is that the house is for the man who has stopped performing. He is not interested in being seen. He is interested in being well. He buys few things, slowly, and he expects them to last him.

That man is not always wealthy. Sometimes he is a young person who has decided early that he will own three coats in his life and he intends them to be the right three. We make the coats for him. We will make them for as long as he will have us.

— M. D. Aurelio Florence, 12 March