One of America’s Best Tailors Lives in Middle-of-Nowhere Maine
And he’s figured out how to bring the classic art of tailoring into the 21st century.
PremiumTony Parrotti’s company name says it all.
He goes by Tony. And he makes shirts. Therefore, he runs Tony Shirtmakers. As the saying goes, it does what it says on the tin.
Despite his meek-as-a-country-mouse moniker, Tony, 34, is something extraordinary in the American apparel industry: a young, small-town tailor who is not just staying afloat, but finding great, year-plus-long-waitlist success from his in-house studio in Damariscotta, Maine. (I’ll call him Tony because everyone else does.)
To his clients, Tony’s sly custom shirts—heavy linen westerns with mother-of-pearl snaps, chartreuse green oxfords with sly hidden plackets, thick canvas shirt jackets in slate gray—are the contemporary equivalent of a bespoke suit. Starting at $675, they’re something to invest in, wait several impatient months to receive, and wear weekly, if not daily.
“I wanted to stick to one garment because I just wanted to get very, very, very good at it," said Tony. “I personally don’t think that you can do that with all garments."
America was once littered with Tonys: tailors operating tidy shops brimming with reams of fabric and paper patterns. These tailors knew every bend in their clients’ biceps, each awkward tilt of their shoulders, how their waistlines expanded over the years.
But the dawn of department stores (and later online shopping) with their deep array of ready-to-wear clothes squeezed most tailors.
In 1997 the nation had 31,840 custom tailors and sewers, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Today there are about half that number. The vast majority are centered around the fashion capitals of New York and Los Angeles.
Damariscotta, a coastal hamlet with just over 2,000 people, is the furthest thing from a garmento hotbed. It is known as an epicenter of oysters, not open-collared shirts.
But Tony’s customers order from all over. He takes the bulk of his orders online—a process perfected during the pandemic—allowing him to reach customers from as far as Thailand, Australia and Berlin through virtual fittings.
He offers consultations over Zoom and asks clients to send photos of them measuring and wearing a favorite shirt, which he builds upon to create an exact custom fit. “I can see his sleeve needs to be about an inch longer, the body needs to be about an inch shorter," said Tony.
Through the process, he’s managed to wrest a stubborn—some might say dying—craft into the 21st century.
“When I looked at his website and saw you could actually get a custom fit to you, I was like, well, I might as well do that, if I’m going to be spending this," said Jim Bethune, 34, a technology consultant in Chicago who has purchased upward of 20 items from Tony over the years.
Although Maine is now home for Tony, his wife, Laura, and their newborn, Elio, for most of his tailoring career, Tony operated in New York City.
He attended Parsons School of Design, though his focus was on the business side of the apparel industry. It took his own gumption to teach himself how to sew. “I was very interested in business but I was also very interested in creating garments," said Tony.
To school himself he purchased two identical shirts from H&M that fit him adequately enough, and painstakingly took one shirt apart, then rebuilt it, comparing his handiwork to the untouched mate—a strategy he called “reverse engineering." By repeating this stitch-by-stitch process over and over, Tony learned how to sew something that looked like a wearable shirt.
It wasn’t long before Tony was making shirts for himself and for friends. In 2014 he left his job on the business side of the apparel industry to work part time with a Brooklyn tailor while also breathing life into his burgeoning shirt brand.
“It was a huge pay cut to go work at the tailor, but I was getting knowledge that I couldn’t buy," said Tony. He met Laura when they both worked at the Canadian womenswear company Aritzia. He credits his wife, who worked in retail management merchandising at that label, for keeping them afloat during this period. “Laura was making sure that we could eat and pay rent," he said.
By 2018, he felt he had learned enough and amassed enough clients to go full-time with Tony Shirtmakers, opening a Brooklyn studio where he saw clients in person.
It could have continued this way. Tony could have been, as Laura said, a “small fish in a big pond." But during the pandemic the pair re-evaluated their priorities and moved to Maine, where they had long vacationed and which reminded Laura of her native Canada.
“Living in Maine really sort of romanticized what we do," said Laura, who is also Tony’s business partner. Shrewdly, the couple plays up the state’s idyllic landscapes in the company’s Instagram posts.
There’s Tony, in peak fall, wearing a fiery-red flecked-wool overshirt with piles of burnt orange leaves gathering at his feet, like a background character in “Good Will Hunting." There he is again in summer, trying on textural camp-collared shirts against a row of verdant green shrubs, as if he wandered out of “Mystic Pizza."
Tony works deliberately, completing upward of just three pieces each week. Most components of a shirt are stitched using a sewing machine, though details like buttons and floating pockets are done by hand.
Working with Tony “is a rejection of fast fashion," said Jason Zuccarelli, 43, a video editor in Mount Laurel, N.J., who has purchased clothes from Tony for many years—all without ever meeting him in person. Instead of going to a store and buying a handful of new shirts each spring and fall, he calls up Tony and together they dream up a single, idiosyncratic item that fits him and only him. “It’s just an organic process that’s enjoyable," said Zuccarelli.
In recent months, Tony’s taken a toe dip into creating trousers, dense overcoats and even an off-white twill wedding suit. On his website, he also occasionally releases ready-to-wear shirts, which begin at $555. A recent crop of Palm Beach-ready camp shirts in fabrics like clay seersucker and periwinkle linen sold swiftly.
For many clients, having clothes made for them is a far superior option to settling for less-forgiving off the rack fits. “It’s been a necessity for my body type," said Adam Halvorsen, 42, who works in marketing strategy in Brooklyn and said he is in the “big and tall" category. He has been a Tony customer since 2016, buying pieces like a green casentino wool overshirt and a mustard moleskin work shirt.
Halvorsen is a prime Tony client in that he’s able to wear specialized, often-expressive shirts daily to work. “If I had a job where maybe I had to wear a suit everyday, like maybe that would have been my thing," said Halvorsen.
Tony’s focus on shirts, an inherently casual piece of clothing, emphasizes just how significantly dresscodes have eroded away.
Often, Tony’s customers have a good idea of what they want on a shirt, such as a sandwich-sized pocket or a slot for an oyster knife.
Tony welcomes design demands. “I’m very good with a hint of direction, I’m very bad with no direction," he said.
Write to Jacob Gallagher at jacob.gallagher@wsj.com
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