The Passion of Pepi

For Pepi Bertini, a fine suit is not simply clothing. It is sculpture – with the customer providing the form.

“You put the suit on the client,” says Pepi Bertini, demonstrating how he customizes a jacket. “The client is always this way or that way, and you have to fit him just as he is.” One shoulder might sit differently from another, or one sleeve length may vary. After 46 years in the business, he says, “Every physique is different. It’s like a different road you have to take, a different map.”

That philosophy is at the heart of Bertini’s shop on Miracle Mile, the culmination of a lifetime immersed in fine clothing.

It began in Cuba, where he learned about clothes from his father, who owned a chic nightclub. As a boy, he absorbed a world of suits and elegantly dressed men. After coming to Miami, he studied fashion design and merchandising at Miami Dade Community College and, beginning in 1981, worked in sales at Franco B., a men’s Italian clothing store on Miracle Mile. More important, he watched experienced tailors and learned the skill that would define his career: fitting.

His greatest teacher was a master tailor named Emmanuel, who he still refers to as The Maestro. Bertini learned that tailoring wasn’t about trimming the garment. It was about reading the body underneath it. “The key to this business [is] fittings,” he says. “If you don’t know how to do fitting the rest doesn’t matter.”

In 1986, while still working at Franco B., Bertini began making custom shirts from his Kendall home. He opened his first store near The Falls in 1990, but Hurricane Andrew intervened two years later. He returned to Miracle Mile in 1992 and has remained there ever since, moving to his present location there about a decade ago.

Spend time with Bertini and his passion becomes infectious. His love of fabric is palpable. He pulls out samples, runs his hands over them and explains what makes each special. For shirts, he favors elite mills such as Thomas Mason and Albini. “We only use one quality of fabric,” he says. Which quality? “The best.”

Suits receive the same scrutiny. Bertini studies a customer’s height, shoulders, chest, stomach, and posture before deciding which cut will complement that build. For a new client, he takes measurements and photographs, recording the body’s individual characteristics so the jacket can be constructed around them. Even an off-therack suit is only a starting point. Bertini selects the model whose underlying construction best suits the customer, then reshapes it. A broad-chested man requires something entirely different from a slender young professional. The goal isn’t merely to make a garment fit. It is to make the person inside it look better.

“My customers are people who know what it is to dress well,” says Bertini. “They see it right away.” And Bertini – who charges $550 for a custom shirt “that will last a lifetime” and $1,500 to $2,500 for most suits (some cost more than $5,000) – still performs every fitting himself. “Every client that comes through here, I kneel down, I do the bottoms,” he says. Even hemming trousers follows a formula refined over decades.

That attention helps explain why generations of families return to him. Fashion may change, but Bertini remains committed to classic, beautifully fitted clothing. “You can buy clothing,” he says. “But tailoring is what we do.”