In Store

Franco the tailor, custom-made suits and
our reporter’s good memory

Photos by Sharon Styer

The first thing that grabs your eye when you walk into Franco the Tailor is the photo of owner Franco Marchio wincing with Tracey Ullman and Kevin Kline during the filming of the 1990 movie I Love You to Death in Tacoma. “She had her hand on our butts,” says Franco, “on both Kevin and me. I mean, really grabbing you in the butt, you know? I say, Tracey, don’t do that while they take the picture!”

Tracey had cause to be fond. Franco is the real thing, Calabria-born and Milan-trained — “Milano, that’s the show business for clothes” — and he did wardrobe work for both stars for about three thousand dollars. Kline’s performance owes more to Franco than to Juilliard. “He was playing an Italian guy, so he wanna talk like me.” They’d drink vino until 2 a.m., and Kevin taped Franco talking. “Everybody say, that was not Kevin Kline, that was Franco. I was impressed. Shoot, forty-five years I’ve been here and I’ve tried to lose the accent, and I can’t.”

Smitten with a Tacoma girl visiting Calabria, he married her and set up shop at 13th and Commerce in 1963, when every man downtown wore a suit. A Botany 500, like Dick Van Dyke’s? “You gotta good memory! Yes, suit every day.” But soon guys in suits morphed into bums in rags. Five downtown clothing stores became one, Franco’s. Yet customers still came. “Forty-five years, we didn’t do no advertise. It’s just words of mouth.” When he moved to Stadium in 1988, they followed.

“We do a lotta custom-made suits. This one attorney, he buy four, five every year. He has maybe couple hundred suit in his closet. Of all the years I’ve been in business, George Weyer-ahouse, David Weyer-ahouse — this attorney I can’t compare with anybody else.” Franco will put you in their sartorial league with a custom-made suit for $900 to $1,400.

Or he may dissuade you. “If you come in and-a you say, ‘I need a custom-made suit,’ and right away I look on you and I get an idea and I ask, ‘Why do you want a custom-made suit?’ Like I’m looking on you right now. I think if we put a 40 regular, 41 regular, in a good brand, it’s gonna fit you just right. So if it’s not necessary, I can get a good ready-made maybe half price than a custom-made.”

Franco also urges his customers to consider the suit, not the name. “I will show you couple suit that they are made on the same factory where is Armani. Same fabric, but is no label ‘Armani.’ And I retail those for $700.” Armani is maybe $1,500. “We have a suit for $450 to $750. We see a lotta people daily here.”
He’s glad to sell you an Armani or a Canali, of course, which costs up to $2,500. All he asks is that you not stint on the tie. “People say, I gotta lotta tie home. If you gotta tie like that one there” — Franco puts a nice tie to a beautiful Lanificio Super 120 suit, making a worse match than that of Jon and Kate Gosselin — “that don’t do any grace. No! I know you gotta lotta tie, but make sure you have the right tie.”

What really drives Franco nuts is when a customer of certain other haberdashers comes in for emergency suit surgery. “Young man last week brought in two suits. ‘My suit, it don’t fit right.’ They took the waist in, but the crotch was a tent. It was all screwed up, so I had to redo ’em again. He said, ‘Why they didn’t do right the first time?’ I said, don’t feel bad, they don’t know any better.”

Franco knows better. “If we sell you something, if we fix something, we don’t send you out until you look good to both of us. You can buy the best suit in the house, but if it doesn’t fit right, you look like you go to Kmart.”

Franco the Tailor

16 Tacoma Ave N.
Tacoma, WA 98403
253.627.2336