SHOULDER TO SHOULDER

I’ve asked many an acquaintance, at the kind of soirée where sartorial distinction is as crucial to proceedings as oxygen, to nominate a single establishment as the world’s bespoke atelier nonpareil. Almost invariably the four-syllable response is the same, and uttered with a level of reverence that sees the speaker’s pupils snap into focus, and which induces slow, appreciative nods by all in earshot.

So why exactly is an atelier founded in Rome by Giuseppe Cifonelli in 1880, and these days entered via a staircase and a large wooden door in a Haussmannian building on Paris’s Rue Marbeuf (the house’s home