Satorial Connoisseur

Emiliano Nelson - known simply as “Nelson” - is the only maker of custom guayaberas shirts in Cuba. They’ve been worn here for centuries, usually made of cotton or linen. And Nelson’s are among the best on the island, he believes, because they are unique, “I’m making the guayabera in my own style, with my own design. The lines and the patterns are more contemporary, a guayabera that has a more fitted look.”

Like a lot of the other new entrepreneurs in Cuba, granted licences to operate small businesses by recent government reforms, Nelson does not face the challenge of demand. His shop at 22 Villegas, between Tejadillo and Empedrado in Old Havana, has plenty of customers. His challenge is supply. He tells me that he gets some fabric from Panama or Italy “but it’s difficult to get”. Plus, Cuba doesn’t make its own linen and the local cotton is not to Nelson’s standards.

There is no Cuban wholesale market for materials. Because of strict state controls, Nelson can’t simply call up an overseas supplier and order bolts of fabric. He must rely on a slow and sometimes inefficient government bureaucracy to import on his behalf. One solution Nelson has found is to get friends to bring cloth into the country for him. He even resorts to the age-old tailoring tradition of having clients bring in their own supplies.

When it comes to his tools of the trade, Nelson’s scissors are from the 1930s, his presses even older than that. The trick to surviving in Cuba, he says, is to get by with whatever you can find, in business or elsewhere - and he should know, he’s been at it for over 20 years.

He was allowed to start his business in the early 90s because of the artisanal and historic nature of his work. At the time, the shirts had almost died out in Cuba. Nelson became one of the country’s first private entrepreneurs and he never looked back.

“A couple of years ago the state made the guayabera the official attire of Cuba, the official dress for protocol and important events,” Nelson tells me. “This has allowed the guayabera to go back to what it was in the past.”

Now the guayabera is back in Cuba and Nelson a star. His customers include foreign celebrities like Danny Glover and Sting. He’s even made a shirt for Fidel himself.

Transforming a symbol of Cuba’s economic past… into it’s future.

It’s been the dog days of summer for much of the US, but here in San Francisco, the weather has been remarkably mild. I’m actually a bit disappointed by it since I’ve been wanting an excuse to wear this linen safari jacket I got from Ascot Chang last year. It started off as the first piece in my shirt jacket project, but after changing the design from a shirt collar (self-explanatory) to a Ghillie collar (what you see above), I realized I no longer had a shirt jacket on my hands, but rather a safari one.

Safari jackets became part of sporting wear during the late 19th-century, when Westerners went to Africa for safari tours and big game hunting. Since then, they’ve cycled in and out of fashion. The height of their glamour was probably around the mid-20th century, when they became associated with Ernest Hemingway, Clark Gable, and James Bond. Then, in 1968, they became a bit more chic after they appeared in one of Yves Saint Lauren’s runway shows as part of his "Saharienne" collection. The jacket died off for a little while after that, only to then be revived ten years later as a staple piece in the original incarnation of Banana Republic (back when they were a high-end, tropically-themed outfitter, rather than just a run-of-the-mill mall brand).