Max Girombelli’s Exclusive SDM Sarti del Mare Yachtwear
Before he says a word about fabric, Max Girombelli hands over a book. It’s heavier than expected, bound in a way that makes it feel like it belongs in a library rather than on a coffee table, and the images inside it don’t look like yachtwear at all. They look like tailoring that happens to be standing on a deck. This is the pitch, delivered without a pitch. Girombelli has spent three decades convincing men that a suit is worth taking seriously. Now he wants them to believe the same thing about a swim short.
That belief has a long runway. Girombelli was born in Italy into a family that has dressed the country’s fashion industry for most of a century, in one form or another. His uncle, he says, was among the first to recognize Gianni Versace’s talent, long before the name meant anything outside a workroom in Milan. His parents ran two womenswear houses. His late father and older brother built a menswear label of their own called Reporter, which for a stretch of the 1980s and ’90s held Italian licenses for Valentino and Moschino, among other names that defined the era. Girombelli grew up, in other words, inside the machinery of Italian fashion at its most self-assured. When the family business was eventually sold, he didn’t look for the next big license. He went the other direction, back to the workroom itself.
Three Generations, One Needle
“It has always been fantastic to see the process,” Girombelli says of those early years, watching designers work. “From the sketch, and then when you start to put it together with the fabric, with the lining, in a few weeks, you see this realized. You understand it’s not only because it’s a creative and famous designer, but there is really something that goes from a vision, from just an idea to a real product.” That transformation (sketch to garment, and eventually, a piece a man might wear for a decade) is what pulled him toward tailoring specifically, rather than fashion in the broader, faster sense of the word. “I always found a gentleman more elegant in a timeless suit or jacket than in a trendy piece,” he says. “If you maintain it well, keep the right measurements, keep your weight, you can wear the same suit for ten, fifteen years. That gives a sense of quality. Not something you feel like a fashion victim in after three years.”
He took over a small tailoring shop in Milan and built it into Duca Sartoria. In 1999, he moved to New York permanently to run the American side of the business himself, a decision that meant trading a wholesale model, selling to stores, for something slower and more exposed: selling directly, one client at a time. “It was a moment of change,” he says, “and I appreciate it thirty years later, because in this way I have to meet the final client. I have the real pleasure to see what we can create, to make him look good and to be happy. That’s something you only see when you work directly with the person, not with stores that resell to someone else.” The trade-off, he’s candid about, is speed. “There is not a rapid growth in one year. It’s day by day. But it’s a much calmer, more disciplined way to do business. The client always pays. Sometimes with stores, they have their own problems, and they put you in that problem too.”
The Discipline of an Original
Ask Girombelli what turns an ordinary man into a more refined one, and he doesn’t start with taste. He starts with fabric. “That is the essence of a suit or a jacket,” he says. “Having the proper material for the proper occasion is the most important thing you’ll see at the end of the process.” Only after that comes the measurement, and here he gets specific in a way that reveals how much of tailoring is quiet correction rather than pure creation. “Each one of us has small details in our body. Sometimes it’s not even something you can see, but we notice it. A lower shoulder, for example. We can adjust for that.” The third pillar is detail: the things a client didn’t know he was allowed to ask for. “You may have a jacket in the right size, but if you like a slightly shorter sleeve, instead of altering it later, you have something created already with your vision.” A man who wants to look taller gets trousers cut differently. A man who smokes cigars gets a pocket built for one. Girombelli’s own signature is a cigar case sewn into his jackets.
That last detail (the personal, almost private accommodation) is what he considers the real engine of bespoke work. “It’s the process, and three concepts: the fabric, the measurement, and the details you put into the suit because of your own needs,” he says. Personalization, to him, isn’t an upsell; it’s closer to a philosophy. A client’s name embroidered inside a jacket. A monogram. A company logo, if that’s what a man wants to carry with him. “It’s their own logo, their own life,” he says. “Not mine.” He extends the same idea to Duca Donna, the house’s womenswear line, where he designs pockets specifically for lipstick or lip gloss, a detail that sounds small until you consider how rarely a tailor thinks to ask a woman what she carries.
Not every client’s idea is good, in his professional opinion, and he has a rule for that, too. “I have a good rule: I’ll give my idea three times. After the third time, I have to go with the client’s request.” Often, he says, the client comes back around to his original suggestion on his own. But not always, and he’s made peace with that. “I may not be right. If the client is convinced, he has his own reason for what he wants. At the end, we’re trying to make his life easier. If it doesn’t work the first time, the next one will be correct.”
Sarti del Mare: A Wardrobe for the Water
Girombelli has always kept a boat (a modest one, nothing close to the mega-yachts his new label is built for) and dives when he can. SDM Sarti del Mare is the place where that private life and his professional one finally meet. “This project combines my passion for the ocean with my vision of a refined wardrobe for the owner, the family, and the distinguished guests on board,” he says. The idea started with something he simply couldn’t unsee once he noticed it: the owner of a serious yacht doesn’t want his guests dressed like crew, and he especially doesn’t want ten guests each wearing a different color, clashing with a vessel designed with far more restraint. “We don’t do uniform,” he says. “But personally, I also don’t want a rainbow of colors on board, not respecting the vessel.” His answer is a wardrobe that reads as one considered look, technical where it needs to be, but designed with the same eye a Duca client gets in Manhattan.
The technical part turned out to be the easier half of the problem. The house’s yacht blazer uses a Storm System fabric from Loro Piana, engineered to shrug off salt water without letting it reach the wool underneath, so the jacket can live on deck all day and all night without complaint. Windproof pieces and technical trousers are cut for movement rather than a stationary fitting-room stance. What’s harder to manufacture is the sense of belonging he’s after: on a full yacht order, the embroidery scales up from a single owner’s initials to the name of the vessel itself, with colors pulled directly from the boat’s interior design, so that a guest’s shirt and the yacht’s upholstery are, in effect, speaking the same language. “That allows you to be part of the culture of the yacht you’re on,” he says.
Durability, on the water, is mostly a matter of discipline rather than engineering. Girombelli treats a jacket in a New York closet and a jacket in a yacht’s cabin by roughly the same rules: rest it, brush it, steam it, give it room to breathe between other garments, with one addition for life at sea. After real exposure to salt water, everything gets washed, steamed, pressed, folded, and, on a long crossing, sealed against humidity. “It’s nice to have it sealed in a bag, so it doesn’t take on much moisture,” he says. The idea for SDM, he adds, isn’t a sudden pivot. It’s something he’s carried “for over a decade,” revisited at different points in his life until the version that finally launched narrowed itself down to what he actually knows best: not yacht accessories in general, but the wardrobe itself, treated with the same expertise as everything else he’s built his name on.
The Regal Man, Reconsidered
Girombelli has been in this business long enough to have watched the idea of a well-dressed man survive several real shocks to the system (September 11th, the 2008 financial collapse, COVID), each one nudging how people think about clothing in ways that had nothing to do with fashion. Silhouettes have swung too, from fuller, more generously cut jackets decades ago, to something slimmer and shorter, and now back toward a more relaxed, structured middle ground. But he resists the idea that any of that changes what “regal” means. “When a client has his own style, and he feels comfortable, that’s not right or wrong. It’s his personal style,” he says. “That’s the regal attitude: he can wear it anywhere, anyhow, because he’s confident in his own way of being well dressed.”
The Essentials
Pressed for a short list of what belongs in every man’s closet, Girombelli starts, unsurprisingly, with color. “Blue is the color a gentleman should use as much as possible,” he says, before making his standing joke: a man should own at least twelve blue blazers. It’s an exaggeration with a real point underneath it (cashmere, velvet, corduroy, gold-buttoned, double- or single-breasted, linen for summer) because a blue blazer, more than almost anything else, moves from jeans to a suit-level occasion without ever looking wrong. After that: a blue or gray suit, and, for anyone with a social life in a city like New York, a proper tuxedo of one’s own. “It’s so much better than the rental, or the old one with tape on the shoulder,” he says.
Asked which single fabric he’d choose to work with forever, he resists the obvious flex. He loves fine vicuña and rare cashmere but keeps coming back to a dependable Super 130s or 160s wool: “the fabric you can use to have a perfect everyday suit.” His view on shirts is similarly unpretentious: white first, powder or light blue second, with pattern decisions dictated by the jacket rather than the shirt. And the item he considers most important isn’t the suit. “The shoes,” he says, “because the shoes work harder, morning to night, than the suit does.” He matches them to a belt as a rule and treats the pocket square (folded more formally by day, looser by night) as the easiest way to shift a single blue suit’s personality across a full day.
For a week aboard a yacht, his packing list reflects his philosophy: technical shorts or trousers with a built-in phone pocket, plenty of shirts and T-shirts, one versatile layer chosen for the boat and the season (a cashmere vest for a calm, sheltered deck, a Storm System piece for open water), and, without exception, a blue blazer in his signature lining. “You can wear it all day, all night,” he says, “with a T-shirt underneath, or over a white linen shirt and white pants. It’s always good to have on board.”
Where the Wind Is Taking Him
Girombelli has recently worked the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show and considers Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach the two biggest stages for the American market. He hasn’t yet made it to Cannes or Monaco (Europe’s largest), but he has enjoyed Dubai’s show, watching the region’s yacht culture grow each time he returns. Keeping the same standard from Milan to New York to Miami to Dubai to Aspen isn’t, in his telling, so much a logistics problem as a matter of consistent attention. “Wherever they are, when we bring that attention to detail, they understand it and appreciate it,” he says. “We put in the effort to make that consistent, wherever in the world they are.”
Two quick answers close out the conversation. The most Italian habit he’s never shaken: “To be elegant.” Land or sea, where he feels most like himself: “Sea,” without hesitation.
A Day as a Client
Walk into Duca Sartoria for the first time, and the process doesn’t start with a tape measure. It starts with a conversation, Girombelli trying to understand who you are before he decides what you should wear. Classic or a little more playful. Dressing for a wedding, a birthday, a business trip. “A good Italian glass of wine always makes it easier,” he adds, only half joking. Then comes the fabric, which he still calls the essence of everything: color, pattern versus plain, weight, quality. Then the lining, which he treats as a kind of private signature, neutral and understated for one man, wildly patterned for another. And finally, the pockets, designed around whatever a client carries through his day, down to the smallest, most personal detail, the same instinct that led him to build a lipstick pocket into a Duca Donna jacket.
What he returns to, again, isn’t fabric or fit at all. It’s respect: for the room you’re walking into, and for the person standing next to you. He tells a story about a couple he’s seen more than once: a woman dressed, styled, and ready for a fine restaurant, standing next to a partner in shorts and flip-flops. “That is a person who is not respectful of the person he’s with,” he says, “or of the place he’s in.” His closing thought that morning wasn’t a rule so much as a habit of mind: when in doubt, he suggested, it’s better to dress up than to dress down. Elegance, in his view, was never really about the jacket. It was about what wearing it well says about how seriously you take the people around you.
Duca Sartoria New York
237 East 60th St, First Floor
New York, NY 10022
+1 212 582 3225
