It’s a hot, hazy Friday afternoon in Rome but Gerardo Cavaliere and Margherita Cardelli, the husband-and-wife duo behind Italian fashion brand Giuliva Heritage, appear poised and at ease, seated on opposite sofas inside their airy and spacious Roman atelier. Cardelli is dressed in a fresh white double-breasted coat with a co-ordinating flowing dress, while Cavaliere wears high-waisted tailored trousers and a T-shirt under a jacket with a wide lapel in a dark navy that shows off a deep summer tan. They embody the effortless ease of their new-generation Italian lifestyle brand, which has roots in tailoring, although not the kind reserved for office wear or formal events.
“We wear Giuliva Heritage every day and we encourage our clients to do the same, so comfort is the most important thing because if you’re not at ease, it shows,” says Cardelli, who is the business brain and strategist of the pair as well as the elegant, long-tressed muse for her husband, who designs the collections. For Cavaliere, who hails from Salerno, southeast of Naples, tailoring does not need to be formal. “This is just how people dressed, even before street style,” he says. “It was very normal for men to dress in suits every day and, where I come from, they still do.”
The couple launched Giuliva Heritage in 2017 as a ready-to-wear companion to Cavaliere’s bespoke men’s tailoring business, Sartoria Giuliva, founded in Rome in 2013. Giuliva, which roughly translates as “joyous” in Italian, was the name of Cavaliere’s bicycle. “It’s a word that explains how happy you feel when you ride a bike but it’s really about a lightness in your approach to life,” he says. “This is very much his character,” adds Cardelli. “And I am very happy that I met him because I am not like this. I am still learning.”
The couple added the word “heritage” to the brand name with the intention of establishing longevity. They offer a lifetime guarantee for their garments, promising to mend and restore any wear or tear. Like Sartoria Giuliva, high craftsmanship and attention to detail are pillars of Giuliva Heritage’s ready-to-wear collections, the majority of which are produced in Naples, a city famed for its sartorial history.
The Giuliva Heritage style has an innate southern Italian flair. The suit, for example, stays true to the Neapolitan approach: the silhouette is less structured with softer lines; shoulder pads and lining are forgone. For increased comfort, the duo favour lighter fabrics, such as silk and linen, which come in an evocative colour palette. For summer this was tomato red and lemon-hued suiting; for the latest autumn/winter collection it’s retro mustard or red jacquard silk reverse-collar shirts. “I’m not at all nostalgic,” says Cavaliere. “I like to challenge the idea of formality and experiment with mixing different styles and dress codes.”
Clients come to Giuliva Heritage for wardrobe building blocks, says Cardelli, who takes great care in cultivating loyalty and establishing a personal rapport, often welcoming customers to the atelier. “Our clients become quite attached to us personally,” she says. “They want to meet us and come in here to try things on.” The couple and their lifestyle are big parts of the brand’s appeal, and they sometimes use their own images to model and promote the collections. The ambition is to grow carefully; they don’t want to move too far away from who they are. “We are building something that will last,” says Cardelli.
The pair moved into this Rome space, a former cardinal’s residence attached to a 19th-century church, on the narrow, cobbled street of Via di Monserrato in the city’s Regola area, one year ago.
Their home, where they live with their two young daughters, is a 10-minute walk from here and their life is contained in this neighbourhood. Lunch is taken down the street at Pierluigi, a seafood institution since the 1930s, while another of their favourite nearby sites is Palazzo Farnese, housing the French embassy as well as monumental late 16th-century frescoes by the celebrated Carracci brothers, Annibale and Agostino. “Before we had the kids and the business, we would spend a lot of time in nature,” says Cardelli, who grew up in the mountainous Abruzzo region, east of Rome. “But most weekends are now spent in the city, and we often have to work.”
To compensate, Cavaliere has amassed a collection of indoor plants and the atelier has taken on a subtropical lushness. “I moved to Rome for love, but I want to stay connected to nature,” he says, looking around. “I’d like even more green in here.”
Currently, women account for 75 per cent of Giuliva Heritage’s business and Cavaliere conceives everything with Cardelli in mind. She is the ideal – having long favoured menswear codes and borrowed jackets and knits from her father and grandfather – and also the fit model. “I don’t like it too fitted, like a second skin,” Cavaliere says of the fluid silhouettes that he conceives, which are more suggestive than revealing. “I prefer it to be relaxed.”
For “pre-fall” 2023, now in store, this meant long, body-skimming knit dresses with low-cut backs, and encircling wool skirts that glide along with the wearer. These are paired with enveloping knit sweaters, while men’s-style shirts in delicate pale silks are layered underaneath tailored blazers that taper at the waist. The latter can be worn with Katharine Hepburn-worthy wide-leg trousers – or not. Typically, clients are encouraged to break up a suit.
Overall, the look is sensual but smart, pinned to a feeling that Cardelli has when she’s trying something on. “It’s hard for me to explain but we like the idea of clothes that feel like they can be lived in; for the creases of the linen to reveal how you moved throughout the day,” she says, before adding: “It’s not about being perfect.”