In an old brick building covered in vines, sitting along McKinley Road in Lake Forest, is a vestige of a disappearing era — Carlo’s Tailor Shop.
The workshop is crowded with racks of in-progress suits, well-used tools, spools of thread and scrap organized in a way only one man understands. That man is Piero Amidei, who at 77 years of age runs the same tailor shop his father started 55 years ago.
His father Carlo was educated in Italy as a tailor, and his diploma still hangs in the waiting room. Amidei, for his part, learned everything he knew from his father. He’d come to the United States at the age of 16, and hadn’t planned to join his father’s shop. In 1968, he was planning to be a bricklayer.
“But it was the winter time, and I couldn’t be a bricklayer until the spring,” he said. “I came in here, and there was so much work that I never stopped.”
It wasn’t the path he’d originally planned, but it has been a good one, Amidei said.
“Y’know, sometimes you fall in a hole that you can’t get out,” he said. “But it was a good hole.”
Amidei completely took over the shop after his father died in 2004. Until recently, the shop had been making its own suits, but his employee of 35 years finally retired. Today, Amidei mostly does alterations and other small jobs.
“We do good work, that’s it,” he said. “It’s not cheap, but I do good work and I’m proud of it.”
Amidei works at an aged sewing machine spun by a leather belt. He deftly cuts, folds, steams and sews as he has for decades. Surrounding him are photos of his family, friends and decades’ worth of memorabilia. The back entrance features a photo of his father.
Amidei isn’t sure what will happen to the shop after him. The “young generation,” he laments, doesn’t “appreciate the fine things.” And at a shop like his, it can be years before you can bring in any real profit. Young people don’t want to wait that long, he said.
“It’s a dying breed, y’know, people like me,” Amidei said.
Regardless, he doesn’t plan to give it up anytime soon. He’s got at least another decade in him, he said with a laugh.
“I’m 77 years old,” he said. “I’ve worked all my life. I like to work.”
It’s been good business for a man who enjoys his vacations, he said. And he still has people over for lunch every day, something his dad started many years ago.
“It’s never a dull moment here, because we have lunch every day,” Amidei said. “I get people coming for lunch, that’s one of my favorite things.”
While lunch with friends means having to work late to catch up, that’s okay by him.
“I could give lunch up, and then I feel sad because I let people down, not eating a good meal,” Amidei said.
Across the region, old family-run shops started by Italian immigrants like Carlo’s Tailor Shop have closed as the owners get older and their kids decide not to follow in their footsteps. It’s a far different era today than it was when such businesses opened, but Amidei reflected on how much the world changed for his parents and grandparents.
“They had nothing, then electricity came, the phone came,” Amidei said. “It’s always changing. Now, we’ll see what’s going to happen next in 20 years. Well, I won’t, but we’ll see what the world’s going to bring.”
