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By Christopher Dickey and Anna Kuchment

Newsweek International

July 25-Aug. 1 issue - "The fabric needs to rest." That's what the tailors will tell you in the little town of Penne, set in the rolling hills overlooking Italy's Adriatic Sea. When they touch the wools and linens, the silks and the cashmeres that they use to make suits for the Italian house of Brioni, they handle them with a kind of familiarity, almost intimacy, as if the bolts of cloth were sentient entities. They cut them according to carefully measured patterns, sew them meticulously thread by thread, right down to the buttonholes. And then they hang up the blazer or suit jacket or overcoat they're making and give the fabric a respite of at least three days, to let the seams and creases settle down before the finishing touches are applied.

Men and women like these tailors are at the center of that delicate universe where taste and fortune, craftsmanship and salesmanship come together in a multibillion-dollar industry. Theirs is the craft behind the art—and the business—of stylish luxury. It's a world of $40,000 suits, $50,000 handbags, $80,000 evening dresses, $100,000 watches and $1 million necklaces. It's these artisans' hands that create an aura of excellence for thousands of other products—from perfumes to boxer shorts—that can be mass-produced by machines and factories under their companies' names. Indeed, as the global luxury market grows larger and ever more accessible to the masses, the image of the tailor bent over needle and thread in his stuffy atelier seems increasingly outdated. But among a small group of elite designers, there is renewed interest in the craftsman as the key to true luxury.

For Brioni president Umberto Angeloni, an unabashed sybarite himself, craftsmanship and attention to detail are vital. Design is important. Marketing is important. So are exclusivity and price. But the icons of classic luxury, he'll tell you, have all been wrought by the masterful hands of great artisans. Think of Chanel's haute couture, the painstakingly matched precious stones in a Bulgari necklace, the solid stylishness of an Hermes bag or the meticulously polished inner workings of the finest watches by Patek Philippe or Vacheron Constantin.

As Angeloni sees the world of luxury, most buyers are "neoconsumers" or, well, "neocons." They're women and men who want to participate at some level in an essentially Old World, European luxury lifestyle. "He may not read poems or history," says Angeloni. "But he knows brands." At the other end of the spectrum is the far rarer "luxury literate" consumer: "He's a man who does not buy for any reason but for his own pleasure in owning special things, primarily if they are made by hand," says Angeloni. Such consumers are also willing to wait for what they want. It may take months or even years for a woman to get the Kelly or Birkin bag she covets from Hermes, but she doesn't mind: each artisan in the atelier on the outskirts of Paris takes between 20 and 25 hours—three or four workdays—to make a single one. "The problem today with the fashion industry—which is called luxury, but mostly is not—is that they tailor their strategies to the 'neocon' because that's where the money is," says Angeloni. Not him. Over the long run, he—like many manufacturers of ultraexpensive handmade products—is banking on the idea that the luxury-literate will set the industry's standards. "If I please them," says Angeloni, "I know I will please the others."

Since that kind of thinking takes more patience than most stockholders are likely to possess, it's probably no coincidence that many of the European companies most attached to the traditions of handcrafting are family-owned or, if traded publicly, family-controlled—Hermes, Chanel, Bulgari and Brioni among them. "Luxury is something you build, you live," says Karl-Friedrich Scheufele of Chopard. "There's really a close relationship between the family and the artisan."

Now there's a new generation of independent luxury designers and entrepreneurs who believe in the future of craftsmanship—and not only in Europe. At the New York market-research firm Luxury Institute, CEO Milton Pedraza says custom-made is "the ultimate endgame for the wealthy, and we're seeing it become more and more elaborate." Not all of these exquisite new products are exactly paragons of Old World tastes. At J.W. Cooper, a cowboy-style clothing company in New York and Bal Harbour, Florida, belts crafted by finely trained leather workers and silversmiths are flying off the racks at prices up to $10,000. London-based menswear designer Jsen Wintle is earning a name for himself with his exquisite beadwork and hand-stitched shirts, with prices starting at about $500.

Several small, exclusive jewelers, including James de Givenchy of Madison Avenue's Taffin, assemble all their work by hand, and have found a growing market among New York's upper crust. "There is an increase in demand for this kind of quality work," says De Givenchy, nephew of the famed Parisian fashion designer Hubert. But supply can't keep up with demand: there just aren't enough skilled artisans to go around. De Givenchy keeps the name of his enameler and stone setter a closely guarded secret. "There are a lot of people out there trying to get their hands on these people," he says.

Most of the actual artisans of luxury—even the grand masters—spend their lives in the relative obscurity of their workshops. Not so Roger Dubuis, a renowned Geneva watchmaker whose name adorns a new line of ultraluxe handcrafted timepieces with wild designs and wilder prices. But Dubuis was brought in mainly so he could lend handmade gravitas to the inspirations of the flamboyant entrepreneur Carlos Dias, who started the firm in 1995. Dubuis has since retired, and the craftsmen who succeeded him are, once again, nameless.

For all the money, glamour and global expansion of luxury tastes, the men and women who set the standards of their crafts have been disappearing. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the realm of French haute couture, where dresses costing tens of thousands of dollars are confected from the most exquisite materials in the world. The Chanel show in Paris earlier this month was a classic example, as models paraded in ensembles inspired by the Belle Epoque and the roaring ' 20s—eras when handcrafting was still taken for granted. A dazzling full-length coat that seemed to be a black cloud of ostrich feathers was shed to reveal a little black dress entirely embroidered with a twinkling semiprecious jet. During the past few years, to make sure it could get this kind of work for its couture dresses, Chanel had to buy up the few surviving workshops where such things were done. Lesage, for instance, specializes in embroidery. Lemarie does flowers and feathers. After World War II, there were some 150 such workshops in Paris. Now there's only one.

Brioni's solution to the need for skilled artisans has been to create a school of its own. The province of Abruzzo, where the company makes its clothes, has a historical tradition of tailors and seamstresses. (A native son, the story goes, became an opera star in Edwardian London, and sent his old Savile Row suits back to his impoverished relatives. They took them apart, and started making their own.) Certainly the town of Penne had dozens of tailors in the early 1960s, when the founders of the company had the idea of bringing them together under one roof to make Brioni's suits. Now the company trains kids of high-school age and older in the traditional craft that may include 5,000 hand stitches in a tuxedo, many of them invisible in the hidden structures of the jacket. The program lasts four years, eight hours a day. Its most exalted alumnus, 33-year-old Angelo Petrocci, is Brioni's head tailor. He travels around the world, taking the measurements of heads of state, creating the suits they want or need, then returning for fittings. With demand so high, Petrocci rarely takes a break. In Penne, it's only the fabric that gets to rest.