If you want to know what it takes to sell some of the best T-shirts in America, you would do well to start by talking your way into Mauro Farinelli’s garage in Alexandria, Va. When I visited in mid-August, the single-car room on a quiet cul-de-sac was packed with dozens of cardboard boxes, freshly arrived from Italy. Around the edges, you could glimpse the trappings of suburban life: a charcoal chimney starter, the handle of a snow shovel, a bag of dog food. In context, the boxes might have denoted nothing more than preparations for a late-summer yard sale. Studying those containers, many of them sagging under the sorrows of transit, you would never guess that the hundreds of shirts inside would sell out within minutes of being advertised online.
Farinelli, 51, is the proprietor and, until recently, sole employee of Wolf vs Goat, a tiny, cultish menswear brand that he has, for much of the past decade, run out of his home. A longtime D.C. area resident, he worked for years in fashion retail, operating womenswear stores in the region, only to see them collapse during the Great Recession. Attempting to figure out what was next, he started designing button-up shirts, which he initially had manufactured in American factories and then in European ones. Along the way, he branched out into other garments, especially knitwear. Though he regularly travels abroad to meet with factory owners and attend fabric shows, much of his work happens out of a small office in the basement of his home, where he lives with his wife, his daughter and their three rambunctious rescue dogs.
Today, the Wolf vs Goat business model works like this: Customers — who mostly find the brand via Reddit and menswear blogs — pay $25 to join the company’s “rewards program,” after which all of the offerings are half off forever. On its website, you might find linen-cotton trousers with the texture of an unbroken brie rind ($107.50 for members) or a long-sleeved wool-silk polo ($200 for members) that will leave you feeling like a Bond villain reclining poolside.
Wolf vs Goat presents itself as a luxury brand, and the quality of the clothes is undeniably high. “I think that it’s a brand that is actually quite forward thinking and modern in its approach to heritage and sustainability in fashion,” journalist Dana Thomas, host of “The Green Dream,” a sustainability podcast, told me. But what, exactly, makes a brand luxurious when it eschews elaborate photoshoots and fashion shows? When it operates out of the suburbs of hardly fashionable Northern Virginia? When its founder announces new products in jocular Reddit posts, one of which found him comparing the thickness of a fabric to a portion of a whale’s anatomy? When he occasionally spars directly with frustrated customers in the comments of those posts? When he welcomes you into his home to gawk at the boxes in his garage?
Unsure how to answer those questions, I asked Farinelli to join me on a window-shopping trip through CityCenterDC, a downtown warren of ultraexpensive shops: Gucci, Akris, Hermès and more. It was a blazing-hot Friday afternoon, so I pulled on a pair of breezy Wolf vs Goat linen shorts and a Wolf vs Goat zippered polo in an airy honeycomb weave — perhaps my favorite single garment I’ve ever owned. Weeks before, Farinelli had told me over the phone, “The people that normally buy my clothes, they’re nerds,” by which he meant they’re eager to learn about fabrics and construction. Even by those standards, showing up to meet him in clothes he had designed seemed a little fanboyish, like wearing the T-shirt of the band you’re going to see. But to my surprise, Farinelli had on the same outfit, except his polo was light gray while mine was a color he calls mocha. Proceeding from store to store, we surely resembled nothing so much as uniformed missionaries from some absurdly well-funded church. In a manner of speaking, I suppose we were.
At the Paul Stuart store, which sells $2,000 sportcoats and $400 trousers, I watched Farinelli inspect and then dismissively push away a pair of casual shorts, apparently because he was unimpressed by the interior seams. After I pointed out a sweater jacket that I’d consider wearing, he examined the lapels for a moment and then looked at the tag: $965. “Not at that price,” he told me.
When the quality of Wolf vs Goat’s own garments falls short of Farinelli’s expectations, he tends to criticize them with similar fervor. He recently had some frustrations with a Portuguese factory he’d been using, and he has since shifted that production to Italy, where he has tighter relationships with manufacturers and hence more exacting control over the quality.
Wolf vs Goat’s own missteps tend to come down to operational issues. Once, long before I began reporting this article, he shipped me the wrong pair of pants. When I pointed out the mistake, he promptly sent me the right pair and told me to keep the other “for the inconvenience,” refusing my offer to return, or at least pay for, the first pair. Other customers describe similar experiences of transparency and generosity. In recent months, Farinelli has taken on business partners and a few employees, and has begun working with a third-party logistics company for shipping, though he still pacifies cranky shoppers personally.
With his gregarious accessibility, Farinelli sometimes seems more like an enthusiastic salesman than a fashion designer. In the Loro Piana store at CityCenterDC — where, as elsewhere, we didn’t identify ourselves and said we were just looking — he bantered affably with the attentive clerk about the micron count of a sweater and the advantages of 2-ply cashmere. As the clerk stood nearby, we stopped to study a dauntingly beautiful $5,050 cable-knit sweater. “It’s a ridiculous sum of money to buy a sweater for,” he told me. Yet he couldn’t help but admire it. “It’s so thick. The yarn’s twisted so nice. That’s an heirloom.”
Neither of us were in danger of buying anything from Loro Piana or the other stores we visited that afternoon. But when something impressed Farinelli, it seemed to be because he could see how well it was manufactured, how flat the seams lay or how well-sourced the fabrics were. In this, there was a different kind of luxury, the kind that comes from understanding why the garment you’re wearing is special — which is maybe the point of Wolf vs Goat. Farinelli will never have a shop like the Brunello Cucinelli store we visited, where tidily frosted cupcakes sat under a glass cloche. His aren’t clothes that announce your wealth, at least not as directly as, say, a pair of rubber Gucci slides, but they still let you tell a story about yourself, which is the real function of all luxury clothing.
Here’s my last story about him, then. We’d just left the Brioni store, where the knowledgeable clerk had pointed out a particularly nice cashmere cardigan with yarn like cream, both in color and texture. It cost almost $2,000 and looked like something I would spill coffee on immediately.
“I almost took a double look at that sweater,” Farinelli told me after the door shut behind us. “I’m making a similar one.”
“How much are you going to charge?” I asked.
“It’s going to be about three-hundred-and-fifty bucks, maybe. With the rewards price,” he responded. And before I could get another enthusiastic word in, he was talking about yarn again.
Jacob Brogan is an assistant editor with Book World at The Washington Post.
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