The new and long overdue appreciation of high-quality products has brought about a veritable heritage boom in recent years, in which old and always excellent traditional brands are experiencing a second or third spring. At the same time, completely new brands have emerged - some as mere copycats of a supposed trend, others
on the other hand, from a deep need to make their contribution to a renewed awareness of quality and to tell their own personal story. Just like Captain Santors.
And this wonderful story begins with a little boy from Calabria, deep in the south of Italy, on the big toe of that famous boot, where the sun burns down most of the year with North African heat and gives the Mediterranean the beguiling "Azzurro", for whose blue there is no adequate translation. This little boy is born in the middle of this Azzurro, because his parents' house is so close to the beach that the boy will carry this deep blue sea with him forever from the moment he opens his eyes. Before he can even walk properly, he spends more time on the water than on land and climbs onto the boat with the local fishermen at every opportunity. The hard-working men quickly take the little boy into their hearts. He is called Gianluigi Santoro, but soon no one calls him that anymore. When his father gives him his first boat for his tenth birthday and the little boy with his proud, four-and-a-half-meter-long new possession is now practically impossible to get ashore, everyone just calls him "Captain Santor's".
And this young captain absorbs everything that the hard life in his Mediterranean homeland, which is so overflowing with maritime pleasures, smells and stories, has to offer him. Whether he sets off early in the morning with the other sailors to fish and the calm sea seems as smooth and sublime as black marble, whether he rides back to his home port in a raging storm over the foaming white of the waves with a fresh calamari or polpo or branzino in the stern of his small boat, whether he has to mend and repair nets, sails or rigging while listening to the stories of the old people, whether he snuggles up in the evening with his beloved Nonna Costanza, who has once again been waiting for him with a steaming fish ragout, as only grandmothers can make so deliciously - it is his world and Gianluigi loves every moment, every detail of it.
Of course, little boys grow up at some point and are interested in other things. But even if the sea takes up an increasingly smaller part of Gianluigi's life in the years to come, it will remain in his heart forever. At the age of 18, he leaves the south of Italy and moves to Tuscany to study law at the University of Siena. He then moves to Bologna and becomes a lawyer. After some time in his career, when he starts working as a legal advisor for a number of well-known clothing brands, he not only comes into contact with the fashion world more and more intensively, but he also gradually develops an idea that is strongly fueled by those wonderful years of his childhood: the memory of the simple but superbly crafted work clothes of those fishermen and sailors makes him dream of his own label under which he wants to reinterpret that timeless maritime style. However, many years have to pass before Gianluigi meets the right people who can pass on their know-how to him in setting up his own clothing brand. In 2015, he was finally ready to take the big step and found his very own label, Captain Santors – supported by Marco, Andrea and Antonio, his three best friends from his Calabrian childhood.
When building their first collection, the four were not only inspired by their memories of the clothing worn by the fishermen of their southern Italian homeland. They broadened the scope of their maritime reference world and incorporated influences from old military uniforms of the navy into their designs, as well as the characteristic overcoats, cabans and sailor shirts of the merchant navy or the dungarees and woolen hats of the dock workers. Gianluigi's work on Captain Santors focuses primarily on careful research: there is nothing he loves more than searching the old warehouses of the ports for rare finds, original clothing from past decades or handmade fabrics that give him new ideas for his collection. To do this, he travels all over the country, sometimes to rummage through the attic of a collector of historical military clothing, sometimes to visit the small shipyard in his grandmother's village, where fishing boats made entirely of wood are still handcrafted. He is always fascinated by the stories that these finds tell their new owners: be it an old jacket, a rusty ship's anchor or just a piece of weathered sailcloth - when Gianluigi holds it in his hands, he immediately imagines what adventures the former wearer of that jacket must have experienced at sea, how many nautical miles that anchor must have covered and how many storms that sail must have faithfully served its crew in.
To outsiders, all of this may sound a little too romantic, and Gianluigi is aware of that. But once you immerse yourself in his wonderful world of maritime clothing, you will notice not only how sincere and authentic he is in running his label, but also how timelessly great his clothes are. Even as a city dweller who does not breathe the salty sea air of the coast and does not have to earn his daily bread with backbreaking work on a fishing boat or a ship dock, as most of us probably do, Captain 
Santors' collection immediately evokes something in you that has never left that little Calabrian boy of yesteryear: it is that enthusiasm for great adventures on the high seas and on distant beaches that awakens the child in man and revives those dreams that the daredevils of our childhood made reality for us, regardless of whether they were called Corto Maltese, Jacques Cousteau, Thor Heyerdahl, Efraim Longstocking or Captain Haddock and Tintin. The spirit of the free lifestyle of these sailors and adventurers can be found in Captain Santors' jackets, shirts, trousers and sweaters, as can the timeless charm of the textile classics of the first half of the 20th century. It can be found in the artistic seams as well as in the buttons made of bone or corozo, which make the decisive difference to comparable brands. Above all, however, it can be found in the fabrics that Captain Santors uses for his collection, which are exclusively handmade and produced in very small quantities in Italy and Japan. Whether it's pure cotton, the finest linen or the softest moleskin - you have to see it with your own hands to believe the unique quality that comes out of Gianluigi Santoro's factory. The fact that when you buy something - for example one of Captain Santoro's beautiful shirts - you also get a free package made from old hemp cloth stocks from the Italian Navy and an original recipe from Nonna Costanza rounds off the overall picture more than harmoniously. The little boy from Calabria with the sea inside him can be damn proud of himself and his modern classics for the timelessly casual man!
Text • Mathias Lösel | Photos • Captain Santors