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.