By Manish Puri

In 1957, Irving Penn arrived at Villa La Californie, the Cannes residence of Pablo Picasso, for an appointment to shoot portraiture – only to be told that the man of the house wasn’t in.

Undeterred, Penn instructed his assistant, Robert Freson, to scale the villa’s gate, where they found the painter lounging in a grey sweatshirt. After some persuasion, Picasso granted Penn 10 minutes to take photos, donning a felt sombrero and a dark embroidered capa given to him in 1955 by the famous bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín (below with Picasso).

Penn’s images of Picasso have become iconic, and despite being so tightly cropped they manage to encapsulate many of the qualities of the cape: powerful, enigmatic, dramatic yet somehow coy.

The garment in question was made by Casa Seseña in Madrid, whose capes, alongside the aforementioned Picasso (who was buried wearing another Seseña cape given to him by his wife, Jacqueline Roque), have adorned the shoulders of individuals such as King Alfonoso XIII, Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel, Marcello Mastroiani, Placido Domingo and Catherine Deneuve.

During a recent trip to the Spanish capital I paid a visit to Casa Seseña, the only shop in the world still dedicated to making capa española.

I met with Marcos Seseña (below right) – the great-grandson of the shop’s founder Santos Seseña (below left), and the fourth generation of the family to run the business. We spoke about how capes are made and who the hell is buying them today (which I’ll cover in a separate article next week), as well as Seseña’s frankly fascinating history.

Founded in 1901, Casa Seseña was one of dozens of tailors in the Sol barrio. But whilst the other outlets were beginning to abandon the cape for more modern clothing, Santos persisted with offering capes alongside suits and overcoats, and even marketed the business as specialists in this area (see advert above from the early 1900s).

The Seseña cape gained popularity among the intellectuals that gathered in the cafes lining the nearby square, Puerta del Sol. Chief among them was the radical dramatist and novelist Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, who was quite the sight in Belle Époque Madrid: his long, greying beard sat proudly atop a black cape (as seen on the cover of his biography, below).

And by the way, isn’t it fascinating how often radicals and the avant garde venerate traditional clothing and craft? Although in Valle-Inclán’s case, having lost his left arm following a brawl at Café de la Montaña, the arm-less silhouette of a traditional cape may have driven his sartorial preference: an illustration of the cape’s ability to conceal a perceived weakness while still projecting strength.

By the late 1920s, stewardship had passed to the second generation of Seseñas, Marcos’ grandfather Tomás.

Tomás (below centre) was friends with a man named Pedro Chicote (in the pinstripe double-breasted suit), a bartender at the Hotel Ritz who opened Spain’s first American cocktail bar in 1931: the eponymous Chicote on the Gran Vía (the setting for the photo).

It was at Chicote’s that Ernest Hemingway (above with Pedro) drank Papa Dobles in between penning dispatches from the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Such was Hemingway’s fondness for the bar that it was immortalised in his short story, The Denunciation, referring to it as “one of the best bars in the world” – quite the tribute from a man who had seemingly been to most of them.

Once the war had ended, in a bid to improve Spain’s damaged international reputation and to access US dollars, Franco became something of an “unlikely patron” of Hollywood, and his regime worked with American studios (who themselves were beset by rising costs, antitrust rulings and a boom in television) to relocate productions to Spain.

Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and El Cid were just three of the many films shot across the country, and with it came a constellation of stars such as Ava Gardner, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Tony Curtis and Orson Welles (below in his signature cape) – all of whom frequented Chicote’s.

Ava Gardner was so enamoured with Spanish culture (and the matadors that bestrode it) that she spent several years living in Madrid. 

While being haplessly pursued across the country by then husband Frank Sinatra, she engaged in romances with Mario Cabré (above left) and Luis Miguel Dominguín (who gave Picasso his cape, above right) – both bullfighters, both fine dressers, and both, of course, customers of Seseña.

A perplexed Humphrey Bogart remarked to Gardner that “most women would be willing to drag themselves at [Sinatra’s] feet, yet you go around with a guy who dresses up in a cape and ballet shoes”.

As Chicote’s parties raged into the small hours and the torrid affairs scorched bed sheets across the capital, Tomás was there selling Seseña capes to one and all from his shop on Calle de Espoz y Mina (captured above by Brassaï in 1950). 

Gardner, Grant, Cooper, Curtis, Hemingway – all became customers. A modest garment for immodest times.

The starry clientele helped bring Seseña capes to prominence with an international audience. A position which was consolidated in the 1960s, when the reins were taken up by Tomás’ widow Conchita Díez and her son Enrique (below), by focusing production solely on capes, and developing (for the first time) a women’s line.

In 2009, Marcos (above) became the fourth generation of the Seseña family to run the business, though not before Enrique had opened one of Spain’s very first online shops in 1998 – the first order placed by a man in Springfield, USA (no, I don’t think it was Evil Homer).

Under Marcos’s direction, the range of capes has grown, with more styles, colours and fabrics. However, the classic capes endure – Marcos told me that while many new customers come in for the modern styles, they stay for the traditional ones – and the method of production remains unchanged from when Santos opened the doors over 120 years ago.

Who are those customers and how are the capes made? All will be revealed in next week’s follow-up article.

Manish is @the_daily_mirror on Instagram