VATICAN CITY — Already, their tailor said, cardinals are rush-ordering new robes.

It’s a sun-drenched day in Vatican City—pilgrims in shirtsleeves, even the Swiss Guards looking lighter in their boots—and Francis has spent three nights in a hospital bed. Argentine doctors removed a piece of his lung when he was Jorge, 21-year-old seminarian. Now he is 88, Patriarch of the West, with double pneumonia. 

By next week a respiratory crisis and a blood transfusion will have plunged the pontiff into critical condition. His kidneys will have begun to fail. He will have told his surgeons, as they’ll later tell the press, that “both doors are open.” Chattering for news, journalists will have swelled the Holy See press office to bursting.

Now, though, just four days into Francis’ hospitalization, the official mood is light. The Vatican fires out a volley of chipper bulletins: The pontiff has had breakfast. The pontiff has read the paper. The pontiff is in good spirits, and his doctors say he is improving.

Yet this seems to reassure neither Rome’s longstanding papal tailors—“please, not now” begs Ditta Annibale Gammarelli’s president, sweat beading at his hairline, “I am so busy”—nor the pair of cardinals who sweep out of the sun, into Mancinelli Ecclesiastical Tailors’ workroom, and order made-to-measure vestments from Raniero Mancinelli, prontissimo.

Mancinelli is 88, plumpish, impressively moustached. He is always in corduroy and usually beaming. He has outfitted and accessorized the clergy through six conclaves and six popes: John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Francis. For all but four of those 67 years he has sewn and sold from his humming dark-wood shop on the Borgo Pio, a cobblestone stretch 300 yards from St. Peter’s.

Mancinelli “is excellent,” reports one French bishop, effectively ending the interview there. “The Pope wears Gammarelli,” says a Spanish priest in slacks and a clergy shirt. “The Church wears Mancinelli.”

 Mancinelli's specialty is a well-made Roman collar. What can he say about a well-made Roman collar? Nothing. "Tricks of the trade." The Vatican rumor mill credits him with dressing more than half of last year’s class of cardinals—not that he is willing to comment on that, either. He will admit, if pressed, that he has spent enough precious pre-conclave hours with cardinals to have predicted Paul VI’s papacy.

On why those pre-conclave hours are so precious, Mancinelli strays firmly into the abstract. At least 15 days must pass between the death of a pope—hypothetical!—and the start of a conclave. In that time the world’s cardinals descend on Rome. They discuss the state of the world and the state of the Church. They make judgments. They make allegiances. They try to make a good impression. This is fashion week, the Olympics, prom. Woe to the cardinal caught unprepared, or underdressed.

After 15-odd days, cardinals under 80 (on the day of papal death) process from St. Peter’s to the Sistine Chapel. They cease contact with the outside world until they have elected a pope. “While they are in the Sistina, listening to the Holy Spirit,” Mancinelli says, “I can’t help them, I can’t reach them. So if they need new clothes, they need to think ahead.”

Which involves a trip, with time to spare, to Mancinelli’s, where three starchy salesclerks in a front room sell fringed sashes, reliquaries, travel bags, croziers (wrought shepherds’ staffs, between 580 and 3,050 euros) swinging thuribles for incense, crosses, crosses, crosses, hammered, engraved, and stone-set rings, collars, bibbed collars, light- mid- and heavyweight clerical raincoats, simple skullcaps, tufted skullcaps, ready-to-wear robes.

This morning a stooped Argentine priest wants an outfit for walking in the country. He thumbs through a rack of rhinestone-studded chasubles to settle on Mancinelli’s lowest-rent alb, the everyday, ankle-length white vestment: 40 euros, polyester blend, machine-washable. Mancinelli’s daughter Laura talks him into buying one size up. “For the breeze,” she says, gently. In and out float deacons and priests, for sweater vests and stoles.

Cardinals at Mancinelli’s cannot shop off the rack. They head instead to the store’s back room where, beneath a CCTV montage and a photo of baby Laura Mancinelli meeting Paul VI, her father measures, traces, presses, trims. Until the Second Vatican Council, ecclesiastical tailors robed clients in silk. “Beautiful,” says Mancinelli. “And so difficult to wash. Everyone ruined their cassocks, came in to buy more.” Now the Church confines priests, bishops, cardinals, and their tailors to wool-silk blends. A scarlet bolt of which Mancinelli heaves onto his table, and starts slicing.

In calm periods it takes Mancinelli a week to deliver a cardinal’s getup: cassock, rocchetto, mozzetta, 12-ridged collapsible hat. The cassock is Church-standardized-scarlet, heel-length, cinched at the waist with a watered-silk sash. Over it cardinals slip rocchetti: knee-length, white, trimmed with a stripe or a field of lace. The mozzetta is scarlet again, an elbow-length cape on which rests a hefty sternum-level cross.

Pope Benedict led the charge on clerical luxury—wore ermine-trimmed mozzette, jeweled hats, intricate brocades. During his papacy cardinals followed suit. “I loved it,” Mancinelli says, dreamily. “I remember the most beautiful rabbit-fur sleeves.” The environmentalist, no-nonsense Francis has encouraged simpler, cheaper dress. "Elegant and costly tailoring, lace, fancy trimmings," he wrote in his autobiography, "sometimes conceal mental imbalance, emotional deviation, behavioural difficulties, a personal problem that may be exploited." In short fur is off the table. The pope's supporters and detractors dress their parts. Cardinal Raymond Burke, the conservative firebrand whom Francis threatened to evict from his Vatican apartment for fomenting dissent, favours billowing silk trains, pom-pom-tufted, wide-brimmed galero hats.

Mancinelli’s ideal clients fall towards Burke’s side of the spectrum. Look, he says, at a scarlet cassock with stiff silk cuffs, just finished. “Flashy,” he says. “Elegant. He wants to be seen in this.” Look, Mancinelli says, at this velvet-collared overcoat. “Bellissimo. This is for a cardinal with some taste, some pride.”

Mancinelli’s orders pile up; he does not know if he has a week to spare. “You can feel the anxiety,” he says. A tubby Syrian priest picking up his bishop’s cassock starts shrieking. He swears he asked for purple trim, not black. The monsignore needs to wear it Sunday. Oddio, Laura says. Oh God. She raises a hand to her forehead. The Syrian puts his hand to his. “I’m not Penelope,” Mancinelli says. “I can’t un-trim it, re-trim it.” Laura slips into dialect. “Stop talking, papà. Work. Stop talking.”

In the workroom Mancinelli summons his grandson to his side. Lorenzo di Toro is a stringy 23: mussed hair, sweatpants, a Derek Jeter graphic tee. He is the sixth of Mancinelli’s 10 grandchildren and the only one working in the shop. Baseball does not interest him. Neither does religion. “It's a crazy world. I don’t know what to think.” But he does like making mantles. He does like making collars. He’d like to learn to make a cassock from scratch, like nonno. “I’m supposed to take over one day,” he says. “I have to learn before—I have to learn soon.”

Mancinelli is doubled over, snipping, still, focused on his scarlet wool-silk blend. Occasionally he steers Lorenzo’s interview back on track, or suggests that his grandson may be an enticing catch. He pauses, straightens, takes this reporter’s hand in his.

"I remembered," he says. “From Benedict I still have some ermine fur in a drawer. I thought one day, the fashion might—" and stopping himself, he bends back to his work.