A fixture in Columbia retail for 4 generations celebrates a milestone birthday
You won’t catch Leonard Fabrizio wearing a tie to work — more likely you’ll find a tape measure draped around his neck, stuck beneath the collar of a smart sport coat, paired with a pocket square.
But he sure will sell you a tie, and a jacket and pants and pocket square, to boot. (Cuff links? Sure, get the cuff links, too.)
Fabrizio just may be Columbia’s master of menswear.
On Saturday, he celebrates 82 years of life and 64 years of dressing everyone from the most dapper to the most clueless among Columbia’s suited men.
“What attracted me to this business is you never get bored,” said Fabrizio, a popular salesman at Brittons, one of Columbia’s oldest retail stores. “At my age, I’ve had some customers, I’m with their third and fourth generations of the family.”
Brittons, a 75-year-old specialty menswear store on Columbia’s trendy Devine Street, is the “homestretch” of Fabrizio’s long career selling clothes in the capital city. A Columbia native, he got his start in retail working at the J.C. Penney store on Main Street — back when Main Street had department stores — while studying at the University of South Carolina.
Fabrizio said he developed his own style through the years by looking to more experienced men around him as well as learning to be himself. The fast-paced, ever-changing nature of fashion kept him wrapped up in the work for decades, even owning his own upscale menswear store, Weathers, for more than 20 years.
He even managed a Brittons store for a while in the 1980s, then returned to the business about six years ago, apparently still in the prime of his sales days.
During a difficult year for retail in 2020, Fabrizio helped carry Brittons with a motto that’s stuck with him through many challenging years of business: “Tough times don’t last. Tough people do.”
“That helped us survive as a family during 2020,” said Stacy Levinson, the store’s owner. “To find a person with passion, not only in their life but their livelihood, that’s unique.”
Brittons manager Perry Lancaster said Fabrizio is “always on.”
“It’s just phenomenal to work with the master that he is,” Lancaster said.
Brittons will throw a party at the store in Fabrizio’s honor on Saturday. Even at the age of 82, he still has a few years to go to catch up with Brittons’ oldest employee, Levinson and Lancaster point out with a grin. That’s Rhena Denberg, the 86-year-old star of the store’s women’s department.
