Deluxe

by Dana Thomas

  Canepa’s family has been in the silk and textile business for two centuries in Como. Half of Como’s business then was weaving—its specialty was silk twill, the fabric used for scarves—and the other half was manufacturing. In the 1950s, it all began to change. First, since Europe no longer produced silk, Como’s weavers were forced to buy their thread primarily from China. Then they started to import twill and other silk fabrics from China, and changed their business from weaving to dyeing, printing, and producing finished goods. When Canepa joined the family firm in 1968, it was third or fourth largest silk manufacturer in Como.

  In 1998, Canepa decided to retire and sold the business, which is now located outside the city, to his sisters. A year later he got a call from his friend Giampaolo Porlezza, owner of Taroni.

  “Would you be interested in buying my company?” Porlezza asked.

  Realizing that he missed working, Conepa accepted.

  Taroni by then was last silk mill in town. Silk production in the Como region is one-tenth of what it was in 1950. China is now the primary producer, followed by India and Thailand. Italian and Lyonnais silk manufacturing firms are boutique businesses, and their woven silks are still considered the finest. “If a client only wants eighteen meters’ worth, that’s what I’ll do,” Canepa told me. “I take the time to do it right.” In the Como region, there are only a handful of other companies, including Mantero and Ratti, that do silk production of this quality. In Florence there is the Antico Setificio, but its production is minuscule. In Lyon there are a few factories weaving high-quality silk, including Bucol, which is owned by Hermès and produces Hermès’s silk scarves as well as fabrics for other couture houses. And that’s about it.

  We walked up the stairs to the muffled thumping sounds of the looms. As Canepa opened the door to the factory’s production room, I was hit with a gust of wind created by the whirring machines. The air had the same musky odor that I had first smelled in Florence. The sound was deafening. The shuttle on the new computer-run Grob Horgen looms moves so quickly that you can hardly see it—quite a difference from the old ones in Florence pulled through by hand. The older Benninger looms from the 1960s, Canepa shouted to me, are slower and better. “On the old looms,” he hollered, “you can produce a quality that is impossible to produce with modern looms.” One of the Benningers was turning out a sumptuous gold taffeta with bronze and pale pink stripes. It was for a top couture house, Canepa told me. He had me touch another soft white silk with small checks. “It’s waterproof,” he explained. It, too, would show up on a runway in a year. Canepa is contractually not allowed to disclose who his clients are—they like to keep their sourcing a secret—but I can say that most of the major couture houses and the top New York designers use his fabrics for their finest creations.

  Many of Como’s manufacturers have moved over the years to the countryside just south of the city. What were once farms are now industrial parks. One of the top manufacturers in the region is ISAS. p.A. Located in a gated compound behind a big grocery store half an hour down the superstrada from Como, ISA produces ties and scarves for Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Gucci, Fendi, and Pucci. ISA was founded by Giorgio Bianchi just after World War II. As a student, Bianchi visited Paris and was so taken with Hermès’s silk scarves and ties he returned to Como and opened the factory to try to produce an Italian equivalent. He focused on one product: silk twill. He designed some print patterns himself; others he bought in Paris. One of his first clients was Céline, followed by Dior back when Christian Dior himself was at the helm. The company grew quickly, from 1 weaving machine in the late 1940s to 150 in the 1960s, but it was hard to find enough labor, especially in such an agricultural region.

  Since the 1960s, ISA’s business has shifted, like Taroni’s, from weaving to printing and production. Today, the company is run by Giorgio’s son Giambattista and his wife, Gabriella, a fashionable young couple with a lot of verve. They understand the importance of China in the manufacturing business and are adapting accordingly. Weaving accounts for a mere 5 percent of ISA’s business, and that work is very specific: the company is down to thirty looms and only produces complicated fabrics like jacquard or precious taffetas and chiffons—“the luxurious fabrics,” Gabriella Bianchi explained to me when I visited ISA in March 2006. “We leave the less expensive fabrics to others in Italy or to China.” Gabriella is a vivacious brunette with an hourglass figure and a winning smile. When we met, Gabriella was dressed in a tight white denim dress, a black leather fur-trimmed jacket cinched with a wide belt, and a saucy pair of gold 1940s-style heels. This, in Italy, is office wear.

  Gabriella grabbed an umbrella and escorted me across the parking lot from the shiny white corporate offices to the old beat-up factory. The weaving was moved off-site five years ago—about five kilometers down the road—simply because it was too loud, she explained as we entered the old loom room. The space is gargantuan—as big as an airplane hangar—with worn redbrick floors. Today it is where ISA makes all the sample ties and scarves. There are bolts of fabric, worktables, sewing machines. In the next big room, a woman attaches bar-code tags to Vuitton neckties, slides them into cellophane sleeves, and places them in a carton to be shipped. At another table is a box of Gucci twill scarves. For Vuitton and some others, the product is sent to the company, where it is boxed. For Fendi, the product is shipped directly to the stores.

  “We do a lot of printing just for Pucci since LVMH took it over, because we do printing and production for many LVMH brands, including Marc Jacobs, Céline, Dior, Fendi, and Louis Vuitton,” Gabriella explained. We walked up to the design studio, a small room with women at worktables and computers, adjusting scarf print designs. Luxury brand design assistants visit ISA’s factory regularly and consult with the studio on designs. Sometimes they bring their own, and sometimes they alter ISA’s proposed sketches. Often they peruse the old leather-bound scrapbooks that contain swatches of previous prints and weaves for ideas. “This is the history of Como,” Gabriella told me as she paged through a dusty volume of plaids. The tattered pages were brown and mottled, but the fabrics were glorious, the colors pure, the weave tight, the yarn smooth and rich.

  The initial hand-drawn design is scanned into the computer so that it can be copied easily to create a repetitive pattern. A prototype is produced by hand on enormous silk screens in the print room, a gigantic space with a dozen fifty-meter-long tables and big plastic tubs of ink that look like huge pots of finger paint. The place smells like a Xerox machine. I watched as two large, strong women hooked a heavy, square screen on top of a long swath of twill on the table. They poured some ink on the screen, pulled a big scraper across it, unhooked it, lifted the apparatus, and moved it to the next plain section of twill. Once the prototype is approved, the design is programmed into computer-driven silk screen machines and the scarves are printed one after another on twill affixed to the long tables. The printed scarves, still stiff with ink, are washed in huge machines until soft and inspected under hot lights for faults.

  Much of the twill ISA uses comes from China. “There are three or four companies there that only do plain twill, and it is cheaper because they never stop production and that’s all they do,” Gabriella explained. “We buy twill from China when the quality doesn’t have to be perfect and the customer wants lower prices. For the first-quality level we still do all the weaving in Como. You can see when something is printed well or woven well. This is the power of Como.”

  Scarves with machine-sewn edges are sent to a sewing room upstairs to be finished. Scarves with hand-rolled, hand-stitched edges are sent to freelancers in the region who work at home or to a factory that specializes in hand-rolled finishing in Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean just off Madagascar. Hermès has some of its silk scarves finished there, too. The Mauritius factory “has good prices and good quality,” Gabriella explains. ISA produces between seven and eight hundred thousand scarves and six to seven hundred thousand ties each year. They used to do more than on
e million ties a year, but “ties are going out of fashion,” she explained. The average twill scarf costs about $40 to $50 to produce. It retails for ten times more, and prices are rarely reduced. The production cost for a scarf in China is 40 percent less, or $25 to $30 apiece. Some brands now produce their scarves in China. But several have remained at ISA—at least for the time being—because, Gabriella explained, “we do small quantities, we are flexible, we do samples in a week, and we’re nearby. We now only do the highest level of the market because it’s impossible for us to make it cheaper. We don’t have the prices. I don’t know what it will be like in ten years, but for the moment, it’s still a good business. And honestly, I don’t think the Chinese are interested in doing small production. At least this is what I hope.”

  THE MANUFACTURING of clothing—like that of perfume, accessories, and every other luxury good—now follows the pyramid model: the exquisite work is produced in a very limited quantity by a coterie of highly skilled traditional craftsmen in France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. The middle range, such as ready-to-wear, is farmed out to big factories in places like Spain, North Africa, Turkey, and the former Eastern bloc countries. Giorgio Armani said in 2005 that it produced 18 percent of its high-end ready-to-wear line, Armani Collezioni, in Eastern Europe. Gucci makes some of its sneakers in Serbia, and Prada does the upper part of some shoes in Slovenia.

  In 2004, Valentino reportedly began to outsource its $1,300 men’s suits to a factory in Cairo, where they were produced by veiled Muslim seamstresses who learned their craft by watching videos on televisions in the workshop. At the time, Italian textile workers’ hourly wages were $18.63; the Egyptian workers earned 88 cents. When the suits, destined for the European market, arrived in Italy, Valentino representatives ripped out the “Made in Egypt” tags—in Europe, companies do not have to declare where their goods are produced. Valentino suits for the American and Japanese markets, which have stricter laws about provenance labeling, were produced in Italy. In the United State and Japan, “perceived quality is more important than real quality,” explained Valentino CEO Michele Norsa. The cut in manufacturing costs had a positive impact on the bottom line: in 2005, Valentino posted its first profit in years.

  The lowest end of the luxury spectrum, like logo-covered luxury T-shirts and knitwear, are produced in developing nations such as China, Mexico, Madagascar, and Mauritius. In February 2003, I traveled to Mauritius to see the process firsthand.

  Mauritius is a tropical paradise so ravishing that Mark Twain once wrote, “You gather the idea that…heaven was copied after Mauritius.” Endless acres of lush sugarcane fields surround jagged volcanic mountains that rise out of the sea mist like peaks of meringue. Wide tranquil bays of vibrant turquoise are framed by swaths of fine white sand and swaying palms. Colonized over the centuries by the Dutch, the British, and the French, the island was the home of the legendary dodo bird. Today Mauritius is a favored winter holiday destination for Europeans and an offshore financial center for India. It has also been, for the last thirty years, one of the world’s key centers for textile manufacturing. Textile manufacturing in Mauritius is a purely contrived industry. Unlike other major garment manufacturing countries, which also produce much of their raw materials, Mauritius imports everything, from the yarn to the packaging. Hundreds of factories dot the inland hills, where workers—predominantly women—produce sweaters, cashmere blankets, and T-shirts for everyone from discount retailers like JC Penney to luxury brands such as Giorgio Armani and Burberry.

  Mauritius was first “discovered” by the Portuguese, shortly after Vasco da Gama’s expedition around the Cape of Good Hope in 1498. In 1511, the Dutch claimed the island and named it in honor of their sovereign, Maurice. During their fifty-year stay in Mauritius, the Dutch not only wiped out the dodo but also introduced and cultivated sugarcane, which they harvested with slaves they imported from Africa. In 1715, the French arrived from the neighboring island of Bourbon (now R��union), renamed it Île de France, and declared it French. During the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century, the French lost the island to the British, who renamed it Mauritius and developed the sugarcane business with the help of indentured laborers from their nearby colony, India. Today most Mauritians speak both French and English. In 1968, Mauritius received its independence from Great Britain, but, as Mookeshwarsing Gopal, chairman of the Mauritius Export Processing Zone Association (MEPZA), the industry’s trade association, explained to me, “it suffered serious economic structural problems. It was a poor country.”

  The one thing Mauritius did have was abundant, unemployed manpower. In a 1975 trade agreement to boost developing nations, it received the right to export textiles duty-free and quota-free to the European Economic Community (now the European Union). The government saw textile manufacturing as Mauritius’s key to prosperity and dedicated all that it could to developing the industry there. This allowed companies like Shibani Knitting Company Ltd. to flourish.

  Shibani is a big block building within the barbed-wire-topped chain-link fences in Phoenix, an industrial area in the hills inland from Port Louis. As I pulled into the parking lot, I noticed a Max Mara factory across the street. Upstairs, in the clean, white retail offices of Shibani stood racks of its in-house label knitwear, T-shirts, and lingerie for the spring season one year away. If it weren’t for the view of the Indian Ocean out the windows, I would have thought I was in a showroom on Seventh Avenue in New York. In walked Sunil M. Hassamal, a large-set Mauritian-born man of Indian origin. He sat down, asked an assistant to bring two cups of tea, and told me about his company, one of the largest on the island.

  Hassamal’s family, one of the more important textile manufacturers in Mauritius, decided in 1986 to produce sweaters for Europe and opened Shibani with a South African partner. “Unlike other Mauritian companies who had cheap labor, hand machines, handlooms—that was the traditional way of doing it—we used electronic machines from day one,” he explained. “And we have kept modernizing and expanding so today we at are at the forefront of technology.”

  That’s evident from the moment you enter the factory downstairs. The knitting room is the size of a football field, the dozens of knitting machines roaring as loudly as newspaper presses; many of the workers wear protective earphones. Most of the machines are from Stoll of Frankfurt, Germany, and bear the company slogan—“The right way to knit!”—embossed on the side. There are also two three-gauge Shima Seiki machines from Japan. “Some people cut up fabric and sew it together,” explain Hassamal. “Here, the whole thing is knitted on a machine.”

  Among the labels Shibani produces in Phoenix and at its two other sweater and one intimate apparel factories on the island are the French catalog company La Redoute, the Paris department store Le Bon Marché, the high-fashion label Zadig & Voltaire, the French couture house Carven, Armani Jeans, Nordstrom, and Ralph Lauren. “We used to do Calvin Klein Europe,” Hassamal said. “And we do all the cashmere blankets for Ralph Lauren.” All of Shibani’s cashmere comes from Mongolia and is then dyed and spun in China, Italy, and Scotland. Chinese cashmere is the cheapest; Scottish the finest and most expensive. “The quality used in a sweater depends on what the client wants to pay,” Hassamal said. Generally, clients bring their own sketches and some supply one-off samples as patterns to follow. The sweater is drawn on a computer following specs for colors, type of yarn (cashmere, lamb’s wool, Merino wool, or cotton), kind of stitch, and size or gauge of the knitting. When the test swatch is approved, the whole production is run. Then the sweaters are sent to the finishing room to have trims, collars, buttons, and labels added.

  It was break time when we walked into the finishing room. The Mauritian women were chatting and drinking tea, as the Chinese girls slept on folded arms on their knitting machines. In the mid-1990s, Mauritius was at full employment and needed more textile laborers to keep the factories running. The government devised a system that grants foreign—or expatriate (expat)—workers three-year contr
acts. Expats—who come from China, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and India—are an essential part of the Mauritian textile labor force; in 2004, there were twenty thousand expats working in manufacturing on the island, most twenty to thirty years old. Up to 25 percent of a factory’s workforce can be expats. The factory owners are obliged to provide housing and board as well as pay wages. Generally, expats are limited to one three-year posting. “But they take another passport and come again two or three years later,” says Michel Mayer, marketing director for World Knits, a T-shirt manufacturer in Coromandel, Mauritius, that produces for JCPenney, Guess, and Armani Jeans, among others.

  Shibani has eighteen hundred workers on sweaters and four hundred on intimate wear; expat workers predominantly from China and India make up about 10 percent of the workforce in the sweater factories. Shibani’s four factories run twenty-four hours, seven days a week, with four shifts each day. The legal Mauritian workweek is forty-five hours. “I’d rather give preference to Mauritius workers than deal with lodging, food, passage tickets,” Hassamal admitted, but “imports are better skilled as machine operators and there is less absenteeism because of family duties. Plus they don’t mind working nights and Mauritians do.” When the break was over, the Chinese girls snapped up and went right back to work. Their faces were blank, their eyes empty. No one spoke. All you could hear was the deafening sidth-sidth-sidth of the knitting machines.