The Coat Route (11 page)

“I think you are a writer—not, thanks to God, a journalist,” he says, leaning back in his chair. “You can’t believe the things I get asked over and over. ‘What is luxury, Mr. Ricci? How do you define “luxury,” Mr. Ricci?’ ”

I put my notebook in my lap.

“The word ‘luxury’ has been diluted,” Stefano says, and I realize that he is going to answer the question anyway. “I went to a conference on luxury in Moscow five or six years ago. I was giving a talk. I told the audience, ‘I am very sorry to tell you that there is no more luxury. Luxury is dead.’ Everyone was shocked. I told
them that companies that don’t have any idea about luxury have abused the word. I said we need a new word. I suggested ‘excellence.’ It is a good word, but now everyone uses ‘excellence.’ ”

Stefano goes on, unprodded.

“I wrote a book called
Luxor of Egypt
with my friend Zahi Hawass, the minister of state for antiquities—you know, the Egyptian tomb hunter; he’s always in
National Geographic
, in the hat? And in it I said, ‘Luxury is a fresh glass of water in the desert, luxury is friendship, luxury is love, luxury is health. When you are exhausted, to reach the peak of a mountain, that is luxury.’ ”

Luxury, it must also be said, is the very sweet convertible Jaguar in which I later find myself riding shotgun, tearing through the streets of Florence, with Filippo at the wheel. We are following his father to Fiesole and the green hills just outside the city, where the Riccis live and have their factory. Stefano Ricci has invited me to lunch.

Cypress trees line the long driveway that climbs a lazy S-curve toward Il Salviatino, a honey-colored fifteenth-century villa that was once the summer hunting lodge of a cardinal and has just been opened as a five-star hotel. Three men join us—a banker from Milan and two Stefano Ricci managers, whose close-shaved chins are only just starting to shadow. All are in slim dark suits, and all have on bright silk neckties.

We are shown to the outside terrace and seated at a round table under a white canopy. There are clipped geometric gardens below the terrace and, beyond them, under the milky sky, a view of all Florence. Waiters stand at the ready just beyond white leather chesterfield sofas, hustling over whenever Stefano Ricci seems close to making a request. “Now, what to drink?” Stefano says to me. “Champagne, I think. And to eat? What do you like?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Everything,” I say.

“So, allow me. I take responsibility.”

Conversations in Italian effervesce around me. I sip my champagne and look out at the distant bald knob of the Duomo, bobbing above a choppy red-roof sea. A plate of pillowy
ricotta gnudi
, garnished with gray-green leaves of sage, is placed in front of me.

“When this hotel opened,” Stefano says, “we were very happy.”

“We come here a lot,” Filippo says, and I get it. To them, this is the corner deli—a place to grab lunch.

Stefano tells me that he is about to open a new factory just over the hill from where we are sitting.

“It is big enough to hold all my toys,” he says, laughing.

Among them, he says, are a collection of hunting trophies bagged on Ricci family safaris, including an upright, full-grown polar bear, a North American mountain goat, dozens of wild boars, and tusks from an African elephant. Each summer Stefano and his wife, Claudia, along with Filippo and Niccolò, Stefano’s thirty-year-old son, who is the company’s CEO, pack suitcases full of custom-made khakis, leather boots, pith helmets, and hunting rifles (“You have no idea how hard it is to get permission to bring them on an airplane,” Filippo tells me later) and head off in pursuit of big game. Their expeditions have taken them from the Yukon to Pakistan to Bolivia.

“As a boy, I was always running away from school during hunting season,” Stefano says. “It was like a religion. My greatuncle would say, ‘Let’s go,’ and we’d take off into the hills. I would come back to school with pheasants and boar. Then the priests don’t mind so much that I was gone.”

The Riccis spend three weeks every summer in Tanzania.

“I hunt for a few hours, and then I spend the rest of the day
designing my next collection. People think I’m crazy, working on my holiday, but it’s not working. For me, it is a joy. I’m able to focus, to have a clear view, away from the world of tailoring and fashion,” he says. “I always select a camp near a big river, in the middle of nowhere. We have a satellite phone—only for emergencies. It is a joy to be able to share my passion with my family, to be out there with all the persons I care about.

“This year, I am going after a prehistoric monster in Rukwa. A giant crocodile. Huge,” he says, and I have to suppress the urge to laugh out loud. “Filippo has the record, with five and a half meters, and I am going for six meters. You have to be silent when you hunt crocodile. You can’t let a twig snap. And you have to shoot them in the temple from a hundred and fifty meters. If you miss by just a little, you lose him.”

A waiter puts a plate of braised beef cheeks in an eggy sauce in front of me, and another refills my champagne glass, then Stefano’s. I ask Stefano what other toys he has.

“I collect vintage cars,” he replies, but won’t say how many when I ask. “I have … quite a few. They are mostly Aston Martins from the fifties. Every year, my wife and sons, we all drive in the Mille Miglia.”

I have read about this race; it’s a thousand-mile vintage-sports-car road rally from Brescia to Rome and back. Stefano is one of the sponsors.

“I’m driving this year with Burt Tansky—you know, from Neiman Marcus. It’s fantastic—millions of Italians line the streets. And we present the Stefano Ricci Gentleman Driver trophy to the team whose outfits best match their car. I sleep for three days when it is over.”

I ask him if he practices for the race.

“This Saturday I am taking my car for a test drive. We’ll
drive it to the sea and back—a few hours. I am sorry to say you cannot come. It’s too dangerous. Those old cars have very little brake system. In the race, once in a while someone dies.”

A perfect cylinder of cream and mascarpone layered with chocolate wafers and topped with fresh raspberries is placed before me.

“Oh, I love that,” Filippo says, eyeing my dessert.

Stefano calls for the chef. When he appears, Stefano pumps his hand and speaks to him in effusive Italian, obviously complimenting him on the meal. Then a hotel employee appears with a long envelope and hands it to me. It is a train ticket for the 5 p.m. trip to Como, via Milan.

“Now you go see my silk. Then you know why Stefano Ricci is so expensive,” Stefano says with a sly smile.

According to Confucius, the story of silk begins in 2640 b.c., when a cocoon, most likely that of the native
Bombyx mandarina
moth, fell out of a mulberry tree into the teacup of a fourteen-year-old Chinese empress. When she fished it out of the hot liquid, the cocoon unraveled, revealing itself to be one long, shimmering filament. Her discovery led to an intensive study of the moth, and when its life cycle was understood the Chinese began to practice sericulture, the breeding of silkworms in captivity, in order to harvest raw silk. The story may be more myth than fact, but what is certain is that over the next thousand years of domestication the silk moth evolved into a species known as
Bombyx mori;
flightless, blind, and dependent on its captors, its only mission is to mate and lay hundreds of poppy-seed-size eggs.

The life of a silkworm is at once pedestrian and profound. When the eggs hatch, the tiny larvae embark on an almost nonstop eating binge, plowing their way through layer after layer of white mulberry leaves, their food of choice. In a breeding room,
where hundreds of thousands of worms are feeding, it is said that the sound is like that of a steady rain on a tin roof. After thirty-two days, when the caterpillar has multiplied its weight by ten thousand and shed its skin four times, it begins to spin a cocoon by moving its head from side to side in a figure-eight pattern, extruding from two glands under its jaw a liquid that—in an amazing trick of chemistry—becomes solid as soon as it hits the air. The larva spins continuously for three days, shrinking as it constructs its white, multilayered oval pod.

Left alone, the moth would soon break out of the cocoon and the cycle would begin again. But when harvesting high-quality silk is the goal, the moth must be killed inside the cocoon before it damages the mile-long silk filament. This is usually done by boiling it to death. Animal-rights advocates have pushed for humane silk-harvesting practices. There is a small market for Ahimsa, or Peace, silk, made from the broken fibers of cocoons after the moth has been allowed to emerge naturally, but the silk is less lustrous and far more expensive than silk produced in the traditional way. Scientists have also been studying how to get at silk produced by wild caterpillars, whose cocoons have a hard coating that makes unraveling almost impossible.
In 2011, researchers from England and Kenya discovered a way to remove that mineral layer without damaging the fibers using an acidic solution—something that could help open the door to a lucrative industry in poor countries where there is a large population of wild caterpillars.

Silkworms are extremely sensitive; expose them to cool temperatures, drafts, loud noises, humidity, tobacco smoke, even the smell of sweat or extra-sweet perfume, and they may produce inferior silk or no silk at all. Few creatures have been studied as extensively as the
Bombyx mori
. In the past several decades, research
on silkworms and moths has led to major discoveries about genetics, heredity, the brain, and the mysteries of sexual attraction. Pheromones, for instance, were first isolated and identified when scientists realized that one sexually ready female silkworm moth could attract every male moth within a mile, just by giving off a minuscule amount of scent through the nanotunnels in her antennae.

More recently, researchers have blasted silkworms with an electric field to induce them to spin more durable silk, fed them dyed leaves to coax them to produce colored silk, and even implanted them with spider genes to get them to spin a hybrid version of Kevlar-strong spider dragline silk. (Since spiders are cannibalistic, raising them in groups for raw silk has so far proved to be an exercise in futility.) Researchers at Tufts University have applied their knowledge of caterpillars to design soft-bodied robots. Taiwanese engineers have used silk proteins in transistors to increase the page-turning speed of e-books.

For more than two thousand years, the Chinese guarded the secret of silk. Anyone who dared to smuggle eggs, worms, or moths over the border was executed. Eventually, the secret leaked out, first to Korea, then to Japan, Persia, India, and Arabia. Sericulture made it to the West in the middle of the sixth century, when two monks, sent by the Byzantine emperor Justinian, sneaked silkworm eggs and seeds from the mulberry tree across the border by hiding them in hollow bamboo walking staffs. Four hundred years later, King Roger of Sicily captured Greek silk weavers, brought them back to Palermo, and set them up in a silk-making operation in his palace. From Sicily, silkworm breeding moved to Northern Italy, where forests of white mulberry trees were planted in order to ensure a constant food supply for the voracious larvae. In a bid to boost an economy dragged down by
the faltering wool trade, Italian rulers moved sericulture to the tranquil shores of Lago di Como, a long, deep divining-rod-shaped lake on the Swiss border, about twenty-five miles north of Milan.

The sky is dark when my train pulls into the Como station. Elisa Panzeri, a petite forty-year-old Demi Moore look-alike with straight espresso-colored hair and an even smile, has been sent by Stefano to meet me. Elisa is in the silk business, which should come as no surprise, because, until very recently, almost everyone in this small two-thousand-year-old city on the tip of the southwestern fork of the lake had a hand in the silk trade.

We drive north a few miles on Via Regina, to Cernobbio, and find a place to park. Across the narrow lake, lights give contour to the ridgeline that snakes for thirty miles along the eastern shore. The town is quiet now, except for the easy slap of water against the dock and the insect whine of a motorbike climbing into the hills. Come summer, though, the plane-tree-lined promenade will be filled with tourists stupefied by the beauty of the place: the high alpine peaks to the north, the extravagant waterfront palazzos with their terraced gardens, and the people—the people!—stepping ashore from the polished mahogany decks of Riva speedboats; women with cascading hair, stilettos, and tight dresses, and men in open shirts, flat-front trousers, and pastel loafers, looking as if they’re headed for a long, Bellini-soaked lunch with George Clooney, perhaps, whose twin villas are just down the road.

Mr. Clooney, alas, is not in the Trattoria del Vapore tonight. At a table near a stone fireplace, Elisa and I work our way through beef tartare,
risotto con pesce
, and a bottle of white wine as she tells me about her family. Her father, a longtime friend of Stefano Ricci’s, started his own silk-screening business in 1974. By then,
disease and high costs had wiped out the silkworm population and sericulture was no longer being practiced in Italy, but the Comaschis, as Como residents are called, were doing amazing things with the raw silk they were importing from China. No one—not even the esteemed silk workers of Lyon, France—could match their skills in finishing, dyeing, and printing fabric. The designers knew it, and a parade of them came through Como to source their silks: among them Ferragamo, Pucci, Gucci, Oscar de la Renta, Yves Saint Laurent, Mary Quant, John Galliano, Ralph Lauren, and Gianni Versace. These days, Panzeri’s biggest customer is Stefano Ricci.

“He spends a lot of time in Como,” Elisa says. “He was here for ten days before the Pitti. He is always working. He’s up early to talk to China and stays up late to talk to L.A. With Mr. Ricci, it is expected we go two hundred miles an hour.”

This is more than a figure of speech, I discover. In a few months, Elisa will be driving in the Mille Miglia road rally with Stefano’s wife, Claudia.