The Coat Route (12 page)

“Last year we tried, but we broke down after only a few miles. Quite heartbreaking,” she says, and flashes a smile.

Stefano Ricci has helped keep the Panzeri family business going strong, but other silk companies have not been so lucky.
In the past two decades, Como lost 80 percent of its textile trade to competition from China, according to
The Washington Post
. It was impossible to compete with the low labor costs in cities like Shengzhou, for instance, where work goes on around the clock to produce two-thirds of the world’s neckties—that’s two hundred million ties—most of which wholesale for between $1 and $5. At first, China’s silk was cheap and of poor quality, but over time, as manufacturers acquired high-tech looms from Italy and Germany and honed their skills, their products improved. What they didn’t
have was European design talent, but they went after that, too.
In one case, the Babei Textile Company, the largest of Shengzhou’s 1,100 tie makers, collected a debt owed by a Como customer in the form of the Italian firm’s design shop, “marrying,” as the author James Kynge wrote in
China Shakes the World
, “hundreds of years of Italian creative tradition to the factory’s ability to churn out three million ties a year. That is a combination that just might finish off Como.”

At the same time, the cachet of the “Made in Italy” label was under siege on the home front. Starting in the late 1980s, thousands of entrepreneurial Chinese immigrants began arriving in Prato, a city near Florence with a long history of textile production. At first, they worked for Italian firms. But soon they began to set up their own companies, using cheap labor in the form of their fellow countrymen, many of whom were in Italy illegally. With inexpensive Chinese fabrics and designs swiped from current European collections, they turned out their own
pronto moda
, with a turnaround time of two weeks or less. The goods came with an almost impossible-to-deflect one-two punch: low Chinese prices and legitimate “Made in Italy” labels.
With the production rate of a staggering one million items a day, the
Financial Times
noted in a 2010 report, “the Chinese garment makers of Prato could dress the world’s population in 20 years.” The apparel produced in the nearly four thousand factories was destined for both small vendors and well-known retailers, including fast-fashion giants Zara and H&M. The Bank of Italy estimated that in 2011 there was $1.5 million leaving Prato for China every day.

Meanwhile, the Italian-owned firms were hemorrhaging money and jobs: about half of Prato’s textile makers went bust, and tensions between the two factions escalated.
What seemed to annoy some Italians most,
The New York Times
noted, was that
the Chinese were beating them at their own game—evading taxes, bending rules, and negotiating Italy’s mystifying, often corrupt, bureaucracy. In June 2011, after a yearlong investigation, the police shut down 318 Chinese-owned Prato factories on suspicion of money laundering, tax fraud, and embezzlement. But there had been raids before, and the factories usually returned in the same locations, with different names.

Only the highest of the high-end, it seems—the Stefano Riccis, the Ermenegildo Zegnas, the Loro Pianas—have figured out how to stay out of the line of fire. Bolstered by the exploding luxury market in Asia and elsewhere, they have homed in on a marketing message that emphasizes quality, heritage and the intangible Italian-ness of their brand. To survive, the Italians had to concede the mass market to Asia, and move on. In the process, of course, thousands of jobs disappeared.

“Going for the high-end is not good for the workforce,” Richard D’Aveni, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and the author of
Beating the Commodity Trap
, told me. “It’s good for artisans and designers, and for people with natural talent. But you can’t hire the average guy who would normally be working on a production line.”

“Be careful,” Elisa says, as we step into the cluttered brick-floored dye room at La Polistampa, the family printing business run by her brother Giuliano out of a low dark-red building on the outskirts of Como. In the narrow kitchen-like space, numbered plastic pitchers of colored liquid are lined up on a paint-stained table. A young man is standing at a mixer, whipping up an intense royal blue. We pick our way around hoses and tubs and head into a long, open room that is filled with natural light from gridded windows. Narrow work surfaces run the length of the
room, and on them, stretched tight, are yards and yards of white silk, like runners on banquet tables.

“This is where we print,” Elisa says.

A burly bald man in a Torino Football Club T-shirt and a color-splattered canvas apron places a framed mesh screen on a section of silk in front of me. This is the pattern that was used to make the silk for Lambert’s coat lining; Stefano had called ahead to make sure they showed me that one.

“He’s the
capotavola
—the head of the table, the master,” Elisa says.

“Each screen is for only one color.” The man pours thick black pigment on the edge of the screen and then, with a partner, pulls a squeegee across the screen and back.

When the screen is lifted up, a pattern appears: a fine filigree of delicate black swirls. Another screen is laid down and the squeegee is pulled again, this time adding a flourish of dark blue. Then a third screen sprays a cobalt inside the black, and a fourth screen adds a touch of azure, while a fifth sprinkles fine white dots across the pattern. It is dazzling, the way the print builds in complexity and depth with each pull of the squeegee. I realize that I have never given even a passing thought to this simple truth: that printed cloth starts out as a solid.

Silk absorbs dye like no other fabric—but it is also delicate, and for centuries silk makers puzzled over how to tint the cloth without destroying it.

“Most designers do only three or four pigments in their prints,” Elisa says. “Mr. Ricci uses eleven or twelve, sometimes more. We can only print two of these lengths—thirty-seven meters each—in a day.”

I lean over for a closer look at the intricate pattern.

“Isn’t it unbelievable?” Elisa says.

Raw silk is ecru, but Stefano Ricci always begins his prints on bright-white fabric. Perhaps he was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s dictum: “For those colors which you wish to be beautiful, always first prepare a pure white ground.”

“It costs double to get the white.” Elisa shrugs. “But … he is Mr. Ricci,” she says, rolling her
r
’s with extra verve.

B
ack in Florence, I cross the Arno one morning on the Amerigo Vespucci Bridge. I am headed for the shaded alleys and sunbleached plazas of the San Frediano neighborhood, where for hundreds of years artisans have been unlocking the doors to their workshops, picking up their tools, and going to work crafting beautiful things. I walk along Via Bartolini until I see a weathered metal plaque marking the entrance to the Antico Setificio Florentino, a silk factory established in the mid-eighteenth century by prominent Florentine families who decided to pool their personal looms and designs in a central location. On hand-operated machines, the weavers turned out fabrics sumptuous enough to grace the walls and windows of Florence’s grandest homes. In the centuries that followed, bombs destroyed the factory roof and floodwaters ruined its archives, but the shuttles flew on, back and forth, like swimmers doing endless laps. Talk of the factory’s demolition to make way for a hotel in the 1950s prompted Emilio Pucci, flush with the success of his iconic silk-jersey dress collection, to buy a controlling interest in the factory (his ancestors had been among the factory’s founding families). But in 2010 the workshop was again on the blocks and facing abandonment. Stefano Ricci stepped in and rescued it.

“I buy that place for one reason,” Stefano had told me. “Being Florentines since forever, we don’t want it to disappear.”

Stefano’s plans for the Antico Setificio include restoring looms, bringing in a new generation of weavers, and perhaps starting a weaving school. For his fall 2011 collection, he also created a small group of shot-silk neckties, handwoven at the Antico Setificio.

It is easy to see why he thought this was a thing worth saving. Beyond the heavy wrought-iron gate, a stone path leads past old walls covered with gnarled wisteria to a small garden courtyard and a faded yellow building. An orange tree, heavy with fruit, and flower-filled terra-cotta urns, flank its red door. I am met by Douha Ahdab, the stylish young luxury-apparel executive with an MBA and a résumé that includes stints with Calvin Klein and Escada, who has just been hired by Stefano. She shows me into the showroom, where rolls of jewel-toned fabrics—iridescent taffetas, complex brocades, and shimmering damasks—hang from wooden dowels and a basket of silk-pouch sachets scents the air with lavender and grass.

Douha leads me into the warping room. Here hand-dyed raw silk from Brazil, so fine it would snap in industrial looms, is being twisted into thread. A gray-haired woman in flat shoes stands watch as celery-green filament builds on bobbins. “Leonardo da Vinci designed that,” Douha says, pointing to a corner and a tall, hooped thread-winding contraption, like a barrel without staves. We step into the main workroom, where a dozen towering eighteenth- and nineteenth-century looms sit under high-beamed ceilings. Douha has to shout above the steady clacking beat of weavers at work. To send weft through warp, they operate their machines by stepping on a foot pedal and
pulling on a rope. We watch one woman working on a length of crimson-and-gold fabric.

“The cloth advances at only three inches an hour,” Douha says. “And the pattern is so delicate that this weaver must stay with the length of cloth until it is complete; changing operators midway would alter the tension of the threads and change the look of the design.”

In one corner of the room there is a Jacquard loom, which reads patterns off hand-punched cards, the way a player piano generates music from nubbed rolls. There are other looms that produce only silk fringe or Renaissance
ermesino
, a color-changing iridescent shot-silk taffeta that, if scrunched up, holds its shape like peaks of meringue.

“If you go the Uffizi Gallery, some of the women in the paintings are wearing silk that was woven here on these machines,” Douha says. What was once used for apparel is now principally used in home décor, in palaces and estates all over the world. The Russian government is a longtime client: in 1848, the czar’s interior designers came to the workshop for fabric to hang on the walls of the Kremlin, and more than 150 years later, when two great halls needed renovations, they came knocking again, this time for four thousand yards of silk. In the mailroom, I see rolls of celadon drapery fabric being readied for shipment; they were to be hung in a hall at Claridge’s, the London hotel, Douha says, and had to arrive in time for the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. Most of the fabrics, though, are destined for private homes.

“It’s for a niche customer who has it all, who knows about beauty and quality,” Douha says. “It’s like haute couture for your house. This is the definition of ‘luxury,’ something no one else has. Some clients—especially in the Middle East—want it quick.
That’s tricky. They always want things tomorrow. But this takes time.”

S
tefano Ricci is holding court at the head of a long table in a private dining room at Il Salviatino. Filippo had picked me up at my hotel and driven me back up to Fiesole for dinner with his family and a few friends. Seated across from me are a square-jawed Russian diplomat and his interior-decorator wife. Next to them are Niccolò, Stefano’s movie-star-handsome older son, and his equally gorgeous girlfriend, who have come straight from the airport, having just arrived home from a vacation in the Maldives. At the other end of the table is Stefano’s wife, Claudia, a serene moonfaced woman with bobbed Gloria Steinem hair, who oversees the production side of the company. On Stefano’s left is a young man named Sedrak, who, if I understood correctly, is the son of the former president of Armenia. And next to me is the Milanese banker, the one from lunch the other day.

Stefano has the table rapt with a story about his wife’s new car.

“Claudia saw one she liked, but we were buying other cars that day,” he says. “Then it was her birthday—a significant birthday, I should say, and we were here having dinner in this room. And she was sitting here, with her back to the window, and all of a sudden we hear
vroom, vroom, vroom
. And the car, the one she wanted, drives up behind her.” Stefano beams.

The dinner comes in waves—tiny plates of soft cheeses, shallow bowls of pasta, and platters of roasted meats. Over dessert, the Russian interior designer sets up a laptop and starts a slideshow of some of her Moscow decorating projects; each room is a lavish tone-on-tone explosion of textured drapes, shiny upholstery,
fringed pillows, and crystal chandeliers. She keeps glancing nervously at Stefano.

“It is too long?” she asks. “Should I stop it?”

“No, no. It’s fantastic,” he says. “Keep going.”

We linger. More wine is poured. There is a spirited discussion about plans to join in the culling of blue wildebeest in Namibia. There are passionate testimonials about the supremacy of Russian Standard vodka.
The conversation makes me think of what Mary McCarthy said in
The Stones of Florence
—that this is a “manly” city. This is a manly crowd, with their safari camps and their liquor and their vroom-vroom cars and their singular brand of Italian swagger: J. Peterman meets Sergio Leone. And the thing is, I don’t think I have ever met people who seem to be having a better time. I lean over toward the banker, whom I, encouraged by several glasses of velvety red wine, have begun to think of as my friend.

“It’s nice to be a Ricci,” I say.

The banker smiles. I think he understands.

“Stefano, he only lives one way,” he says. “The best, the best, and the best. It’s simple, really.”

When dinner ends, there is a storm of cheek-kissing. I get back into Filippo’s car. Stefano drives off ahead of us and peels around a corner with a squeal of tires. Filippo laughs and shakes his head.