Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster (24 page)

Few admit to it. The small Italian leather goods firm Furla said it began to produce some of its wallets and handbags in China in
2002
. Despite Bernard Arnault’s declaration at a luxury conference in Hong Kong in December
2004
that only European artisans truly knew how to make luxury goods, one of his LVMH brands, Céline, produced its denim and leather Macadam handbags in China the following year. A brown leather tag inside the bag stated that it was designed in Paris and “handcrafted in China with the greatest attention to quality and detail.” In May
2005
, Prada CEO Patrizio Bertelli boldly told the
Financial Times
that the company, which at the time claimed that all its clothing and accessories were made in Italy, was “currently evaluating a series of opportunities” to produce in cheaper labor markets elsewhere in the world, including China. In fact, Prada had already been producing leather goods in China for at least six months when Bertelli made that statement.

Today, the luxury brand handbag is a study in globalization: hardware, like locks, come from Italy and China (primarily Guangzhou); the zipper comes from Japan; the lining comes from Korea; the embroidery is done in Italy, India, or northern China; the leather is from Korea or Italy; and the bag is assembled partly in China and partly in Italy. The sourcing is sometimes as questionable as the true provenance of the bag: one manufacturer told me that one supplier claims his silk is British when in fact he buys it in China, stores it in the United Kingdom, and then sells it at European prices.

Most luxury brands don’t produce a lot of different styles in China. Instead they reproduce the same designs in different colors or materials. The luxury brand’s design team dreams up a new bag and sends a pattern to the factory in China. The manufacturer does the research to find the materials, hardware, and, if needed, a source to do the embroidery. Sometimes the manufacturer’s research pays off: one replaced an Italian-made fabric that cost $
21
.
50
(€
18
) a yard with one from Korea that cost $
12
, and, he added, “the quality is better.” The Chinese manufacturer makes the prototype. Once corrected and approved, the bag is put into production.

The luxury brands are fiercely protective of the logo and only send the number of labels needed for the amount of bags in each order. “If that label turns up on other bags, the logo is worthless,” the manufacturer told me. Few bags actually carry the “Made in China” label. If they do, it is well hidden. For one bag, the tag was sewn into the bottom seam of the inside pocket. For another, it was stamped on the reverse side of a postage-stamp-size leather flap that bears the brand’s logo. You need a magnifying glass to read it. The majority, however, carry a “Made in Italy,” “Made in France,” or “Made in the U.K.” label. The brands have little tricks to get around the China label. One brand’s “Made in China” label is actually a sticker affixed to the outer package. The luxury brand rips it off when the goods arrive in Italy and replaces it with a “Made in Italy” label. Another has the entire bag made in China except for the handle. The bag is shipped to Italy, where the Italian-made handle is attached. Some brands have the tops of shoes—the most labor-intensive part of the process—made in China and then attach the soles in Italy. These items can carry the “Made in Italy” label.

The craftsmanship can be complicated. I watched Chinese girls make intricately braided leather handles and tassels. “We learned the technique from Italy,” the manufacturer told me. The amount of glue used to construct the bag dictates the level of luxury—and the retail price. Low-end luxury brands use a lot of glue. Higher-end brands use little. One young and highly respected European brand that produces only very fine leather goods doesn’t use glue at all—but it does quietly produce most of its goods in China. When you walk into its production room, you only smell leather. “I hate glue,” the manufacturer told me. “But that’s how the brands can afford it.” And how they make their profits.

Production in China costs
30
to
40
percent less than in Italy. “So we aren’t dirt cheap,” the manufacturer said. “There is a preconception in the U.S. and Europe that if the brands move to China they’ll get it for
10
percent. Sure, there are factories that will do that, but the quality won’t be there and the brand will suffer. If we do it right and they get good products from our effort, they will make money. In the end, we are the money generator for them.”

Indeed they are. The evening after I visited the factory in China, I met some friends for a drink at the bar at the new Harvey Nichols store in Hong Kong. As I entered the store from the Landmark luxury shopping mall in the heart of the Central business district, I passed through the handbag department. To my right, on the shelf, sat the exact same bag I saw the Chinese girls making in the factory. It cost the brand $
120
to produce. It was for sale at Harvey Nick’s for $
1
,
200
.

A C
HINESE FACTORY
can be a bit like a university campus. The place is populated with thousands of unmarried young people ages sixteen to about twenty-six. They often live in dorms on the property, eat off metal trays at long tables in a cafeteria, and ride bikes or take the bus to town during their time off to hit a karaoke bar. One factory I visited has a game room with pool tables, Ping-Pong, and Foosball; a basketball court; a convenience store; and a computer room. A gym was under construction. There’s a doctor onsite and day care. And the place was absolutely spotless. “If it’s not a healthy environment, then the workers aren’t healthy and our goods reflect it,” the manufacturer told me, adding, “We are one of the few exceptions.” Factories that produce luxury goods have a couple of thousand workers, small by comparison to mass brands. “A Nike factory will have twenty to thirty thousand people,” the manufacturer told me. “It’s a town.”

Most of the workers are young women, somewhere between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-six. The legal working age in China is sixteen—though, the manufacturer noted, “there are tons of kids in regular factories here who have fake papers.” Only about
15
percent of the workers in Dongguan are locals. The rest come from the poor cities in the north and from the countryside and require a permit from their hometowns to go elsewhere to work. They earn about $
120
a month and send it all home. “They come to work and get out,” he said. “They work enough to support a family, build a house. In five to six years, they earn between fifty and sixty thousand RMB, which is about $
6
,
000
to $
7
,
000
. The workers have no friends. No relatives nearby. They don’t mind doing overtime. They don’t care if they are working long hours or don’t have fun. They just work. It’s a big cultural difference.”

At the factory I visited in October
2005
, the workday is
8
:
00
a.m. to
12
:
30
p.m and
2
:
00
p.m. to
7
:
00
p.m., and if there is overtime,
9
:
00
p.m. to
11
:
00
p.m. at one and a half times the usual hourly rate. All workers have Sunday off. This is unusual: most factories in China run
24
/
7
, and shifts can last up to ten hours. I arrived in the early evening, just as the workers were about to go on break. In the four-floor factory there is nearly twenty-seven thousand square feet of production space. The windows were open and slatted to allow for cross-breezes. Fans sat silently in the corners; summers in the Pearl River delta are stiflingly hot and humid. It takes about ten months to build a factory in China from scratch to production—one-fourth the time it does in the United States. In one large room of fifteen thousand square feet, there were fifteen rows of long worktables. At each table stood about a dozen thin young women in pale blue short-sleeve shirts and dark trousers busily gluing, hammering, and stitching seams on sewing machines. They were surrounded by bags with coveted luxury brand logos. A room this size processes fifteen to twenty thousand units a month. Unlike at Hermès in France or Gucci in Italy, it’s all assembly-line work. I watched one girl as she glued handles onto the outside of a canvas tote. She placed a cardboard pattern on top of the canvas to make sure the straps were attached in the right place, hammered them, then handed the bag off to the next girl, who in turn stitched the handles to the canvas on a machine. The glue girl did about two bags a minute. When it was dinnertime, the girls put everything neatly in its place, covered the machines—in case of rain—and walked out, single file, giggling and gossiping as they crossed the common to the six-story dorm for dinner in the ground-floor canteen. Each girl had a photo ID badge on a chain around her neck.

Not surprisingly, manufacturers in China are starting to experience problems. Supplies are going up in price. There are electricity shortages because there are so many factories. And there’s a shortage of what is known as “sophisticated labor”: work that requires refined skills. As workers gain more education, they demand more in wages and perks. Salaries went up
30
percent from
2000
to
2005
, from $
90
to $
120
a month, simply to retain workers. The gyms and computer rooms help, too.

The brands aren’t making it any easier. “They get all the human rights complaints,” explained the manufacturer. “It’s killing me because they put constraints and complain that we don’t pay enough. I say, ‘If you want it made same way for the same wages then just produce in your country.’ We never want to treat the workers badly because we want to make the product. But the brands are helping the workers, giving them more value.” Nevertheless, there are still casualties. On the way to Dongguan, we read a story in the paper of a worker who, just the day before, left the factory in an industrial zone in Guangzhou after a twenty-four-hour shift, collapsed in the street, and died. “Pure fatigue,” the manufacturer told me. “It’s one of thousands of cases here.”

C
AN YOU SMELL
the silk?” Laudomia Pucci asked.

We were standing in the entrance of the Antico Setificio Fiorentino, the oldest silk factory in Italy, maybe even in the world, housed in an eighteenth-century building near the Amerigo Vespucci Bridge in Florence. Before us sat a rack of big wooden spools wrapped with luminescent silk thread in hues that only nature can produce: the dark blue of the deep Mediterranean, a gold the color of wheat at harvest, a fuchsia like French tulips in springtime.

I took a deep breath and could indeed smell the silk: a damp musky smell of forests and cocoons.

Silk is known as the queen of textiles. It has been used for Chinese emperors’ robes and Catherine the Great’s wedding dress, for Italian noble families’ banners and the Pope’s Swiss Guard flags, and for the thread that stitched war wounds closed. Skiers wear socks made of silk because it naturally wicks moisture away from the body. Ben Franklin flew a silk kite during his electricity experiments. Today silk remains the fabric of choice for couture gowns, whether they are in taffeta, satin duchesse, organdy, or tulle. “Silk does for the body what diamonds do for the hand,” designer Oscar de la Renta once said.

Laudomia Pucci, a slim, elegant brunette in her early forties, is the daughter of Marchese Emilio Pucci di Barsento, the founder of Pucci, the Florentine luxury fashion brand known for its psychedelic-print silk jersey clothes that has been majority-owned by LVMH since
2000
. The Puccis have deep roots in Florence. In the fifteenth century, the family served as political advisers to the ruling Medicis. Their sumptuous thirteenth-century palazzo, on Via de’ Pucci, is decorated with elaborate frescos, and their family chapel in Santissima Annunziata is a Renaissance gem.

Emilio Pucci was raised with his younger brother and sister by severe nannies. An accomplished athlete, Pucci excelled in swimming, tennis, fencing, and skiing. He studied agriculture at the University of Milan and the University of Georgia, and received a skiing scholarship at Reed University in Portland, Oregon, where he earned his master’s degree in social sciences. While there, he designed uniforms for the ski team. He later earned a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Florence. He was a member of the
1934
Italian Olympic ski team and served as a pilot in the Italian air force in World War II, returning “covered with medals,” Laudomia boasted.

After the war, he worked as a ski instructor in Switzerland and, continuing his dual passions for innovation and skiing, designed the first slim stretch ski pants with an elastic stirrup. They appeared in
Harper’s Bazaar
in
1948
and soon were the preferred look on ski slopes around the world. The following summer, Pucci opened a small boutique on Capri, the jet-set haven just off the coast of Naples, and filled it with clothes for “island life,” like cropped pants, dubbed Capri pants, in cheerful colors like Mediterranean blue, bougainvillea pink, and sunshine yellow. In
1954
, he officially launched the House of Pucci. With the fabric mills in Como, he created print silk jersey that clung sensually to the body. Originally production was in Florence, in little ateliers around town. He signed the psychedelic patterns “Emilio,” respectfully leaving the Pucci family off and out of the limelight. “He believed women had to be free to move, no corsets, or girdles,” Laudomia explained.

By the mid-
1950
s, the Antico Setificio Fiorentino was in a state of semi-abandonment. In
1958
, Emilio Pucci purchased the majority share of the factory from a consortium of fellow Florentine noble families, effectively saving it from the wrecking ball. “It was supposed to be bought by a hotel corporation and turned into a modern hotel,” Laudomia said incredulously. Pucci poured some of his sizable fortune into the factory and commissioned it to reproduce the damasks and taffetas that for centuries had been used to decorate the family’s palazzo. The looms have been singing ever since.

In the spring of
2004
, I rang up Laudomia and asked her to show me the Antico Setificio Fiorentino. “It’s really a special place,” she told me as we drove across the Arno and turned the corner onto Via Bartolini. You walk down a narrow stone path draped in wisteria, cross a small courtyard garden where for centuries the children of weavers have played, and enter a simple faded yellow houselike building with thick walls, worn brick floors, and big airy rooms with high beamed ceilings. The first room is the warping room, where the silk thread is prepared for the looms. One of the warping machines is a tall wooden cylindrical contraption called Orditoio, built in the eighteenth century according to plans by Leonardo da Vinci. It is the only one known to be in existence today. “You have to kick it to move it,” Laudomia explained to me. The other warping machine at the factory is a Benninger from
1879
.

In the next small room sat big plastic bags stuffed with skeins of gloriously colored silk thread. Until the
1920
s, the Setificio dyed silk, most of it produced in the region. Silk production in Italy disappeared after World War II. Today silk arrives from China in bulk, already dyed and ready to be spooled. You can tell that it has not been treated chemically, because you can hear it rustle. Laudomia took a bolt of emerald green taffeta, called
ermisino
—“the grandfather of taffeta,” she said—and scrunched the fabric. “Look,” she said, “it stands up.” The fabric held the scrunched shape, like tinfoil. “That’s what silk is supposed to do,” she told me. “Silk is a living thing. Today, manufacturers push it so much, they kill it and destroy it. Weaving by hand respects the body of the thread.”

Next comes the pattern making. Back in the Renaissance, the noble families each had looms in their palazzi to produce silks to decorate the house and dress the family members. Laudomia tells me that when the oldest son married, the family would create a new damask pattern that would bear the family’s name. A silk fabric design was also created when a first son was born, and the family owned exclusively it until he died.

The largest and noisiest room of the otherwise serene Setificio is the weaving room. It is there that all the damasks and moirés and even some linens are woven by workers on manual looms. Though it is a magical room of movement, sound, and
richesse,
it is a sad shadow of what it once was. In November
1966
, the Arno flooded and the Setificio, which sits on the river’s banks, filled with water and mud. Most of the patterns, designs, and archives—which included the records of what each loom had produced for centuries—were destroyed, but the looms were salvaged. All are from
1780
and are pedaled with the right leg; the hand pulls a rope, and the shuttle slides through. When I visited one woman was weaving a sixteenth-century lampas called Princess Mary of England; it is made of fine gold thread and advances only sixty centimeters a day.

Workers require five years of training to be able to weave silk and linen at the Setificio. It’s a trade passed down from generation to generation. Back in the
1920
s, Florentine girls came after school to learn how to weave on small looms built for them. Today, there are thirteen weavers, mostly women. Each fabric is made from beginning to end by one weaver because otherwise you would be able to see the change of hand in the cloth. Most weavers at the Setificio are in their thirties or forties. Back in the factory’s heyday, the weavers’ talent was considered so precious that when they decided to marry, the factory would offer handsome dowries and other concessions to get them to stay on.

The Setificio is underwritten by the noble families of Italy who are still shareholders, and it receives commissions from all over the world. In
2000
, the looms produced the silk for the costumes for Siena’s annual Renaissance parade. The factory has also created damasks for one of the royal palaces in Copenhagen and won the commission over Lyon to redo two rooms of the Kremlin; it continues to make silk pouches for potpourri for the Farmacia di Santa Maria Novella, the famed seventeenth-century apothecary that operates in the heart of old Florence. Next door to the factory is a shop that sells the Setificio’s silks and linens. While there, I admired an ivory silk and linen weave called Spinone. It cost €
125
a meter. Laudomia saw my interest. “The problem is, once you do one chair with this fabric, the rest of the room looks awful,” she said with a laugh.

S
ILK IS CREATED
through the process of sericulture, or silkworm farming. Silkworms are not worms at all, but rather caterpillars, and the
Bombyx mori
is the primary variety used for commercial silk. The
Bombyx
is raised on farms in China, Thailand, and India, where it feasts on mulberry leaves and increases its bodyweight ten thousand times in its four-week life span to about the size of an adult thumb. After four moltings, it spins a two-inch-long waterproof cocoon, ejecting liquid silk at about a foot a minute. Two weeks later, it emerges as a moth and mates like crazy for a few hours. The female lays three hundred to five hundred eggs and dies in a few days. The eggs take six weeks to twelve months to hatch. A few moths are allowed to hatch to continue the process. The remaining cocoons are steamed to kill the caterpillar, washed by hand in hot water to remove the gummy substance called sericin, and unwound on a reeling machine, which spools the filaments on a bobbin. The work is swift, the water filthy, smelly, and very hot. Usually five to eight filaments are spun together to create a thread. On some farms in India, young girls make thread by hand, unwinding the cocoons and slapping and twisting the filaments across their thighs.

The Chinese began to produce silk in the third millennium BC for exclusive use by the emperor and his court. The Chinese kept sericulture to themselves for centuries—anyone found guilty of disclosing its secrets was sentenced to death by torture—but the fabric itself made its way westward. When Alexander the Great conquered Persia in
331
BC, he discovered swaths of the luminous silk. The five-thousand-mile Silk Road began in Xi’an, passed through the Jade Gate, and crossed the Turkestan desert, the Iranian plateau, and Asia Minor to Constantinople. There, silk and other exotic goods were loaded on ships and transported to the Mediterranean’s capitals. Travel on the Silk Road peaked during China’s prosperous and culturally rich Tang Dynasty (AD
618
–
907
), and glorious cities along the route, such as Tashkent, Bukhara, and Samarkand, flourished. In Rome, only the wealthiest could afford silk—it was said to be worth its weight in gold—and they wore it so lavishly that the government passed sumptuary laws to restrain its conspicuous display. Caesar’s heir, Octavian, eventually restricted the importation of silk because the material was too costly.

There are many legends about how the knowledge of sericulture arrived in Italy. One recounts that in the sixth century, the Roman emperor Justinian sent two monks to China to smuggle cocoons in a hollow cane back to Italy. Another tells of an Asian princess who brought the fabric to Italy as a bride. The most generally accepted, however, is that of Italian merchants in the Middle Ages who discovered the rich iridescent fabric in Hormuz, Persia, dubbed
ormesino;
learned how it was made; took it home; and reproduced it. Today it is known today as
ermisino,
the taffeta that Laudomia scrunched.

One of the early centers for silk weaving was in the Tuscan town of Lucca. In the fourteenth century, several of Lucca’s weavers settled in Florence and opened the city’s first silk workshops. The city’s rulers granted them tax exemptions to pursue their art. The Arte della Seta, the silk weavers’ guild, was formed and drew up strict guidelines for silk manufacturing. By the mid-fifteenth century, Florentine farmers were required to plant mulberry bushes on their land to feed silkworms. The noble families of Florence, including the Puccis, wholly embraced the luxurious silks for both decor and clothing, as detailed in portraits by such Renaissance masters as Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Botticelli. By the fifteenth century, silk was a symbol of Florence’s wealth and refinement: when Cosimo de’ Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, arrived in Florence, he noted that the streets were filled with “fine tapestries and hangings…There was not a shop to be seen that did not put on a great show of works in silk and sumptuous gold.”

The Como Lake region in northern Italy was at the time a center for wool dying and weaving. The wool came from Scotland and Spain, across Flanders, down the Rhine to Zurich, and over the Alps to Como, where the lake’s pure water was perfect for dyeing. When turf wars broke out across Europe, the wool route shut down. The ruler of the region, Gian Galeazzo Sforza, and his uncle Ludovico Sforza decided to bring silk production from Florence to Como to make up the loss. Como has remained a textile manufacturing center ever since. In the fifteenth century, King Louis XI of France set up silk manufacturing in Lyon to stop French aristocrats from buying the fabric from Italy, and the industry flourished there for centuries.

O
N A RAINY SPRING
afternoon in
2006
, I drove from Milan through the congested industrial northern suburbs to Como, the Alpine lake resort, to meet Michele Canepa, owner of Taroni, the last silk factory in the city. Canepa is one of those friendly yet elegant Italians who instantly make you feel welcome and important. When I met him, he was dressed conservatively yet impeccably in a brown herringbone jacket, charcoal gray flannel trousers, a good blue-and-white-striped shirt with French cuffs, and a conservative black knit tie. His longish chestnut hair was slicked back neatly, and his eyes were smiling. The Taroni headquarters dates to the early twentieth century; Canepa’s office was filled with
1970
s contemporary decor, including a glass-top table for a desk and molded plastic chairs with chrome legs. Outside his small window a strong old magnolia was in bloom, many of its petals scattered about, knocked off by the pouring rain.