Despite the occasional sparkles of glamour at some of the catwalk shows and presentations that took place during Milano Moda Donna, recession cast its shadow upon the event.
Roberto Cavalli cancelling the catwalk for his Just Cavalli line wasn’t per se a worrying event. The worrying thing behind it is what will happen to all those people who work for the company that produces the line and how many job cuts will be made once the company is finally restructured.
People who work in the fashion media industry often have an annoying attitude: they praise a fashion show for its entertaining value, they go to the party in honour of a designer afterwards and have fun forgetting that what they saw on the catwalk or in a showroom was actually made by highly-skilled people who work behind the scenes without enjoying all the fun and glamour. Yes, fashion should make us all dream, but you often get in magazines more reports about parties and celebrities than precise reviews of what happened on the catwalks and that can't be right. While Milan Fashion Week was taking place, the workers of the Distretto Tessile (Textile District) in the Prato area organised a demo. I actually wish they had organised it in Milan, where they would have maybe attracted the attention of the foreign press as well.
A few weeks ago the workers of the textile industries in and around Prato asked the government to provide the same financial support the car industry was given. After all, if the textile industries in Prato close down, the so-called “made in Italy” will be damaged.
Last year orders were slow to come in, the same thing is happening this year for next winter’s collections and, by the end of March, there might not be any more funds to support small artisanal factories. The Textile District in Prato already lost many jobs, unemployment rates quickly rose and they will keep on rising in the next few weeks. Somewhere else in Italy, the La Perla workers have been striking about the job cuts. Lingerie manufacturer La Perla was sold to an American company last year and since then there have been strikes in the Bologna-based factory. A couple of days ago also the workers from the Roseto-based factory in the Abruzzo Region went on strike.
Now these strikes and demos may sound like Italian problems but they’re not: many factories in Italy also make clothes and accessories for foreign designers and if a textile factory closes in Prato, particular luxurious fabrics won’t be produced anymore and this will have an impact on many designers, not only on the Italian ones.
At the end of February, the clueless Italian minister of economic development Claudio Scajola stated the government had the intention of supporting the Made in Italy and Italian economy and promised the first interventions in support of the fashion industry will arrive by mid-March. Yet with too many things on its mind and too little will to really help people in need, I wonder how the useless Berlusconi government will genuinely manage to support an industry that employs around 800,000 people.
A few days ago I read on the Internet about vapid Alexa Chung being involved in an advertising campaign to encourage people to buy British fashion. That's really a cutting-edge idea.
Believe it or not, Mussolini did the same thing in Italy in the early 30s. First he founded the Ente autonomo per la mostra permanente nazionale della moda (Autonomous body for the permanent national fashion exhibition, EAMPNM – don’t you find fascist acronyms hilariously long?) that had to support Italian fashion with two Turin-based exhibitions and fashion shows a year. Then he transformed it in 1934 into the Ente nazionale della moda (National fashion body, ENM) that had to promote the Italian fashion industry and persuade women to get inspiration for their clothes from the local traditions. Fashion wasn’t important only on a financial level, it was an important vehicle to build up a new image for Italy and the Duce knew it. Yet Mussolini’s plans for a thoroughly Italian fashion industry failed, mainly because Italian women kept on looking up at Parisian designers for inspirations and kept on copying French models.
Like it or not, we live in a globalised world where we are all directly connected one to the other. Many factories in China – and that’s not a secret – manufacture stuff for famous Italian designers; a few British brands partially or entirely produce their collections in Italy; young people who want to become designers often move from their home country and study or specialise in universities or with fashion houses based in another nation; there are foreign designers working as creative directors for Italian fashion houses and Italian designers working for foreign companies. It’s therefore impossible to just talk about fashion "nationalism" and just supporting British designers or saving the “made in Italy” without talking about finding ways to save the "global" fashion industry.
Besides, why should I favour a British designer over an Italian one or viceversa when through the Internet I can buy clothes and accessories directly from young and new designers maybe based in Brazil, Finland or Iceland? I think one solution is not to fascistically support your own country, but to support all those people who produce high-quality things that last (I’m not talking about high-end designers here, just look at all the young, talented and not so expensive people out there...).
I had the chance of speaking to a few young Italian designers in the last few days and the impression I got from them was they are living in a state of "elated depression": some of them were happy they had been discovered and that their collections had generated an interest, but they were also sad about the fact that, though things are slightly changing thanks to a couple of fashion competitions recently launched by the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana (National Chamber of Italian Fashion), there is no real financial support for all those young designers who want maybe set their own label, organise their catwalk shows and launch their own collections.
France leads the way with amazing fashion competitions such as the prestigious ANDAM prize that gave Gareth Pugh a better chance to get known around, or with that talent trove that is the Hyères Festival. These are the sort of things that should inspire the governments to find new ways to support the fashion industry.
Just a few days ago it was announced that the "Glasgow: Scotland With Style Design Collective" project will be replaced by a new scheme launched by the Glasgow City Marketing Bureau. Under the new scheme ten designers who live, work and sell in Glasgow will be given a budget of up to £45,000 in support of their business. Well-done, bravo.
Yet I had the impression the choice fell on this scheme not as a way to keep the "next" Christopher Kane safely in Glasgow, but because it proved as a viable option to save a bit of money since taking to London Fashion Week the “Glasgow: Scotland with Style Collective” was more expensive.
I don't like the word "globalisation", but if you're really serious about fashion you can’t just build locally without looking at ways to expand internationally, otherwise you will just have created an alternative form of parochialism and your business will eventually die. There are for example a few Italian designers who are relatively new and not so well-known in Italy or Europe, yet they managed to build their own markets in faraway countries such as Russia or Japan, avoiding in this way to fall prey to recession.
I think we should definitely find new ways to save, redevelop and relaunch our local fashion industries, but we should do so without a cosmopolitan mind and heart and focusing on high-quality, otherwise the final collapse of our "beloved" fashion industries will be unavoidable.
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