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While researching clothing and manufacturing costs, I heard about the book “Made in Italy” by Giuseppe Iorio. Following the scandal of Dior and Armani manufacturing their overpriced bags in illegal workshops in Italy, I wanted to learn more about “Made in Italy” and this book was able to answer all my questions.
The book is a bit dated and only available in Italian. But that’s not a problem for me because thanks to AI, I can now translate any book for my personal use. Many professionals working in Italy would also like this book to be translated into English, but it has never been done.
Today, I’m going to share information that I found interesting in the book.
Giuseppe Iorio worked for the large Italian textile group Ittierre, and had to regularly visit factories around the world to sign contracts or monitor progress. The worst part is that he wasn’t even working for fast fashion, but for Italian luxury brands.
The book begins with an account of the author’s nth trip to Transnistria. We first follow him to Transnistria where he explains that the country is under a dictatorship. The cost of labor is therefore set by Smirnov, the dictator. Here, it’s dirty money, miserable wages, atrocious working conditions.
In Transnistria, a luxury garment can be produced for 20 euros per piece. Compared to 50 euros in Italy and 35 euros in Romania. “Luxury fashion brands have plenty of margin to be able to work in Italy, given that they resell their products at scandalous prices compared to the quality they offer.”
For jackets worth 1000 euros, they can clearly charge us 30 euros more to cover manufacturing in Italy. No, to save these 30 euros, they prefer to know nothing and produce cheaply elsewhere than in Italy. Why? He claims that we are in a system based on “the most desperate labor possible (…) the fundamental principle is that of economy at all costs.” The system is also based on speed. “Speed in production and speed in deliveries. Speed is economy. Speed is invading the market before others.”
I repeat, here we are talking about brands that have large margins and sell us clothes for 400, 600, 1000 euros.
“The cost is calculated by the minute. The labor expense is evaluated in cents per minute: in Italy, it’s forty cents per minute of work (that’s what a machine operator costs), in Romania it should be fifteen or even thirteen, in Bulgaria eleven, in Moldova and Serbia ten or less, in Armenia zero point eight…”
“Cheap materials combined with very low labor costs and voilà! In the store, they offer you, nicely packaged at a thousand euros, a garment that’s barely worth thirty!”
He compares the modern textile industry to a new form of slavery.
Many Chinese are “imported” from China to work in sweatshops, in basements on the outskirts of Italian cities (Prato, for example).
“Once in Italy, they should work at least two years for free to repay the agreed debt, or rather extorted by those cursed mafia who had granted them the “privilege” of a journey made in dirty and dilapidated trucks, of endless days spent in sordid crates with little or nothing to eat.”
But this practice has also spread to cheaper European countries, like Romania. The Sonoma factory in Bacau (Romania) finds that Romanians ask for too much (they should have been content with 260 euros per month!) so they have imported labor from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and remote regions of China. Workers’ accommodations are inside the very hangars where they work. With beds pressed against each other, placed a few meters from the production and manufacturing lines. Due to visa restrictions, they are not allowed to move freely in Romanian territory and are accompanied for their weekly Sunday outing to shop for groceries (food being at their expense). So 6 days of work per day. The workload is enormous and workers may have to work 18 hours a day if necessary, and even on Sundays. Manufacturing costs here are even lower than in China itself. The work comes from Chinese hands, but it’s not “Made in China,” it’s “Made in Romania,” in Europe. Very large Italian brands are produced here.
The author then takes us to see a factory in Bulgaria, in a prison transformed into a sewing workshop, in the province of Padua. He explains that many steps are done by hand because machines cost more than humans. For example, a chemical treatment to wash jeans is called “sandblasting.” This process requires spraying fine powders with harmful dust, but “the process, when carried out with appropriate technologies, has a relatively high cost, and that’s why, I’m told, it was decided to reduce costs by coming to Bulgaria to perform this type of operation. The only way to save money is not to use robotic machines, and the only way not to use them is to do operations manually.” There is another task: filling down jackets with feathers. This is also a task that can be automated with a machine as it’s very repetitive and degrading work. Here, no problem, it’s also a woman who takes care of it all day, her entire life. “Work has meaning when it gives dignity. Here, on the contrary, they have really tried to trample on this dignity.”
There is a very interesting passage about down jackets:
“The feather in down jackets is not the real goose feather; the feathers and small feathers are separated, selected in certain wooden silos as I saw during numerous visits to the factories of producers.
The feather in down jackets is what remains from the selection. It’s called “flake.” It’s the softest part, made of fiber and air. It has almost no weight; a gram already makes a fairly large and very light packet. If you squeeze some in your fist, it compresses, almost disappears, and then expands and blooms with the consistency of a dandelion when you suddenly reopen your hand. It’s almost impalpable; you can’t evaluate its weight.(…)
Chinese feathers are coming! Now, still in the name of economies at the expense of quality, producers hardly ever buy the soft “flake” of down of which the French are masters of production. Purchases of this precious and special material for padding duvets are now increasingly made in China. The quality is completely different. (…)
Feathers that come from China are not at all impalpable! First, the Chinese are much more approximate in sorting goose feathers and selecting them to obtain the “flake.”
Second, the animals. French geese are adult and especially fat, deliberately fattened to obtain that all-French delicacy, foie gras. This excessive “fattening” makes their feathers particularly soft. Obviously, the French “flake” is precious and expensive.
The Chinese eat very young geese and ducks; they grill them in no time in the millions of frying establishments scattered everywhere. In their farms, they don’t have time to wait for a goose to grow and fatten properly.
They produce tons of feathers but of very poor quality.
If you wonder why your expensive jacket is “losing its feathers,” the answer lies in the fact that the Chinese feather inside is not soft at all. So, after a few months of wearing your expensive and beloved brand jacket, the feather pierces the outer fabric and the jacket “loses its feathers” like any cheap jacket you find at the market.”
About Moncler, he states:
“Nowadays, the soft feather of French origin is considered too expensive, and the padding is made of feathers of dubious quality, often stored in warehouses under non-optimal conditions. Then, to reduce costs even further, it’s even recycled! The result is that, being a product of animal origin, it deteriorates and loses all its softness characteristics.”
But the factories he takes us to visit are not the worst. I quote:
“Anyway, many are those who produce in factories like these, and there are structures even worse than those I have described, in the sense that they exploit more (as strange as it may seem!) and are less well organized. They can be found in Eastern Europe, North Africa, Asia, basins of misery beyond all imagination, and it is precisely there that we find 80% of the prestigious names of “Made in Italy”. They are all united by the same policy and the same greed.
Prada, Armani, Moncler, Fay, Boggi Milano, Dolce & Gabbana, Tod’s, Zegna, Versace, Scervino, Ferragamo, Max Mara, Pedrini, Marina Rinaldi, Marella, John Galliano, Luisa Spagnoli, Cavalli, Costume National, Patrizia Pepe, Elena Mirò, Motivi, Alberta Ferretti, Harry Cotton’s, Marina Yachting, Gaultier, Moschino, Burberry, Calvin Klein, Blauer… These are just a few.”
The Reguzzoni-Versace-Calearo law grants the “Made in Italy” label to products where at least two production phases out of four are of Italian origin. By “production phase,” they also mean finishing, packaging, trimmings, the origin of the fabric. So: a garment made entirely in Moldova, it’s enough to iron and pack it in Italy for it to get the “Made in Italy” label. Or: a garment made entirely in Armenia, but with Italian fabric (not all the fabric of the garment, the lining is enough) and the buttons attached in Italy, will have its beautiful “Made in Italy” label. They have legalized what was illegal until recently. (…) The trick is simple: just inflate the costs of the finishing phases so that they appear higher than those of labor (done abroad). And there you go, the trick is done.”
By outsourcing, thousands of jobs are lost in Italy. Craftsmanship and manual know-how once lost can never be recovered. Even if we now want to reproduce in France or Italy, once the links are lost, we can no longer restore the entire production chain.
Asia has understood very well that Europe needed them more than they needed Europe.
“it has appeared that material costs in Asia are inexorably increasing with the cost of labor, due to the growth of domestic demand there. So. First: labor is beginning to no longer be as advantageous as before.
Second: buying everything locally – fabrics, accessories, models – could be an advantage a few years ago. Today, it has become an imposition by Asian companies. And with rising prices of raw materials.
Third point: distance. Distance plays a determining role that is not compatible with the quick delivery times required by suppliers and end customers.
These three points would be more than enough, but there are other things.
Given that to produce their clothes in Asia, fashion brands are forced to buy everything locally, the product tends to depersonalize and standardize according to “global” characteristics. In short, one can see that a garment is Chinese. The fabrics are always the same, the colors, accessories, and everything else copy each other. The objective of “Made in Italy” should be to produce unique and inimitable items, but we go precisely to the Far East, which is the cradle of lack of originality and inventiveness. The result: garments that seem “mass-produced,” devoid of character and craftsmanship.
The designers of “Made in Italy” know this all too well. But the change of course is very difficult. They are often forced to stay in Asia because they have no alternative and especially, it is impossible to go back after twenty years of scorched earth in Italy.(…) So, when doing the accounts properly, all this economic advantage in relocation does not exist. (…)
In China, one must submit to the production minimums required by local entrepreneurs. This leads to a particular commercial consequence: if I don’t reach the production minimums, I have two options, either produce more than necessary or pay a greatly increased cost for a small production.
But Chinese factory owners don’t even consider small production. If there is little production, they don’t do it, period. (…) The result of relocation to Asia is that the Chinese become the absolute managers of everything related to the production of Italian ready-to-wear items. It will be increasingly they who determine its cost, and this is due to the Italian “fashion system.”
The factories are paid so little that they also take advantage to dupe the brands. For example, they will produce exact copies of the original with exactly the same manufacturing processes, same raw materials… then they will sell them to reseller shops, which resell them for the same price as the original. Except that technically, they are fake in name only, because they are exact copies. This “double production” is observed everywhere the author worked, in Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova…
“The producer thinks: “They pay me ten euros to sew a Moncler down jacket? Armani gives me thirty euros to make a suit. I, who must absolutely accept the work out of necessity, to the two thousand they regularly ordered from me, I add four or five thousand others made by me!”
The merchant thinks: “They make me pay them dear and I can only apply a margin of one hundred percent with the risk that I’ll be left with some? Good! To the ten originals regularly purchased, I add twenty parallel ones.”
There is no difference between the original and the parallel. These are not counterfeits, those made in China that you see on pirated DVD sellers.
Here, the difference lies solely and exclusively in the price. Obviously in the price that the reseller pays to the manufacturer. But this small detail, the buyer, that is, the end consumer, cannot notice because it is sold to him at the same price as the original.”
In short, we already know that fast fashion is of poor quality. But clothes that cost 1000 euros are too. He talks about a dress produced for 7 euros resold for 400 euros in store. Down jackets that cost 40 euros and resold for 600 euros to consumers. Even by paying premium prices, we no longer have access to quality, nor to “Made in Italy.” “Made in Italy” is gradually disappearing because the real know-how is also disappearing from this country. Now, everyone can perfectly imitate, even surpass “made in Italy.”
I hope you enjoyed this article. I sincerely hope that this book will be translated and updated, because it says everything that everyone knows and keeps quiet about in the fashion industry. It’s time for things to change.
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