Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.

MONTEMURLO, Italy

Almost nine years ago — on Sept. 7, 2004 — I sold my family’s textile company, the Lanificio T. O. Nesi & Figli. Founded in the 1920s, it was one of uncountable thousands of small Italian companies swept away by, first, the rising tide of globalization and, then, the subsequent series of financial meltdowns. We produced first-class fabric and sold it to every fashion designer you’ve ever heard of. I was supposed to be the third generation of manufacturers in my family. Instead, I am the one who failed. Mine is a story of personal and familial loss that runs the length and breadth of Italy.

This succession of disasters is now undermining the very stability of our society, a society that was based on a dynamic array of small enterprises capable of producing excellent handmade products — a society that distributed wealth, instead of merely concentrating profits in the hands of a greedy few.

I know them all by heart, believe me, the arguments in favor of globalization. I’m well aware that it has helped lift tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of people out of poverty. I’ve listened to great thinkers describe in lofty tones how it constitutes a historical necessity. I’ve heard them say that globalization offers advantages to every consumer.

Let me tell you another story. The story of consumers who return home, every night, and become people, consumers who can no longer consume anything at all, except perhaps their lives. The story of the losing side, those who have realized, over the course of just a few years, that they have been left behind by history. The story of the raving ones, the furious ones, the ones who yearn for the past.

Of all the stories that I could tell you about the naïve belief, held dear around the world, that making fine-quality products would preserve us from failure and bankruptcy, I’ve chosen one of the happiest ones.

It must have been 1997 or 1998, one of the last few years when the small and still-smaller textile companies of the Italian provinces, and the hundreds of thousands of factory workers and artisans who made those companies run, were still pushing the economy forward. I was in Prato, where our factory and offices were located. Sergio Vari, our fabled director of sales who claims he once spent a whole summer with Led Zeppelin in Goa in the ’60s, phoned me from Milan to say that we had to create a special color for a very, very important client.

“It’s periwinkle, Edoardo,” he says, “and the client wants this color in Cabora.”

It was our finest cloth for overcoats, Cabora, a high-sheen fabric made up of a blend of superfine Australian wool, cashmere and angora.

“There’s just one small problem, though. The color comes from a photograph.”

“From a photograph?”

“Yes, and I’m looking at it now. It looks like the ’80s, in London, and a beautiful girl is wearing a beautiful periwinkle overcoat. The client says that it reminds him of a scene from a film by Antonioni. He wants us to recreate that overcoat, in that color.”

“And just what does the color periwinkle look like, Sergio?”

I asked, because I’m colorblind.

“The periwinkle is a flower, Edoardo. In the Middle Ages they used it to make love potions … It’s a beautiful shade of color … it looks like a sky blue, with hints of violet … and gray … It really is lovely.”

I say nothing to him about how complicated it’s going to be to take an Australian wool, cashmere and angora blend and dye it a special color, or the fact that our chemists are going to lose their minds — that it’s impossible to faithfully reproduce a color from a photograph. The challenge is too daunting, but the client is too important to refuse. We’d never worked for him before. He’s a very important, very well-known fashion designer. You’d know his name if I told you.

I go to see the technicians and I explain the whole thing. About the periwinkle, the photograph, the cashmere and the angora. They smile and tell me that there’s no way to reproduce a color like that and, as if that weren’t bad enough, from an old photograph! In a wool, cashmere and angora blend! Impossible!

I tell them the name of the designer. They look at me, they look at one another. They nod. They say they’ll give it a shot. In the meantime, the photograph arrives. The girl really is beautiful and the color of her overcoat is also really very lovely. At least, as much of it as I can see. …



Photo

It takes the technicians two weeks to fine-tune the color, and they run through eight bolts of cloth, frayed beyond repair by the process of being dyed and redyed. Finally, they bring me a piece of cloth dyed a heavenly hue and ask me under what light the client is going to approve the product. Because the color is, certainly, a lovely periwinkle under a D65 light source, which is to say a light bulb that imitates sunlight. But it changes radically under a TL-84 lamp, which imitates the neon lighting that was widely used in stores. And it turns into a strange violet under an A lamp, which imitates the light of incandescent bulbs. I tell them that I don’t know. I really don’t know.

I HAND over to Sergio the sample of wool and cashmere and angora cloth, dyed the same periwinkle as the overcoat from the photograph of the beautiful girl that looked like a scene from a film by Antonioni. Sergio gets into his car and leaves for Milan. Three hours later he calls me to say that the client has gone upstairs to his penthouse apartment and is looking at the color. Another hour later, Sergio calls back and announces that the client says that the periwinkle strikes him as not bad at all, but that he can’t give final approval today, because the sky is overcast. He’ll look at the color again tomorrow.

I ask him if he’s joking. In the meantime, back in Prato, the technicians and the finishing workers are all standing by, anxiously awaiting the designer’s verdict so that they can go into production, which means taking all the bolts of wool and cashmere and angora that have been woven in the meanwhile and starting to dye them periwinkle. There is a delivery date to be met. Sergio says no, he isn’t joking. The client never approves a color unless there’s sunlight. And no one can decide but him.

I smile. It strikes me as something wonderful, midway between magic and romanticism and the immortal standard set by the artists and poets of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s court; it is a perfect example of the deep-rooted logic of a highly personal form of knowledge, shamanic, verging on the alchemistic, and thus in thrall to sun and clouds.

When I turn to the expectant technicians, I decide to look on the light side, to pass it off as the eccentric whim of a great designer. But there’s no need. No one laughs, no one loses his temper, no one thinks the client is being capricious. The technicians nod their heads and smile, as if they’re happy, almost honored, to have been asked to satisfy the demands of an absolute master, and for an instant I feel as if I’m no longer in Prato, in a finishing mill, in 1997 or 1998, but in a 15th-century artist’s workshop in Florence under the Medici.

The oldest technician slaps me on the back and says:

“Edoardo, with artists you just have to be patient.”

And that was Italian style.

Edoardo Nesi is the author of the memoir “Story of My People.” This essay was translated by Antony Shugaar from the Italian.