Colour Schemes

Fiona Russell Powell untangles the wonderful world of Benetton

Arena Homme + Spring 1994

Late winter afternoon. It's cold and grey, much like the city we are in: Birmingham. I am here for the opening of the first Benetton megastore, selling underwear, cosmetics, shoes and accessories as well as their Sisley line and the bog-standard Benetton junipers. The store is buzzing because somewhere in the invited throng is the company's much-photographed head, Luciano Benetton. He has flown in for the event - a rare visit to Britain (though I suspect the chance of a quick drive to Oxford afterwards to look over his Formula One racing team may have been a deciding factor). The food is unusually good, the guests are uniformly well-dressed and the waiters (and the chefs peeking front the top of the stairs) are uncommonly handsome.
The party is beginning to break tip and Signor Benetton and I adjourn to the staff quarters upstairs, where we settle, all five of its - two bits for the company and his translator, as S Benetton says his English is not good enough for "Communicating complicated concepts". (I suspect it's a matter of won't rather than can't: after all, his 650 company employees back at HQ in Italy are offered free English lessons.)
I learn quickly that Luciano Benetton is adept at talking at length while saying little, throwing out the Benetton party line with wordy embellishments straight out of the company's meaty press packs. All of which is hardly surprising because, as well as being one of Italy's most successful businessmen, or "industrialists" as he prefers to be called, Luciano Benetton is also a senior politician sitting on the Republican (left-wing) side of the Italian Senate. He was elected by the people of Trevino, his home town, most of whom are employed by or connected to the Benetton company in some way, a place where the local basketball, volleyball and rugby teams are sponsored by Benetton and where the company bas built a modern sports centre providing free facilities for the local citizens.
An amiable but shrewd 58-year-old, Benetton comes across as a "man of the people", albeit with a slight statesman-like air; he is approachable though protected by a metaphorical pane of glass. Attractive, in the mould of an elegant intellectual and with a commanding presence, he's not the sort you ask about his love life, though we know he is separated from the mother of his four children and must qualify for the title of Most Eligible Industrialist of the Year. With his curly collar-length grey hair and expensive designer glasses, he is the Bamber Gascoigne of up-market, middle-of-the-road chainstore fashion.
But why describe him when he's been plastered butt-naked over the hoardings of Britain, promoting the return of cast-offs to Benetton outlets to be boxed and shipped off for redistribution among the world's refugees?
The "c" word crops up constantly when dealing with the Benetton camp, though mine is controversy and theirs is communication. For instance, the first subject I want to tackle is Benetton's "Fabrica" project, an Institute for the Arts which will invite students from all over the globe to pursue (and make available) their talent on a scholarship basis. Scheduled to open in September near Treviso, it is housed in a grand Venetian villa which has been restructured and enlarged by Tadeo Ando, the celebrated Japanese architect. And guess who bas been asked to fill the post of 'principal at the school (which no doubt will espouse the Benetton "philosophy" of world peace, racial harmony, tolerance, and the right to individual personal freedom)? Fidel Castro, whom Signor Benetton describes as a "nice man" (they met last year when a Benetton outlet was opened in Havana, Cuba).
“ We got on well. We both pretty much agreed that Communism in Cuba is over, it hasn't worked, and be would probably admit himself that he's become a bit of a liability to Cuba now. Castro has great communication skills and I decided why not use these skills? So I invited him to preside over Fabrica. You talk about his past terrorist activities and yet isn't it better to give him a chance to do some good? If Castro is running a school in Italy, lie unit be doing; anything bad in Cuba."
Talking about controversy, let's discuss time famous Benetton ads, from the widely-condemned dying with AIDS advert, to the bloody newborn baby, to the black Queen, to the mercenary holding a human thighbone, to the human-branded HIV+ ads. He tells me, "You should address your questions and comments to Toscani [Oliviero Toscani, Benetton's art director], it is his vision, not mine." Come, come - this simply won't wash. But he refuses to be drawn.

Later, however, Benetton's British PR, Marysia Woroniecka, talks about the difficulties of handling the Benetton account during the time when no British advertising agency would touch Benetton business and magazines like Vogue, Elle and Marie- Claire refused to accept the artwork. Did she have any qualms about handling the account?
" No, well, I'd been handling the account for three-and-a-half years previously anyway... Personally, I felt comfortable about the image and could support it because a senior executive at Benetton in New York was personally involved in that his lover had just died of AIDS and he wholeheartedly supported the image. Also, we had lots of letters from David Kirby's [the dying man, family and friends and his hospital staff saying they supported the campaign completely. David Kirby was an AIDS activist and the photographer who took the image that Toscani used, Therese Frare, was documenting Kirby's life and his disease. She expressed a reluctance to photograph his death, and he said, 'If you don't photograph me then, at the moment of my death, and people don't get to see it, then the test of my life has no meaning.'"
Surprisingly, she reveals that it was actually the newborn baby Benetton ad which generated the most fierce public response in Britain: "People phoned and threatened to bomb Benetton shops, windows were smashed and I fielded, er, dealt with, a lot of irate people and quite a few sad calls from women who'd just had miscarriages and things like that. It got quite scary and we used a PO Box for out offices for a while. Another image which seemed to infuriate a lot of people was the black Queen ad from last summer. There was one man who used to drive around in a white Rolls Royce with big tins of black paint and he painted in all the windows of the Benetton outlets and hung a sign on the doors which said, 'If you can afford to black out the Queen then I can afford to black out your shops.'"

Meanwhile, back in Birmingham, Luciano Benetton is still maintaining his detached air on this issue, but offers to expound on the theme of art director Oliviero Toscani's genius when I refuse to let the subject drop. Signor B gushes: "Toscani told me 'Benetton's become my voice', he has complete freedom, it's the most freedom Toscani's ever been

And so to the Hotel Continental in Treviso, 40 miles from Venice. Ah, Northern Italy - Heaven and Hell rolled into one where every woman you pass is beautiful and sports a fur coat; the land of homogenized "good taste", where they worship the colour brown in all its shades, so long as it comes in mink, crocodile or silk.
I have been flown here courtesy of Benetton, to inspect their HQ and tour their state-of-the-art factory a few miles away. They seem keen to impress and, indeed, I am impressed. Benetton provides the sort of work environment which would make you want to get out of bed in the morning.
The headquarters is run by a high percentage of beautiful and intelligent women who stand out from the rest by wearing fake fur coats. Lunch is prepared by gourmet cooks and served in a ritzy restored outbuilding, part of a restored seventeenth-century villa (Benetton has a charity foundation which restores dilapidated villas throughout the Venice area) where every design detail is considered - from the saucepans to the water jugs to the coat racks, upon which it is unlikely a Benetton jacket will be hung as no Benetton employee gets a discount - they have to buy their Benetton clothes full price at the local boutique with the rest of the punters. This dining area looks like Heals crossbred with Tom Dixon; the creative brains responsible are the husband and wife architectural partnership of Tobia and Afra Scarpa who have worked on all Benetton building projects (with the exception of "Fabrica") since the company was formed in the mid-Sixties.
Dotted around the landscaped Benetton compound, like a pretty village, are clusters of little houses which are really offices (including those of the other two Benetton brothers), covered in tinted metal roof tiles (developed by the Scarpas and patented by Benetton, of course) which change colour according to the light. There is an underground car park for 600 cars.
Down the drive, to the left of the newly extend-ed and renovated factory hangar (where Guiliana Benetton - Luciano's sister, responsible over-all for design, and specifically knitwear - is based), is an expanse of lawn which covers a surreal underground model Benetton street of sample boutiques, each kitted out in a different shop style - all of them available from Benetton once the outlet's owner has decided whether he wants to sell Mature Benetton Man (dark brown oak), Benetteen (pale ash) or Benettot (gay pink vinyl tiles) to mention just three of the choices.
The mock shop shelves are stuffed with Benetton gear and fully dressed dummies lurk behind the counters. Even the "street" is non-conformist; it's made of crushed velvet, sorry, crushed quartz. It can be mechanically raised to meet pavement level or rise above it to become a catwalk, the shop windows screened with sliding curtains, the ceiling opened to reveal racks of spotlights. But my favourite trick is the arched ceiling "at rest", peppered with a massive array of tiny lights like the sky on a starry night. And a wall of water, which stops long enough to let you cross a non-slip bridge.

The Crown Jewel in Benetton's tiara is the new textile plant, of which they are rightly proud. It is the first plant of its kind in the world, designed and built using revolutionary techniques developed by the Scarpas and Benetton's labs. There are three buildings, the piéce de resistance being the structure - a cable-bridge suspension concept where no support system is needed inside the building, the entire edifice being held in place by what looks like a ship's mast on the roof with steel cables stretching from either side to the roof edges.
At 40,000 square feet, it took eight months to erect and is used for storing and cutting cloth. The second building is full of enormous piles of white jumpers which are thrown into giant dyeing machines and coloured according to season, then dried. The clack of row upon row of knitting machines for other knitwear (the white jumpers are sent from another factory in Tuscany and are made on Guiliana's famous machine, designed by herself, where the yarn goes in one end and an untouched-by-human-hands sweater comes out at the other end) echoes rhythmically throughout the building.
The third factory is where the boxed clothes (there is no surplus stock, everything is made to order) arrive via underground tunnel for distribution, where 600 daily deliveries are made world-wide. That's about 15,000 boxes.
Only six people are needed per shift as everything is fully automated. Eight huge robots collect the boxes as they trundle in on conveyor belts and then load them into the appropriate chute for whichever geographical area the produce is destined for and, finally, the boxes slide out directly into waiting freight trains. The nerve centre, i.e. the computer for this prototype system, is also in the underground section and it controls all of the lighting and heating (fibre optic cables) for the complex. It is a spectacular achievement, but appropriate for the world's largest consumer of wool. In fact, I'd expect no less from Benetton.

Back to HQ for late lunch with another Benetton lovely, a brainy beauty who is the Director for International Image (a rather pretentious title for Big Cheese in Press Office). She tells me she was formerly head of European News at ITN and later at Sky, which shows that Benetton only poach the best. I ask her about the news that Luciano Benetton has decided only the day before to step down from his seat in the Senate and not stand at the upcoming general election. My charming factory guide had told me that he was "essentially an entrepreneur who was frustrated by the bureaucracy of Italian politics".
My dining companion agrees, adding over the grilled endive that he probably quit because "it takes them a whole day to decide what stationery to use". Toscani, the "creative genius", cannot be dismissed so easily, and debate over the ads rages through the soup, the pasta and the rare fillet steak. This is the main area of contention for me and I have discussed it with every single Benettonite I have met. It is strange because Luciano's loyal disciples always have answers for everything and they are always the same answers. Not that I doubt he is a humanitarian who has done a great deal of good for his local community - but all the same, I left Treviso and Benetton feeling that I'd just spent a day with the Jehovah's Witnesses of Jumpers. By the way, they do a wonderful cappuccino.