MILAN — Italy’s Camera della Moda once again held an early-morning breakfast at Casa Cipriani with a select number of board members to meet the press on Wednesday morning, the second time it has done so during a Milan Fashion Week, which chairman Carlo Capasa aims to turn into a tradition.
Capasa opened the event by discussing some of the data that emerged from a Camera and McKinsey & Company study, “The Beauty of Fashion,” which revealed some “unexpected” information, including that 70 percent of students in the top five Italian fashion schools are foreigners, six times the Italian average.
Fashion represents 5 percent of industrial production in Italy and there are 47 provinces with production hubs linked to fashion in the country. There are more than 500,000 employees in fashion, a number that rises to 1 million when indirect jobs linked to the supply chain are included.
Indeed, protecting the supply chain was one of the key issues discussed by Capasa, who touted the association and its members’ “approach to creativity and strong values. Everybody is welcome in fashion, let’s talk about the good stories, not the little black spots.”
He said that the Camera relies on the entrepreneurs in the association, “something very unique, very specific,” who “create a system, to share ideas, to share vision, to share prospects, to understand how to find solutions together. I think the secret of everything is to create a system. When we work as a community, we are very strong, and we can answer even the difficult questions. If we act separate, each brand by each brand, I think it doesn’t work the same. So the strength of our association is to keep together all the Italian brands and to make them really active.”
He said that there are about 12 “tables of experts, the sustainability table, for example and under the sustainability table, there is the welfare table. There is the chemical table, with working groups made by all the experts of each company. All those groups, working groups, they actually analyze any item, any issue from our industry, and they try to find the solution. So this means to be united. This means to create a system. This is the way we work in the association.”
The Italian fashion industry has been rocked by recent cases of alleged worker exploitation, abuse and sweatshop schemes in the country’s fashion supply chain.
The study also related that fashion attracts international talent to the top of company boards, 25 percent more in fashion compared with 12 percent among the top 100 Italian companies.
“Italy ranks second in the world for tax-free spending and the country continues to stand out as a premier destination for fashion, shopping culture and lifestyle,” and 67.9 percent of visitors consider fashion the first or second main reason for choosing Italy, the report stated.
Also fashion is “one of the main drivers attracting international capital to Italy, five times the average size of financial deals compared to the national average.”
Flanking Gildo Zegna, chairman of the Ermenegildo Zegna Group; Stefano Cantino, co-CEO of Dolce & Gabbana, and Lorenzo Bertelli, Prada Group’s chief marketing officer and head of sustainability, and executive chairman of Versace; Riccardo Bellini, CEO of Valentino, believes “the strength of luxury lies in its ability to transmit exceptional know-how and move forward the heritage of a company and pass it to the next generation to give their own contribution. So when you have basically an exceptional set of skills in your company, when you have an exceptional heritage, and you open it up to new perspective, you open it up to a diversity of perspectives, either a younger generation or people coming from other industries. You don’t just make it stronger, you make it more creative. You make it more and more relevant.”
Building strong communities and storytelling, with customers looking for meaning, was another topic, as well as AI, seen as a tool that can improve creativity, logistics and clienteling, discussed by Remo Ruffini, executive chairman of Moncler Group, and Bertelli.
“I think everybody is testing AI,” said Bertelli. “Somebody is ahead, somebody is behind. But I think this is not the key point. I think all the big discoveries of humanity at the end allowed us to gain time, and time is the most precious thing that we have, and it allowed us to do more, so it’s not about reducing headcounts. It’s about doing more with the same people, and of course you have a change of knowledge within the organization.”
He believes that “sometimes the hardest things to face with the evolution and changes in the world is not the technology itself, but it’s understanding the mindset and culture, the willingness to change, and a lot depends on the culture of the company. For me, it’s quite incredible, and for sure, it’s going to drive our future.” He compared the use of AI to that of the smartphone. “I always think that technology is overestimated in the short term and underestimated in the long term, and I think this is going to be the case with AI.”
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