To outsider eyes, Ponzano, Italy, is a nondescript little burg about 20 minutes outside of Venice, but snake your way through its outer byways and you’ll run into more important contemporary architecture than you’d ever imagine possible in a town of 12,000 people. What did Greater Ponzano do to deserve this? It has the good fortune to be the headquarters of the Benetton family.
Founded by four siblings (Luciano, Giuliana, Gilberto, and Carlo) in 1965, Benetton made its name peddling happy-colored knitwear. Fast fashion is old hat to us now, but when Benetton did it, it was revolutionary. The company went on to help set the trendy-preppy dress code of the early ’80s and pioneer confrontational, socially conscious advertising, some of which didn’t even show the company’s products. (Conceiving of a brand as a worldview rather than a label to be slapped on a T-shirt was another cultural trend Benetton prefigured.) So while Benetton’s clothing—attractive, current, European, democratically priced— has never been at the avant-garde of fashion, the aesthetic aura that surrounds the family and the company certainly has. Those campaigns famed creative director Oliviero Toscani dreamed up in the ’80s and ’90s? In addition to scenes of engagé multicultural bliss were uncompromising portraits of people with AIDS, a nun and a priest midsmooch, and inmates on death row. Add to this radical marketing strategy the company’s important buildings designed by such luminaries as Tadao Ando and Tobia Scarpa; innovative factories; the ambitious publishing and image-making lab, Fabrica: and Colors magazine, and Benetton’s heritage rises far above that cute rugby shirt that everyone had to have a quarter century ago. In 2005, the direction of the 2-billion-euro company, which has grown to include substantial real estate holdings and four sports teams (volleyball, basketball, rugby, and Formula One), was handed down from Luciano Benetton to his then-41-year-old son Alessandro. And Luciano’s progressive outlook is in no danger of fading away. All-new architectural projects, an African microcredit program, global design and architecture contests, and a local children’s school, Ponzano Children, are just a few of the stews recently boiling on the Benetton stove. Ambitious, sure. But why shouldn’t rugby shirts and $200 suits pave the path to utopia?
“It’s true—these projects are not all directly related to selling T-shirts,” says Alessandro Benetton when I go to Ponzano to poke around. Yet many of them make good business sense, even if they have a do-gooder foundation. Take, for example, the microcredit program Africa Works, started in 2008 with the Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour. “It’s not that we want to be just charitable,” says Benetton firmly. “Africa is a continent that’s growing 5 percent a year.” Benetton is already selling there—the company has 6,000 stores in 120 countries, more than a dozen in Africa. If Africans’ standard of living rises, they might have enough disposable income to buy some new sportswear. In fact, one of Benetton’s strongest initiatives in the past decade has been its growing retail presence in emerging markets such as India, Eastern Europe, and Iran. As the company has grown, the clothes have kept up with the times. They’re gently au courant without being trendy, with the same wit and color sense as ever.
Benetton is also proud of what it’s doing at home. Theirs was one of the first factories in rural Italy to have air-conditioning. In 2007, Benetton opened Ponzano Children, a day care center and preschool, in partnership with the local government. The school is set up for kids ages nine months to six years; half are employees’ children and half are town kids. Housed in a white, skylit cube ringed in by an ovoid outdoor play space and gardens, the 2.3-acre compound was designed by the award-winning architect Alberto Campo Baeza. In the various play spaces, among the hand-me-down dressup clothes (many with Benetton logos) and toys typical of any nursery school, are modular chairs by Play+. There is a space dedicated to “nothingness.” The large common play area is filled with intenselooking, large-scale photographs of happy children.
As for Alessandro Benetton, who is tall, tanned, soft-spoken, and almost impossibly good-looking, his home shares the same utopian spirit as his company. To build his family place, which he shares with his wife, the Olympic Italian gold-medal skiier Deborah Compagnoni, and their three children (Agnese, 9, Tobias, 7, and Luce, 3), he hired Tadao Ando, a starchitect known for clean, almost strict temples to light. (This was Ando’s second commission for the family; a third is on the way.) The finished product, called “The Invisible House” for the way it’s set into a depression in the landscape that hides it from public view, is nearly 11,000 square feet of concrete rectangles that are as comfortable inside as they are Spartan on the outside. Benetton’s taste in furnishings runs toward high Italian design, but the sunken living room, with enormous plate glass windows and soft polished powdered marble walls, is a study in tasteful flopping. Two giant couches and a chic version of a beanbag dominate the hearth and TV areas. Family photos are on most surfaces, and the guest room is riddled with Compagnoni’s trophies and antique silver cups. There was once an adjoining room just for shoes; still, Alessandro has more pairs than his wife. The eldest two children share a bedroom. (The kids were playing in the garage with a neighbor when I arrived. Tobias had made a television set out of a cardboard box that he was wearing on his head.) In the garage gym, there are about 10 Nautilus machines, but there is no home office. “I thought it was a good idea not to bring work home,” Benetton says in a pleasant northern Italian accent. He tells me he and Compagnoni don’t do a lot of socializing. Even if I weren’t as well-known a homebody as Benetton, I wouldn’t want to leave the place either.
Ando, who carved his initials into Benetton’s dining room table when the house was finally furnished in 2004, also built Fabrica, which is just a 20-minute drive away. The company’s independently functioning product, design, and communications lab was the brainchild of Luciano Benetton, who founded it in 1994. It includes a one-year school of 40 to 50 international students apprenticing in all manner of packaging and design; a conference facility; a branding agency (with clients other than Benetton); a film production hive; and a research library. The student body—multicultural, intermittently pierced, and almost all smokers, as far as I could tell— is straight out of Colors, the quarterly magazine formed in 1991 by Oliviero Toscani, Tibor Kalman, and Luciano. Still in circulation today, and still tackling the same issues of identity, conflict, and creativity around the world, Colors now produces books with the same wry wit and attention to detail. Probably Fabrica’s most acclaimed nonprinted work includes the dark comedy No Man’s Land, about the war in the Balkans, which won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2002. And Benetton sponsors such competitions as Designing in Teheran, which has just awarded the architects Grzegorz Witold Woronowicz and Yana Radera commissions to build retail and office spaces in the Iranian capital. Fabrica’s building has the same Ando hallmarks that the Invisible House does: angular concrete, reflecting pools, clean surfaces, and enormous amounts of natural light. “It is important for a company with a global vision to create a strong architecture, one with clear concepts and ideals,” Ando says. Benetton has never made much of a secret of its concepts and ideals, and Ando’s work is a perfect fit. The look is as elegant as it is earnest. Granted, these buildings bear a much higher price than a poppy scarf or a pair of attractively cut $75 pants. But the vision’s the thing.
Thanks to Elle.com
Founded by four siblings (Luciano, Giuliana, Gilberto, and Carlo) in 1965, Benetton made its name peddling happy-colored knitwear. Fast fashion is old hat to us now, but when Benetton did it, it was revolutionary. The company went on to help set the trendy-preppy dress code of the early ’80s and pioneer confrontational, socially conscious advertising, some of which didn’t even show the company’s products. (Conceiving of a brand as a worldview rather than a label to be slapped on a T-shirt was another cultural trend Benetton prefigured.) So while Benetton’s clothing—attractive, current, European, democratically priced— has never been at the avant-garde of fashion, the aesthetic aura that surrounds the family and the company certainly has. Those campaigns famed creative director Oliviero Toscani dreamed up in the ’80s and ’90s? In addition to scenes of engagé multicultural bliss were uncompromising portraits of people with AIDS, a nun and a priest midsmooch, and inmates on death row. Add to this radical marketing strategy the company’s important buildings designed by such luminaries as Tadao Ando and Tobia Scarpa; innovative factories; the ambitious publishing and image-making lab, Fabrica: and Colors magazine, and Benetton’s heritage rises far above that cute rugby shirt that everyone had to have a quarter century ago. In 2005, the direction of the 2-billion-euro company, which has grown to include substantial real estate holdings and four sports teams (volleyball, basketball, rugby, and Formula One), was handed down from Luciano Benetton to his then-41-year-old son Alessandro. And Luciano’s progressive outlook is in no danger of fading away. All-new architectural projects, an African microcredit program, global design and architecture contests, and a local children’s school, Ponzano Children, are just a few of the stews recently boiling on the Benetton stove. Ambitious, sure. But why shouldn’t rugby shirts and $200 suits pave the path to utopia?
“It’s true—these projects are not all directly related to selling T-shirts,” says Alessandro Benetton when I go to Ponzano to poke around. Yet many of them make good business sense, even if they have a do-gooder foundation. Take, for example, the microcredit program Africa Works, started in 2008 with the Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour. “It’s not that we want to be just charitable,” says Benetton firmly. “Africa is a continent that’s growing 5 percent a year.” Benetton is already selling there—the company has 6,000 stores in 120 countries, more than a dozen in Africa. If Africans’ standard of living rises, they might have enough disposable income to buy some new sportswear. In fact, one of Benetton’s strongest initiatives in the past decade has been its growing retail presence in emerging markets such as India, Eastern Europe, and Iran. As the company has grown, the clothes have kept up with the times. They’re gently au courant without being trendy, with the same wit and color sense as ever.
Benetton is also proud of what it’s doing at home. Theirs was one of the first factories in rural Italy to have air-conditioning. In 2007, Benetton opened Ponzano Children, a day care center and preschool, in partnership with the local government. The school is set up for kids ages nine months to six years; half are employees’ children and half are town kids. Housed in a white, skylit cube ringed in by an ovoid outdoor play space and gardens, the 2.3-acre compound was designed by the award-winning architect Alberto Campo Baeza. In the various play spaces, among the hand-me-down dressup clothes (many with Benetton logos) and toys typical of any nursery school, are modular chairs by Play+. There is a space dedicated to “nothingness.” The large common play area is filled with intenselooking, large-scale photographs of happy children.
As for Alessandro Benetton, who is tall, tanned, soft-spoken, and almost impossibly good-looking, his home shares the same utopian spirit as his company. To build his family place, which he shares with his wife, the Olympic Italian gold-medal skiier Deborah Compagnoni, and their three children (Agnese, 9, Tobias, 7, and Luce, 3), he hired Tadao Ando, a starchitect known for clean, almost strict temples to light. (This was Ando’s second commission for the family; a third is on the way.) The finished product, called “The Invisible House” for the way it’s set into a depression in the landscape that hides it from public view, is nearly 11,000 square feet of concrete rectangles that are as comfortable inside as they are Spartan on the outside. Benetton’s taste in furnishings runs toward high Italian design, but the sunken living room, with enormous plate glass windows and soft polished powdered marble walls, is a study in tasteful flopping. Two giant couches and a chic version of a beanbag dominate the hearth and TV areas. Family photos are on most surfaces, and the guest room is riddled with Compagnoni’s trophies and antique silver cups. There was once an adjoining room just for shoes; still, Alessandro has more pairs than his wife. The eldest two children share a bedroom. (The kids were playing in the garage with a neighbor when I arrived. Tobias had made a television set out of a cardboard box that he was wearing on his head.) In the garage gym, there are about 10 Nautilus machines, but there is no home office. “I thought it was a good idea not to bring work home,” Benetton says in a pleasant northern Italian accent. He tells me he and Compagnoni don’t do a lot of socializing. Even if I weren’t as well-known a homebody as Benetton, I wouldn’t want to leave the place either.
Ando, who carved his initials into Benetton’s dining room table when the house was finally furnished in 2004, also built Fabrica, which is just a 20-minute drive away. The company’s independently functioning product, design, and communications lab was the brainchild of Luciano Benetton, who founded it in 1994. It includes a one-year school of 40 to 50 international students apprenticing in all manner of packaging and design; a conference facility; a branding agency (with clients other than Benetton); a film production hive; and a research library. The student body—multicultural, intermittently pierced, and almost all smokers, as far as I could tell— is straight out of Colors, the quarterly magazine formed in 1991 by Oliviero Toscani, Tibor Kalman, and Luciano. Still in circulation today, and still tackling the same issues of identity, conflict, and creativity around the world, Colors now produces books with the same wry wit and attention to detail. Probably Fabrica’s most acclaimed nonprinted work includes the dark comedy No Man’s Land, about the war in the Balkans, which won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2002. And Benetton sponsors such competitions as Designing in Teheran, which has just awarded the architects Grzegorz Witold Woronowicz and Yana Radera commissions to build retail and office spaces in the Iranian capital. Fabrica’s building has the same Ando hallmarks that the Invisible House does: angular concrete, reflecting pools, clean surfaces, and enormous amounts of natural light. “It is important for a company with a global vision to create a strong architecture, one with clear concepts and ideals,” Ando says. Benetton has never made much of a secret of its concepts and ideals, and Ando’s work is a perfect fit. The look is as elegant as it is earnest. Granted, these buildings bear a much higher price than a poppy scarf or a pair of attractively cut $75 pants. But the vision’s the thing.
Thanks to Elle.com
