Benetton, The family the business and the brand

The Emperor's New Clothes Going further, Ponzano, the Veneto, 1992
For the new spring and summer campaign, Toscani had selected seven images conforming to a single theme: 'reality'.
The images included a Mafia killing in Palermo, a flood in Bangladesh, a boat full of refugees from Albania, a burning car in Sicily, a truck overrun by refugees in Liberia, and a Liberian soldier with a kalashnikov, holding a human thigh bone behind his back.
The single green and white rectangular logo on each bore the legend 'United Colors of Benetton'.
This time, however, none of these images had been taken by Toscani. The supreme egotist, who had first taken all the pictures and then taken all the clothes out of the pictures, had now stopped taking the pictures altogether.
The reaction to these images, used in the context of clothes retailing, was immediate; most of them were banned to various degrees in various countries.

Oxford Circus, London, England, 1992
The art of folding and refolding woollen jumpers, sweatshirts and shirts all day long, perfectly, over and over again, without losing your self-control, was more easily acquired by some than by others, as the manageress of the Hampstead shop and others had discovered.
Each garment had to be retrieved from where the customer had discarded it, refolded in exactly the prescribed way and replaced in exactly the same place on the shelves.
Two tables stood in the middle of the shop in Oxford Circus expressly for this purpose; they were fully occupied all day, every day. When a discarded garment had to be replaced in a hurry and the two tables were busy, the process was done on the spot instead, in a manner known as 'air folding', which was only for the most advanced and self-controlled shop assistant. Saturday was the busiest day of the week in this, the busiest of the London shops.
This was why die group of gay rights activists from Act-Up, the international AIDS pressure group, had chosen precisely this time to demonstrate against Benetton on the pavement outside the shop.
Their plan, however, was not just to target the attention of the passing crowds but also the United Colors of Benetton shop itself and its customers.
After finishing on the pavement, the demonstrators paused for a moment to regroup.
Then, in a body, they rushed the entrance and fanned out inside the shop. Here, amid shouts of abuse and glee, muscular, tattooed arms sporting studded leather wrist bands pulled immaculately folded, brightly coloured jumpers by the score from the shelves and flung them high into the air.
As the customers and shop assistants scattered, a mountain of disorderly clothes landed on the floor of the shop. All these clothes would have to be picked up, refolded and replaced in the right position. The demonstrators then left as quickly as they had come. This visitation was just one effect of the seventh image in the series that Toscani had selected on the theme of 'reality' for the new Benetton spring and summer campaign.

I have copies of the original slides and prints, and, untouched, he looks the way many of us picture Jesus.'
Barb Cordle was the Columbus, Ohio hospice nurse who had cared for David Kirby for the last three years of his life. She knew how Kirby had been treated before he had come into her care; how he had been hounded in his small home town; how the contents of the ambulance that had taken him to hospital had been burned afterwards; how Kirby had fought back against the disease and fought for greater education about AIDS and its myths.
Ms Cordle could eventually no longer contain her feelings about the criticisms of Benetton's use of the image, and wrote: 'The picture in question has done more to soften people's hearts on the AIDS issue than any other I have ever seen. You can't look at that picture and hate a person with AIDS. You just can't.'
The New York Times summed up thus: The company estimates that between five hundred million and one billion people have seen the AIDS image, far more than ever saw it when it first came out in Life magazine. A public that is reading fewer newspapers and believing fewer broad casts, might begin to swallow tiny doses of information between the ads for liquor and lingerie. Elsewhere, meanwhile, there was an unexpected reaction to another of the 'reality' images in the place where the real event depicted took place.

The civic authorities who tried to resist the grip of the Mafia on the area lived in fear of their lives and frequently ended up in the same position as the man in the picture, only, in their cases, innocent. Yet they went unmourned by the likes of Ms Grado, her mother and her sister-inlaw, who were the three women in the picture shown mourning over the corpse of Mr Grado.
In a further twist, the Magnum photographer who took the picture, Franco Zecchi, was suing the Italian Fascist Party for using it in their election publicity.
Meanwhile, it was good for the Catholic Church and other critics of Benetton to know that old-fashioned notions of decency and public morality were still alive and well in Sicily.

One of these copies had landed on the desk of Aldo Palmeri. Palmeri had returned after two years at Citibank to his job as chief executive of Benetton Group. 'He was a very clever managing director,' Gilberto would say, 'and our relationship was so good that after he had been gone for some time, we decided to track him down and persuade him to come back.' Palmeri had looked at Colors and its contents: the Albanians, the Russians, the designer chickens. Then he looked at the costs.
Palmeri's return to the business had also enabled Luciano to fulfill the ambition he had been harboring for some time; indeed, it had been a factor in the return of the chief executive. Luciano had decided to go into politics. Palmeri's return was not the only reason for Luciano's decision, although many outside observers professed themselves surprised that Luciano had chosen to move into political life. The truth was that there were a number of reasons. Toscani was content merely to rail in a libertarian fashion against social injustice and hypocrisies without which his work would ultimately have had no meaning. Luciano, on the other hand, truly believed he could go further. The recent direction of the image of the brand had given it a greater political dimension than ever. The business was well into turnaround as the analysts had predicted, and safe in the hands of Palmeri. Luciano was also an indefatigable, world-class networker, known from the White House to the Kremlin. There were plenty of precedents for businessmen going into politics around the world. The country was undergoing a free-market revolution, in which greater privatization was seen by Luciano and many others as the key to a stabler and more prosperous future. He feared that the difficult economic situation in Italy, with its spiraling labour costs, might derail 9 this process and bring back the spectre of political and social unrest. 'I am very busy, but I've always wanted to go into politics,' he was misquoted as saying.
This was untrue, but here he was offering his services to the nation.