New Fashion Scenarios in Prato: Chinese Migrants as Apparel Manufacturers in an Era of Perishable Global Fashion

This chapter presents an overview of Chinese migrants’ businesses in Italy, showing the constant growth of individually-owned businesses and the dramatic increase in commercial activities. This chapter describes how Chinese subcontracting workshops are operated and how for a long span of time they have enabled Italian final firms to remain competitive, notwithstanding the stiff competition from countries with low labor costs. It also describes a major change taking place within the ethnic workshops where by now different occupations within the ethnic niche tend to coincide with different regional origins of Chinese migrants. Chinese manufacturing businesses are concentrated mainly in the Italian industrial districts. The place in Italy with the highest concentration of Chinese is Prato, a mid-sized city in Tuscany, well known in the literature on industrial districts worldwide. In Prato, Chinese migrants previously active mainly as suppliers in recent years have been upscaling in large numbers and becoming final firms in the pronto moda (ready fashion) business, occupying the entire low and medium-to-low garment production. This move, started some years ago, is now realizing its full potential. This chapter uses interviews conducted in 2006 in Prato as well as a wealth of information collected during the last five years at the Prato municipality among social workers, lawyers and language and cultural facilitators active in providing services to migrants. It, for the first time, undertakes an in-depth description of the internal organization of Chinese-operated pronto modas and of their relationships with Italian suppliers and co-ethnic contractors in the context of a global fashion business. Finally this chapter argues that Chinese migrants’ production organization has followed a pattern strikingly similar to the one existing in Italian industrial districts at the times of their economic success (among the vast literature on industrial districts see Becattini, 2000, Dei Ottati, 2003), exacerbated by the new Chinese ideology of the successful migrant and by constraints of local contexts striving for survival in a globalized economy. While a systematic comparison of models of organization in the traditional Italian industrial districts over the years of greatest expansion, and the characteristics of Chinese migrant settlements in those districts over recent years, still waits to be outlined, this chapter provides a preliminary analysis of the main points of contact and macro-level differences.