We feared that Prato would be the most dangerous place in Italy after the outbreak of the novel coronavirus. Friends, relatives, and colleagues who knew about our ethnographic research with Chinese migrants in greater metropolitan Tuscany began reaching out with trepidation.

Prato hosts Europe’s largest concentration of Chinese migrants, who have become formidable entrepreneurs and workers in the globalised iteration of the prestigious Made in Italy fashion industry. Like many politicians, public health officials, and journalists, our hunches about Prato becoming a Covid-19 epicentre were based on common sense. But not all common sense is good sense. Our predictions couldn’t have been more wrong — a reminder that origin stories of diseases are distinct from their life histories, which also manifest in social narratives and practices. And although such histories can be useful for tracing contagion within societies, these histories can also be used for political purposes that may be as dangerous as the disease itself. In the case of Covid-19, knowledge related to its origin story has fed xenophobic sentiments that target Chinese migrants as well as individuals who ‘look’ Chinese. The origin story evolved — or, might we say, mutated — into its own narrative of blame. Such mutations call for intervention.

As it turns out, the threat of stigma, knowledge of quarantine, and the will of solidarity motivated an entire migrant community to take action — similar to Chinese migrants elsewhere in Italy and Europe. Some 25,000 migrants with Chinese citizenship reside officially in Prato, and estimates suggest about twice that number live there when undocumented migrants are included. Among them, only a single person in the entire Region of Tuscany has been diagnosed with novel coronavirus.

Of about 7,500 positive cases of Covid-19, Tuscany’s Regional Health Agency (ARS) has identified the national origin of 6,000 cases, of which 100 were ‘foreigners,’ primarily Albanian, and only one in the entire region was of Chinese nationality, according to Fabio Voller, the region’s ARS Coordinator of the Epidemiology Observatory.¹ The Province of Prato has a relatively low level of overall infection (404 cases, or 16 per 10,000, in a population of 257,716 as of April 15).²

Many Chinese citizens had experienced their first quarantine in mainland China after travelling to Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province in early February to celebrate Chinese New Year. Upon their return to Prato, messages circulated via the WeChat social media app, tracking individual travel departures and arrivals between Italy and China, health status, and phone numbers so friends could pressure others to follow self-quarantine measures.

Meanwhile, stories of violent acts of xenophobia from cities to the North and South circulated among tight-knit families that make up Prato’s 6,000 Chinese-owned firms. More than half of those firms (3,700) are categorised as confezioni, or cut-and-sew workshops. Other Chinese firms include fast-fashion wholesalers, textile factories, and services that support those businesses and the people working in them, such as real estate activities, restaurants, bars, and small retail shops.³

Worry grew among members of the Chinese community — diverse in terms of socioeconomic class, education, as well as documented status — that such violence could spread to Prato. They sensed being in a vulnerable position to become victims of a major blame campaign. Some feared for their lives. They wondered if they would be targeted and pressured to leave the country. Being seen as the source of contagion could devastate their social well-being and threaten their businesses and economic livelihood. Thus, the second quarantine happened as Prato’s Chinese residents collectively put themselves into self-quarantine several weeks before the Italian government issued the nationwide stay-at-home order on March 9.

Overnight, typically crowded streets turned silent. Fast-fashion businesses ground to a halt. The Chinese-populated neighbourhood known as Macrolotto Zero transformed into a ghost town. Bars and retail stores emptied out as did grocery store shelves. Teachers noticed that Chinese students were absent, and assuming that the students were staying home for fear of being bullied, authorities pleaded with parents to send their children back to school.

Given Italy’s nationwide lockdown, some Chinese residents are thus in their third quarantine. The extent of distancing among the Chinese community is particularly noteworthy considering the Wenzhou ‘spiritual insistence’ related to hard work, manifesting in intense just-in-time rhythms of the fast-fashion niche, in the pursuit of making money to pay off debt and becoming your own boss.

We reached out to several public figures from the Chinese community in greater metropolitan Tuscany. Franca Hong, until recently active in a youth association and herself a young entrepreneur of an accessory firm on the outskirts of Florence, spoke of a widespread sense of civic responsibility. She emphasised that the more people adhere to the stay-at-home orders with a sense of discipline, the sooner the situation will pass. Noting that business was largely at a standstill, she pointed to the power of employees in small Chinese family-owned firms as having a crucial role over production given the productive model of the Chinese firms; she credited the workers with insisting on not coming to work but rather on quarantining. She underscored a collective sense of being ‘in the same boat’ as fashion makers and distributors shut down production and sales outlets. This, too, has strengthened a sense of solidarity. A silver lining in this period of pause has been to prompt people to reflect on life and to prioritise health and family.⁴

Marco Wong, elected to Prato’s city council in June 2019, identified guiding sentiments in three phases: fear of a formidable contagion stigma; solidarity against discrimination; and a desire to show goodwill through donations of medical masks and protective gear. He defined the first phase as deeply painful as people learned through social networks and word of mouth of troubling incidents of xenophobia. There was profound worry among the Chinese migrants in Prato that they would become victims of hostility. In turn, a second phase gave rise to sentiments of solidarity and actions of good will, including some workshops converting operations to the manufacture of masks. He characterised the third phase as Chinese being recognised as saviours of the patria, or the nation, as manifested through widespread gifting of essential items such as masks and other medical equipment.⁵

It’s worth pointing out that the migrant population is fairly young and less affected by the virus. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that, given the concentration of Chinese residents, Prato ended up being the last province in Italy to register persons affected with Covid-19. The city boasts the highest percentage of migrants anywhere in Italy. Of its total population of 195,089, some 42,371, or 22 percent, are classified as stranieri, or foreigners. (The national average is around 8.5 percent foreign residents.) Registered Chinese migrants yield numbers of around 58 percent of official resident foreigners.

The situation has profoundly shifted the image of Chinese migrants. Prato’s mayor, Matteo Biffoni, described his city as ‘in the eye of the hurricane’ and pointed to the Chinese citizens’ behaviours as ‘exemplary’ for leading the way to a circolo virtuoso, or a virtuous society. In an article published in the national newspaper La Repubblica, he underscored that the Chinese community had set a good example for Italians. It is no coincidence that Biffoni himself ran his electoral campaign against hate and, rather, on a platform of love.⁶ The behaviours among Chinese residents of Prato appears to have convinced others of the necessity to follow strategies aimed at limiting the risk of contagion; the effectiveness of such practices was also evident from reports of decreases in infections in China.

An unexpected consequence of Covid-19 has been a sea change: the very community that a New York Times article pointed the finger at to explain Italy’s racist roots and lurch to the populist right has gone from being a source of fear and resentment to being one of the most admired in Italy.⁷ ‘They’ve saved us,’ remarked Anna Ascolti, a psychologist friend who works in Prato’s public health agency.

Prato has been a laboratory of globalisation particularly related to fast fashion. Future prospects point to the city as different sort of laboratory. One blogger, Huang Miaomiao, who uses the hashtag ‘I am not a virus,’ #iononsonounvirus, envisioned this future as including dialogue, innovation, and mutual responsibility.⁸ Others underscore possibilities for diversifying the economy through new creative enterprises that build on the region’s fashion strength. Supply chains may be reimagined. Temporalities may shift or at least be questioned. New ways to realise sustainability for people and the planet may emerge.

As anthropologists who have collaborated during the past decade to understand the ways in which families, individuals, and institutions cope with globalisation, we want to emphasise that disease origin stories, while important, can lead to dangerous narratives. We need to recognise that the hegemony of global supply chains to produce the clothes that are advertised, stocked in retail outlets, bought and worn should not lead to ‘pathologising’ the entrepreneurs and workers who produce them. We need to imagine different futures that push back against demographic nationalism. We need not to criminalise the people who work hard to make clothes as they follow a desire to realise dignified lives. Diseases have not only origin stories and life history narratives but also afterlives. Social narratives related to coping with transmission and prevention practices also need to be tracked, understood, and respected.

Elizabeth L. ‘Betsy’ Krause is the author of Tight Knit: Global Families and the Social Life of Fast Fashion (University of Chicago Press, 2018) and professor of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Massimo Bressan is president of IRIS, a social and economic research institute in Prato, Italy.

1. Interview with subject, April 14, 2020. See also https://www.ars.toscana.it/images/qualita_cure/coronavirus/rapporti_Covid-19/Report_coronavirus_14_aprile_2020.pdf ↩

2. https://lab.gedidigital.it/gedi-visual/2020/coronavirus-i-contagi-in-italia/?ref=RHPPTP-BH-I251620115-C12-P2-S1.12-T1 ↩

3. http://www.po.camcom.it/doc/public/2019/STR_2018.pdf ↩

4. interview with subject, March 31, 2020 ↩

5. Interview with subject, April 3, 2020 ↩

6. https://www.repubblica.it/dossier/politica/virus-in-comune-sindaci/2020/04/03/news/coronavirus_intervista_sindaco_prato_matteo_biffoni-253004431/?ref=search&fbclid=IwAR3RzeUWPPllgBPc2BzejyJAS-m3B88raH9oipiuaSfZVcjRvyAIwjz5v7I ↩

7. P S. Goodman and E Bubola. 2019. ‘The Chinese Roots of Italy’s Far-Right Rage,’ The New York Times,https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/business/italy-china-far-right.html ↩

8. https://www.huffingtonpost.it/entry/doppia-quarantena-cosi-i-20-mila-cinesi-di-prato-hanno-affrontato-il-virus_it_5e830158c5b6d38d98a4343d ↩

IN THE LOS ANGELES ‘Jobber Market,’ the hub for fast fashion within the U.S., the multitude of failures that arrives and presents itself at every turn is overwhelming. It comes with the disorienting sense that one will never possess enough information. Or that the predictions on colour, trim or trend, that provided some profit for today, will turn out quite differently for tomorrow. It’s the daily ‘not knowing’ – that one step away from risk, bankruptcy, failure – that manifests itself in paranoia or accumulates in the form of total exhaustion among all those who work in this garment district.

I’ve been coming to this neighbourhood in downtown L.A. for the last five years to carry out research on the fast fashion industry. Considered the nerve centre for fast fashion in the U.S., the Jobber Market consists of nearly six thousand clothing lines designed and distributed from small five hundred square feet showrooms that line the streets and alleyways of one square mile. Most of these labels are in actuality small-time clothing manufacturers, operated by Korean American and Korean Brazilian entrepreneurs, who produce clothing for the majority of American retailers and have fuelled the fast fashion industry within the U.S. Most of the cheap and trendy clothes are designed in L.A. among first and second generation Korean Americans, manufactured in China, then shipped back to L.A. to be distributed by retailers like Forever 21, the largest fast-fashion retailer in the U.S. which is also owned by Korean Americans. And even though this clothing market – within this small urban neighbourhood run by immigrants and their children – might just be a small blip of a place in the global universe of fashion, the risks taken and failures endured in its alleyways and narrow streets are the reverberations of fashion’s entire global supply chain. Like little filigree tremors, failures felt here reflect the ‘continuously-being-made’ global landscape of destruction in fashion in the twenty-first century, yet these spaces also serve as pockets of hope and possibility for all those who work within it.

It’s quite astonishing to play out all that could possibly go wrong in the making of a single piece of clothing. It may begin with news of a rusty button or a loose stitch, or that the grading of a shirt is off just by a quarter inch in an order of thousands of blouses or tops. You may have manufactured the top in horizontal stripes in red or black – those French boat-necked shirts always seem to come back into trend – only now your timing is off since all the showrooms in the district are beginning to sell them. You might be awake at night thinking about all those thousands of pleather jackets you have stuck sitting at the port, held captive until you can come up with the cash to pay. Or you’ve just gotten off the phone with your big American retail buyer who is going to fine you ten cents a piece for having the hang tags on your order pinned in the wrong place. The workers in China are on holiday or on strike or there is some kind of problem. One of the factories you use, the one that can produce so many different types of stitches, cannot do the kind of embroidery you are asking them to do. The department store buyer decides that your neighbour in the showroom next door will sell a similar product at a slightly cheaper cost – did your factory cut a better deal with her? Did your neighbour rip off your designs? Did they talk? Your employee, the godfather of your child, just took off one day and you learn many months later from all the gossip in the district that he had to cross the border into Mexico to see an ill relative but couldn’t tell anyone including you. Now he can’t get back across because the cost of the coyote has jumped since the last two times he crossed. On the worst days, you tell me about the closeout buyers who make their rounds throughout the district sniffing out fear and desperation. Like ‘rats stinking cheese,’ you tell me – your failure means a bargain to them, an easy load for resale in another market or continent. A copy of a cease and desist letter arrives from a powerful online company being threatened by Burberry because of a jacket you’ve manufactured for the company – its lining poorly resembling the signature Burberry plaid – never mind that you’ve only made and sold two hundred pieces, and that your profit margins are miniscule.

In the L.A. Jobber Market, it is the potential of failure at every fleeting second of the making of clothing that makes fast fashion within the U.S. possible. In such a volatile global market of clothing where consumer taste is finicky, every single decision has the potential to collapse a line of clothing like a house of cards. All relationships of trust are held with suspicion; they are fragile and attended to, performed and maintained. Bankruptcy is palpable and embodied in the quickly changing nature of store names. It’s no wonder then, that this community of fast fashion manufacturers, garment vendors and traders are all so highly religious. For all the times one fails, left in debt or with nothing, one needs to have something permanent to hold on to – family, salvation, faith, and God. The walls of showrooms are often adorned with crucifixes or bible verses. Printed on the bottom of every Forever 21 yellow shopping bag is the bible verse John 3:16: ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.’

I study these fragile ecologies of clothing that have sprung from our twenty-first century globalised fashion industry. New markets have emerged among the massive movements of mostly female migrant workers who today labour in the countless and anonymous garment factories around the world. These fleeting interstitial spaces are the meeting place for all kinds of risk takers, intermediaries and brokers: the buyers and sellers, nomads, and traders. Few make it big and most scrape by, making little profit while risking everything. Come to one of these markets and tug on a thread and it will inevitably lead you to the big name retailer or brand selling this stuff in your hometown store. Tug even more and it may lead you to the very bottom of the supply chain, to a migrant worker on a global assembly line of production. The Jobber Market in L.A. leads to Guangzhou market in China’s Pearl River Delta, Qipa Lu in Shanghai, or Bom Retiro in São Paulo. Keep following the supply chain and it will lead you to the ‘second’ or ‘third tier’ garment cities of the world, to industrial zones, manufacturing hubs, factories and sweatshops.

I am attracted to these interstitial spaces because failure and despair sit so intimately with aspiration and hope. These clothing markets, like the one in L.A., are a landscape of urban pastoral foraging – countless layers of ordinary people who are on a search to catch the next trend, or strike a deal with a fabric supplier, or unload dead stock. These men and women find gems in the rough and turn a profit out of nothing, all from the buying and selling of clothing. These are markets created out of almost nothing, often comprised of migrants who have had to move several times – back and forth between cities and across borders – often bringing with them nothing other than their entrepreneurial skill and creative minds, sets of experience, diasporic connections and knowledge from having worked years in the rag trade. This kind of work often permits one to be one’s own boss, to work outside of a wage system even if to make such small profit. And for me, the innovators and creative makers are among these traders, who emerge from the most tenuous spaces that global capitalism in fashion produces.

Failure sits closely with innovation and creativity. Walking through the wholesale market in Shanghai, a friend explains to me that the copies of the copies of the copies should actually be thought of as a game of Chinese whispers; the object that resembles Chanel, Prada and Michael Kors combined has gone through so many stages of becoming that it has, in the end, become its own entity. I marvel at all the different technologies and hand-sewn skills that are evident in that one copied object, from digital printing to hand dying or sequined embroidery. In the Los Angeles Jobber Market, the divisions of labour in skill and the networks of trust created among Korean family manufacturers have both innovated designs but also cut down on production time, subverting buying structures of traditional department stores that would not originally buy from them. From an Italian economist, I learn that second generation Chinese Italians, having grown up in the garment district in Prato though still denied Italian citizenship, are revitalising old Italian fashion manufacturing houses within the city by forming alliances with older generations of Italian makers. These second generation immigrants and industrialists are looking to find ways to create better designs and more sustainable ways of making. And I am convinced that the big companies whose names and symbols we seem to worship and who take claim in terms of creativity and profit, rely and draw on the failures and creativity that come from these anonymous risk takers from below. Fashion is less the result of corporate innovation or simple ‘trickle-down’ economics in some imagined fashion pyramid and more the result of the innovations made by those at the bottom of the supply chain – the unseen and vanishingly small with their atlases of experience – their successful decisions and sets of negotiations embodied in our everyday clothing.

The anthropologist Anna Tsing describes the blooming of a rare matsutake mushroom from the ashes of a nuclear war, a mushroom that is now foraged after by refugees, war vets, and the undocumented alike in the forests of the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. to sell on the black market for high prices. And in many ways, I have come to understand the global fashion industry in this way – among these landscapes of destruction that have exploited workers and cared little for the environment. These survivors of failure, who have failed over and over again, produce the successful clothing we all wear because they have had no other choice than to persist and change and adapt and innovate as much as the fashions themselves. These bubbling pockets of creativity occur alongside risk and failure, illegality and inequality, hidden and covert as evidenced in the banality of our wearable things.

Christina Moon is an assistant professor at the School of Art and Design History and Theory and director of the MA Fashion Studies at Parsons The New School for Design. 

This article was originally published in Vestoj: On Failure.