There is a shopkeeper in the Marais who has not trusted labels in twenty years. She is in her sixties now, and she has been selling clothes in that arrondissement since before algorithms told people what to want. Her shop is small, appointment-only, the kind of place you find because someone told you about it. She stocks Italian and French houses, mostly, and she has opinions about both.
A client once asked her about a coat. Camel, mid-weight, clean lines. The tag said Made in Italy, and the price said it meant something. The shopkeeper, folding something at the counter, did not look up.
"That doesn't tell you what you think it tells you."
She had learned this years earlier from a woman who sourced for one of the Italian houses. They had become friendly, the way you do in that world, and one afternoon over coffee the woman explained how EU regulation actually works.
A garment earns "Made in Italy" if the final substantial transformation occurs there. The word substantial is where the room gets quiet.
Cut the fabric in Romania. Sew the garment in Tunisia. Ship it to a workshop outside Florence for buttons, pressing, final inspection. Italian.
The sourcing woman had shrugged. "It is not a lie. It is just not the whole truth."
Biella is in Piedmont, in the foothills of the Alps, and it has been the center of Italian textile production for five hundred years. The mills there wove fabric for Napoleon. They still weave for the houses that care about saying where the cloth comes from.
