Luciano Benetton: Famous fashion to cultural controversy

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. It's 1993 and we're in a brightly lit photography studio. Everything is white, white walls, white backdrop. In front stands a 57 year old man with a mane of frizzy white hair. He's wearing round glasses and a grin and he stares straight ahead at the camera. But that's all he's wearing. The man is completely naked. Behind the camera opposite a photographer encourages him teasing and joking as only an old friend could. Snap, snap, snap. They've got it. This new campaign image might shock some, but they used to that. Our model shrugs his suit back on. It's time to get back to the boardroom. Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. We pick a billionaire and find out how they made their money. We take them from zero to their first million, then from a million onto a billion. I'm Simon Jack, I'm the BBC's business editor. And I'm Zingseng and I'm a journalist author and podcaster. And that naked man is none other than Luciano Benetton, founder of the High Street Fashion brand that bears his name. And for the past 60 years, it's been celebrated for its brightly coloured knitwear. This is a belting episode. I've got to say, which takes in Benito Mussolini, post-war Italy, Formula One, a bit of Dolce Evita, some Vespas. Princess Diana. Princess Diana. Princess Diana as an influencer. Now I'm very aware of this brand. It was impossible to miss during the 80s and 90s. It was in your face wherever you looked on billboards. I'm not sure I have a bought anything there, but I was very aware of it. I think I had one or two Benetton jumpers, but I do remember those big shops and with those as we'll discuss later, those incredibly provocative, colourful ad campaigns. And you should look them up if you haven't seen them before. They addressed race, religion, AIDS, war, the death penalty. I mean, at the time, this really shocked tons of people and some of the ads were even banned. But over the last two decades, the Benetton brand has declined to the point of bankruptcy. So is Luciano a good or bad billionaire, or just a regular billionaire? Let's travel back in time to find out. Luciano Benetton was born in 1935 in the small Italian town of Trevisso near Venice. Now, this is Italy under the rule of the fascist dictator, Mussolini. And when Luciano was just a baby, his father, Leone, left Luciano and his mother to find his fortune as a trucker in Abyssinia, which is now known as Ethiopia, which had been recently invaded by Mussolini. Now, we also have to credit the author Jonathan Mantto for his book Benetton, which has been a really valuable source in finding out the history of this fascinating billionaire. But Leone was not a fortunate man. He caught malaria and his truck was stolen. So we returned to Trevisso and started a small bicycle hire business. And soon Luciano got a younger sister, Juliana and two brothers, Gilberto and Carlo. Luciano was only four years old when the Second World War began and amidst the increasing threat of violence, Luciano continued to cycle to school in Trevisso. But then in 1944, Trevisso was heavily bombed by the Allies. They mistook it for another town where they thought Mussolini was hiding out. Over a thousand inhabitants were killed, but by some miracle, the entire Benetton family survived. I'm still getting over the fact we've got a story with Mussolini playing a large part in it, because in April 1945, Mussolini was executed by the Italian resistance. His body famously, along with the bodies of his mistress and his retinue, were strung upside down for public display in Milan. Now a photo journalist called for daily Toscani took an now infamous photograph of that gruesome scene. Toscani had a young son at home, Oliveiro, who will go on to become an even more infamous photographer once he teams up with Luciano Benetton, we'll get to that story later. Just a few months before the end of World War II, Luciano's father, who never fully recovered from the effects of malaria, dies. His mother also develops a serious heart condition that requires long periods of rest. Luciano later described this time as a tragic period, you could say it was cruel, but you lived through it because you hoped things would change. The lesson I learned is that it was possible to fend for yourself. At 10 years old, I was no longer a child, so learning independence from really quite an early age. Yeah. To support his family, the young Luciano works part-time, selling papers and delivering bread and soap. We've had quite a lot of our billionaires deliver papers at one time in their life. It's like entry-level job for billionaire. Yeah. Now that newspapers and printers are slowly dying out, you wonder what the billionaires of tomorrow are doing. What are they doing right now? Anyway, his sister, Juliana, begins knitting the family's clothes and takes on extra work, selling in a garment factory. Italy was not the kind of dolcivi to place that we might think about back to now. It was a pretty drab place post-war clothes with grey, navy, black, burgundy. But at home, Juliana starts to get creative. She's sewing brightly-colored knitted sweaters for her family, and a bold yellow sweater she makes for Luciano was particularly admired. You can just imagine how much that yellow jumper worth popped. It's like sort of like this. Or the black. The black and white TV suddenly. Yeah. Exactly. Because poverty was really right in post-war Italy. So the houses were emptied of possessions, you know, staple foods. Like pasta became a luxury, if you can imagine that. At only 14 Luciano quits school to get a full-time job, he became a sales assistant in a clothing store run by the Delacierga brothers. Now, this isn't the kind of clothing store we might recognise today. Very old fashioned. The clothes are hidden away. There's only a few examples in the shop window. And customers instead describe what they wanted to the sales assistant who then went off to try and put together an outfit. This is time-consuming, often-resultant customers being presented with clothes they didn't actually want or like. And browsing without something specific in mind was pretty much impossible. I cannot imagine this ever being a shopping experience that existed. I can sort of, what look are you going for, Madam? It puts so much power in the hands of the shop assistant. You can see how people became tyrant. Well, I think shop assistants were quite tyrannical in those days. Even I remember sitcoms from my childhood where the sales assistants were very judgmental about the customers who had come in and tell them what they should wear. I mean, in one way, you can kind of understand how the high street became seen as this democratisation of fashion where anybody could buy whatever they wanted. Yeah, but as the 1950s roll on, things began to change. Exactly. Luciano began to notice a new kind of customer coming into the shop. So they were younger. They had a bit more leisure time. They had at least some disposable income. Because the economy of Italy was recovering in 1954 fortune magazine reported that Italy's industrial production had risen 50 percent above its pre-war base. So the exports for Italy were changing, things like olive oil, cheese, wine, all of those are declined. But fashions and fabrics were rising rapidly. Made in Italy had become a stamp of excellence. And to this day, if you're a bloke and you see a shirt which is made in Italy or a tie made in Italy, you think, "Oh, okay." Yeah, we're talking business now. Yes. Well, as a young man Luciano was interested in clothes, he dressed himself in a shop seat. He bought with his new wages. He even made his own bow tie, which was red, green, yellow, blue stripes, on white that he made by boring Nido and thread from Giuliana. Now, when he wore the tighter work, the Delaciaga brothers told Luciano, "It's original estesco, Alch, but you're a salesman, not a clown. I never want to see it in the shop again." I mean, it sounds like he was doing the absolute most with that Nido and thread. Well, also, it just shows that he's got a provocative streak in him, which will be evident throughout this story. He imagined a new kind of clothes store, one for people like him, where they could browse new fashions, spend their own money and come back time and time again. He would later say the traditional shops were destined to die and we killed them. So, in 1955, Luciano and Giuliana aged just 2018 decided to go into business. He was a natural salesman. She had the creative spark, but alas, they had no money and the knitting machine they needed was not cheap. It was $300,000 lira, which was around $200 at the time, but to put that into context, that was almost a year's annual wage in Italy. Yeah, so big money. To raise that money, Luciano sells his beloved accordion, while his little brother, Gilberto, sells his bicycle, they borrow the rest from relatives and friends, and when the sewing machine arrived at their home, they actually threw a party for it as if it was a new member of the family. I love that. Luciano collected wool from suppliers on his bike, Giuliana knitted till midnight, her mother ironed the sweaters, so this was a real family affair. And within a month, Giuliana produced her first collection, 20 knitted sweaters. The style was typical, but the colours were not. So the sweaters weren't green, yellows, pale blues. These colours were not seen in drab, post-war life in Italy. And they called the collection "tradually". Very pretty. Luciano sold the first sweater to a neighbouring grocer, Mr. Zucchello. He described the feeling he had in this moment as the same intense feeling as a scientist whose theory has just been proved correct. Eureka. Yeah, he had that moment when he realised these things could sell. And his employers, the Delecyaga brothers, were impressed. They placed an order for 600 of these sweaters. So the Benetans were able to buy several sewing machines and employ a handful of young women from the neighbourhood to sell them. And over the next few years, this business grew steadily. They sold their designs to more and more Italian retailers. Luciano no longer needed his day job, he was able to hand in his notice with the Delecyaga brothers. But before he left, their store changed his life in one more way. Yes, it was on the shop floor that he met his future wife Theresa, who was attracted to this tall, dashing sales clerk. After they married, she joined the family business and she went to work with Giuliana Benetan. Okay, by now, it's 1960 and Luciano is visiting Rome as it hosts the Olympic Games. Now, Luciano is blown away by what they call ill boom. There's post-war Italian economic miracle. And if you think about the movies and the scenes from this time, I'm thinking, "Dutch Evita, I'm picturing Sophia Loren in a sort of headscarf and glasses." Everyone going on a Vespas. Vespas or in a little alpha Romeo. And the appetite for consumption meant, as the 1960s progressed, treasurly the brand they had grew from a collection of just 20 jumpers made at home and delivered by bicycle into professional business with rented factory space, manufacturing tens of thousands of jumpers every year. And Luciano kept selling, but with sales reaching 100,000 sweaters a year, they quickly ran into a problem. They were at capacity with the factory space they rented. It just couldn't deal with this number of orders. So Luciano decided to build his own brand new state of the art factory and to pay for it, he used the profits from their booming sales, plus bank loans that were hard won by his little brother, Giuberto, who by this point had become the financial brains of the whole business. And they built themselves a spanking new modern factory, air conditioning, and crucially this factory gave them the novel ability at that time to dye an entire sweater in a vat. And that drastically spared up how quickly they could get their products into the shops. Most clothing manufacturers can only really guess what colours were sell well. So if say a yellow sweater sells out, they can't produce extra supplies quick enough to keep up with this trend, but the new manufacturing technique meant that they could respond to trends within 10 days compared to a month for their rival brands. So this is an early incarnation of what we would call fast fashion now. And if you look at the people like H&M and those kind of stores, they pride themselves on being able to respond to market trends in days rather than weeks now. And that's one of their big competitive advantages. And Luciano called this raising fashion from the artisanal to the industrial level. And it wasn't just Benetan's genius, he was exploiting the environment around him. Benetan was one of many businesses in the region, capitalising on a rich artisan tradition, combined with an excess of labour due to shrinking agricultural production. Remember we talked about things like olive oil and other cheeses and all that kind of stuff were in decline. So there's plenty of spare workers. And this formula, combining fashion with industry and technology, that was if you like the sort of secret source for Benetan's success. So they now have the production capacity to take a leap from just being the manufacturer of clothes, to being the retailer in their own right to being the people who sell those clothes. A year earlier, Luciano had been approached by a man named Pierro Machorello. Pierro worked in his father's small clothing store in a town called Balluno, not far from Triviso. And on a trip to Rome, Pierro had admired the treasurer leaves designs in a shop window. And just two days later, he turned up at Luciano's store with a bold proposal. He said, "I want to open a shop exclusively selling your clothes. I have no money and no experience, but if you trust me, I know we will be successful." That is quite the elevated pitch. What a pitch. I've got no money, no experience, but I'm sure it's going to work. Anyway, Luciano was excited by this idea. There had never been a one brand, one product shop like this before. It was kind of hard to imagine that now, isn't it? So he makes a deal with Pierro, that Pierro would buy exclusively from the Benetans and keep the profits on a no return basis. The Benetans loan Pierro some money and along with the bank loan, Pierro opens his store. This is basic franchising and is the key to Benetans success. Now, franchising is where, and it happens all over the world at the moment, like McDonald's is a franchise thing, where basically McDonald's, for example, doesn't own the restaurant or operate the restaurant. An independent person does that. I just supply them all of the stuff they need, ovens, the food, the branding, the menus, but you run it as your own business. So I don't have really the overheads of running the business and you're bearing some of the risk, but you're, though, my distribution network, that's kind of franchising how it works. Yeah. And if you're the one setting it up and, you know, as Pierro is, you have the brand, you have the goods, you don't need to go around trying to fill your shelves yourself. Yeah. It's an interesting one because although you lose a little bit of control because you're not actually running the store yourself, it's a passport to fast expansion because you're getting lots of other people to open the stores for you. Well, the first store that Pierro opened was in a dense street and a quiet part of his town in Baluno. Luciano called it the worst sight I've seen in my entire life, but Pierro was optimistic. If it works here, it'll work anywhere. You need that kind of optimism, I think, if you want to start business. That store opened in 1965, drawing on inspiration from Swing London. They gave the store an English name, they called it My Market. It was painted white, brightly lit. The clothes were displayed in waves of colour, a far cry from the department stores we counted at the beginning of the story. Yeah. It was enticing people in and the store was an instant success in this quiet town. Young people just flocked to it. They were excited at being encouraged to browse the clothes without the pressure to buy from those shop assistants we talked about and franchise stores quickly followed in Cortina, which was a fashionable ski resort town, in the University town of Padua, and there were young customers there queuing up around the block to get in. So a very early version of the kind of queues you now see outside stores such as Suprem or Stussi in London. Yeah. So Luciano was perhaps understandably feeling pretty confident. So he dropped the name treasurly and replaced it with his name, Beneton. But it would be several years before the family name graced the front of its franchise stores. Luciano didn't want the Beneton brand damaged if my market proved a failure. But he didn't have worried. My market shops are spreading to Italy's major cities, Rome, Florence, Naples and Trieste. These franchises were largely run by people who had visited the original three shops and they saw that retail could be fun. They wanted in on this kind of revolution. But Luciano decided he would no longer raise funds for these new shops to open, budding entrepreneurs had to do it themselves. This is the franchising model. It's interesting, isn't it? This idea of retail becoming an experience a past times, you know, something to do a hobby almost. Yeah. With the success of these franchise stores, Beneton stopped supplying independent retailers so they wouldn't sell bits of their product to get be in one corner of somebody else's shop. Instead, they developed new stores to sell a bigger range of products. Mercaria was a gentler experience, more traditional with classical music to appeal to the older female customer. There was tomato, that was aimed at teens, while phantom acts lent into hippie culture. These stores would often compete in the same town and I guess it's better to compete with yourself than with others. Within a year, there were 300 stores that sold Beneton clothes exclusively. You know what this reminds me of? This reminds me of what Inditex, which owned Zara Kids, Zara Home, you know, all these kind of diffusion lines in a way that are still kind of offshoots of the main brand. I think Inditex also earned Pull and Bear. It's the solution of choice on the streets when in fact they own quite a lot of these brands. All this meant that by 1969, the family was wealthy enough to buy the grand 17th century Villa Menelli, near Treviso. It had been a banner for over 150 years, so not surprising the renovation took over 15 years to finish, but it remains Beneton's headquarters today. And Luciano was also busy growing his own family. By the end of the 60s, he and Teresa had four children together. Mauro, Elisandro, Rosela and Rocco. Fortunately, he was making enough money to provide for this big family. And we think that it is around 1970 that Luciano became a millionaire. Now, it's hard to get exact figures as it was a privately run business, but at the start of the 70s, they went from dozens to hundreds of stores. So if he was pretty safe to say, at this point, he is a millionaire. Luciano Beneton is a millionaire. [Music] [Music] So let's take it to the 70s. They were all about Beneton's franchise stores expanding throughout Europe, and in each country they adapted their offering to local taste. So by the end of that decade, there were 1700 stores across the continent. Estonishing fact, Beneton was now the largest consumer of wool in the world. They were also diversifying into Denim. The world was narrowing genes, including Luciano himself, so they acquired French Denim Fashion Company, Cisly. It was in one of Luciano's gene stores that he met an employee called Marina Salomon. She was in her early 20s, about her 10 university in London. He was in his 40s at the time, and he fell for her instantly, and he flew to London to begin an affair. After several months, Luciano came clean to wife Teresa. She ended their marriage. He moved out of the family home and in with Marina. Luciano and Marina would stay together for almost two decades and have a son, Brando. He would also help her set up her own luxury fashion group. But let's get back to the 80s. Luciano and Marina are in love, and he's about to expand his empire beyond Europe, opening the first stores in New York City in Tokyo. Beneton was the hot brand at the time. Celebrities, like Sylvester Stallone, Dustin Hoffman, Jackie O, all visited the New York stores. And in London, Lady Diana Spencer, who was then the fiancé of Prince Charles, was photographed stepping out of a Beneton. So this is amazing, because I feel like Diana at the time was a proto-influencer. Yo, for sure. I'm struggling to see Sylvester Stallone in the yellow sweater, I've got to say. I can sort of see it, but Diana, I can see indefinitely in a Beneton knitted jumper. She was, you know, the tourist for those. And as we'll see, she was super progressive on some of the issues that Beneton was also interested in. And so I mean, she's a perfect fit and a very powerful, probably the most famous woman in the world at that time, I would say. Yeah, well, I'm a perfect brand representative for Beneton. And he understood full well, Luciana did, that sports could also help grow the brand. He chose the glamorous globe-trotting technology-driven world of Formula One. In 1983, Beneton sponsored the Tyrell Racing team. Three years later, he purchased a team outright, Tolman, and rebranded it, Beneton Formula. Now one of its famous drivers was Michael Schumacher, who got his big break with the team. He won two drivers world championships and was the most famous driver at the time. They also won what they call the Constructors Championship before eventually being bought out by Renault. I remember that period really well. So if you weren't getting to meet with High Street Clothes, you were getting to people like me through sport. Well, Beneton was loved by movie stars, sportsmen, royalty, affordable and wearable. So obviously, the public went completely mad for it. I mean, it's quite rare to actually have a High Street brand that was this loved by the rich and the famous. The closest I can think of is Topshop with Kate Mosses, with that collaboration with Kate Moss. But it's very rare that a High Street fashion label in today's day and age is so closely associated with celebrities of that caliber. Yeah. So by the mid-'80s, Beneton had over 3,000 shops worldwide. They were opening one a day, most of which now bore the Beneton name above the door. The Financial Times profiled Luciano at the time, trying to identify the source of his success. The company now uses some of the most advanced data processing and factory automation techniques. In fact, Beneton employed more computer operators than people making clothes. They have more sales information than almost any other company in the world. They would joke, "First we sell the clothes, then we make them." Who does this remind you of? Walmart? Exactly. One of our other billionaires, you found it Walmart. And in some ways, it reminds me a lot of all the fast fashion chains now, because they respond to what they see on the internet, what they see trending, and then they make it within days. Yeah. But as Luciano's wealth and notoriety grew, organized criminals were taking notice. One evening, Luciano and Marina were relaxing at home when five men entered, tied them up at gunpoint, and left with money and jury. Just months later, driving through the gates into their villa, two men with crowbars and pickaxes attacked their car, and the police uncovered even more kidnapped plots against Luciano's son, Alessandro, and sister, Giuliana. So Luciano decided to move to a town in his words near lots of other houses, in a home where we can be safe, and they all got arm-a-plated cars and bodyguards, such a long way away from post-war Italy. Yeah. Well, I suppose no one gets very rich in Italy without the mafia raising an eyebrow and saying, "Hang on a second. What's going on here?" Without the eyes of criminals following. So, a big security retinue of people doesn't come cheap. But fortunately, Luciano is about to make the move to take the company public. We've been through this many times on this program, the initial public offering the IPO when you sell shares in the company to the public. And this gives you a very good snapshot of what a company is worth at that time. You have to, because everyone's got to price the shares. So, 20% of the company went on sale to the public and raised over $270 million in less than 15 minutes. So at that point, in 1987, when Fortune Magazine releases its inaugural billionaire list, it's an inaugural one-mind. Luciano makes the list with $1 billion aged 52. He's a billionaire. The 1980s made Benetan a billionaire and a household name. But it was over the next decade that the brand would become infamous, and the name Benetan would become mired in controversy. Enter Oliveiro Toscani, whose father, you may remember, took that gruesome photo of Mussolini's hanging body. Toscani, Jr., Oliveiro has become a photographer in his own right and was working with fashion magazines like Vogue. He was also a self-described anarchist. Yes, that's an interesting point given what is soon to come. After being introduced at a party in 1982, Oliveiro and Luciano immediately hit it off, and Luciano soon made him art director for Benetan. His first campaign was titled "All the Colors in the World" and featured images of young people of different ethnicities, laughing together, so, you know, a real display of inclusivity at a time when that was actually quite far from the conversation in fashion. The campaign won praise from even the United Nations, and by 1989, they officially adopted the brand name. I remember this, United Colors of Benetan. But remember, Oliveiro is a self-described anarchist, he's a provocateur, and what began as a campaign about harmony began to show ever more controversial imagery, so the first campaign to cause real backlash featured a black woman breastfeeding a white baby. It received accusations of being racist. It was felt by some to conjure up historical images of slavery and wet nursing, and today Benetan's own website states, "This photograph led to global controversy, the African American community in the United States protested and obtained its withdrawal from the United States." But they were not deterred, Luciano and Tuscany doubled down, in fact. The 1990s saw them release a whole series about campaigns that commented on contentious social issues, and often were almost always had very little to do with clothing. Yeah. If you actually look at some of the ad campaigns from the time, very few of them actually feature any Benetan clothing at all. There's images of, you know, one I remember is of a blood smeared newborn baby, and you could still see its umbilical cords, a quite a gory image. Yeah, I remember the one with a Catholic priest and the nun passionately kissing. That was banned in Italy after the Vatican protested. And there's also a photograph of the AIDS activist David Kirby on his deathbed. So it was originally published in Life magazine. You might have seen it before. It became a global symbol of the AIDS epidemic at the time. And Benetan's use of it in a fashion campaign sparked a ton of debate about exploiting this tragedy for advertising. Kirby's family on their part reportedly approved the use of the image. There was also death row in mates photographed in their cells. These images appeared in magazines on billboards all around the world. Victims rights groups were outraged. The state of Missouri in the US sued for misrepresentation. And major retailer Sears dropped their Benetan products. It's really interesting, I think, to understand a bit about fashion and why these campaigns were seen as the thing for Benetan to do at a time when the brand was still rising high. Because I think, you know, controversy and viral imagery. And this was before the word viral had even been coined, right? Plays a really huge part in fashion's role in selling to consumers. There is the old adages and there's no such thing as bad publicity and anything that raises your profile, you know, controversial or not, achieve something. And you could argue they're not individual examples of trying to shock. They're kind of a theme to this, which is sort of, you know, just basically difficult issues, but, you know, I don't know. It's a tricky one. Yeah, I think fashion is one of those industries where they're always chasing this quite nebulous idea of cool and sometimes it can go over into the realm of edgy, which then turns into the realm of needlessly provocative and you could argue that Benetan's imagery kind of straddled all three at a time. But, you know, clearly Luciano really believed in Toscani because he told the telegraph newspaper, I approved them all and I defend them all. Our photos had a fantastic effect on public opinion. We wanted to probe emotions and stare debate and we did. And, you know, that is certainly true. Yeah. And, reflecting later, he also told the New York Times, am I radical? I rather think so. I believe this is the only way one has in my position to be an example myself. I paved the road trying to make people aware of participating in problems. And Aluviero said of him, Luciano is a modern Medici, he goes on instinct, he'll say, let's try it. Although, in his book, Jonathan Mantle, quotes a high ranking non-family member of the business. If Mr. Benetan suspected for a second that the recent campaigns were causing losses, he would have fired Toscani immediately, even though he's a close friend. So bottom line still talks. Yeah. Business is still number one. By the new millennium, however, fashions were changing and Benetan was no longer the hot Neil brand. So sales were decreasing as competition from other high street brands was increasing. So you had Gap and Banana Republic in the United States. You had Zara and H&M in Europe. And Luciano had invested in Italy. Benetan played catch-up well after rival brands had saved money by moving, manufacturing to the East. So in 2002, Benetan lost money for the very first time in a 38-year history. Don't feel too sorry for him, though. No, despite this Luciano was still listed as being worth almost $5 billion that year. And that made him the 62nd richest person in the world. In 2003, he announced that his family would be taking a step back from the day-to-day running of the business. But in 2012, Luciano stepped down as chairman as well of the Benetan group. The same year, the company delisted from the Milan Stock Exchange. I don't know if you've ever had a company on Good Bad Bill in a D-listed. Why would they do that? Well, if we keep doing this for some time, I think this will come up more and more. Right. It's happening more and more often. So what is it exactly? So basically, if you're a public company, you're required to have a level of transparency that private companies are not. So for example, you've got to show how much all the top bosses earn. You've got to report your earnings either every three months or every six months, and the analysts pour over all your results. And if you don't get the profits in this particular quarter or this half year, they push your share price down. So you'll subject to a lot of expectation and public scrutiny as a public company, none of which you are by private company. And at the moment, we're seeing tons of companies go from being publicly quoted on stock markets to being private. So what happens to all the stocks that the public bought? So basically, what will happen is the private company will come along and make all the owners of those publicly listed shares and offer, send me your shares, I'll give you X amount of money. You then cancel the shares, deal us the company, and it's no longer listed on the stock exchange. Right. Well, I mean, this all heralded quite the changes at Benerton. And so over the next few years, the brand suffered even more losses. So just like in the movies, Luciano came out of retirement for one more job. At the age of 83, Luciano once again becomes executive chairman, taking charge of commercial operations and communications alongside that controversial photographer, Oliveira Tuscani. Luciano told the newspaper La Republica, "It's unbearably painful for me. It's our own faults. Our stores were bright with lights. Now they've become somber and sad. The worst sin was that we stopped making sweaters. It's as though we took the water away from an act product." But it wasn't just the Benerton clothes brand here to worry about. Over the decades, the family had also been making money through their holding company, Adizioni. That infrastructure and transport arm hit a real crisis, though, because in 2018, a bridge in Genoa, the Ponte Morandi, collapsed during a rainstorm, killing 43 people. Now, the Benetons controlled Autostrade, the company charged with maintaining public infrastructure. The New York Times reported at the time, "Now the Benetons are suffering through their first encounter with national infamy. Three days after the collapse, the anti-establishment newspaper, Il Fato Quattediano, ran photographs of the Benetons on the front page, and the headline read, "We pay, bridges collapse, and they cash in." Benetons holding companies sold Autostrade after the intense political scrutiny, and the incident also saw the end of perhaps Luciano's longest relationship. After Oliveira Tuscani said a national television, "Who cares about a bridge collapse?" The company immediately cut ties of Oliveira and released this public statement. Luciano Beneton and the entire company renewed their sincere closeness to the families of the victims and to all those who have been involved in this terrible tragedy. It was a massive event, that's why I remember that very clearly in the news. Let's bring it up to date, they last year aged 89, Luciano Beneton finally stepped down as chairman of Beneton. He blamed losses of over $100 million on a new boss and management. In short, I trusted them and I made a mistake. In January of this year, Beneton group filed for bankruptcy. Wow. Announcing that over the course of the year, it would close 400 branches around the world. So, gosh, bankruptcy, long way from the heady height to the 80s and 90s. Yeah, a long way from Diana stepping out in one of your sweaters. But don't worry, because Luciano's still doing okay, despite the fact that his company has gone bankrupt at 90 years old, he's still worth around 3.7 billion today. A highway infrastructure company accounts for more than half of his fortunes. Despite that crisis. Exactly, so despite the crisis with the bridge, despite the bankruptcy, he is still riding high, relatively high as a billionaire. What a story, starting in Mussolini's Italy and ending up right where we are today. A fantastic story of Luciano Beneton. So, now we have to judge him. So, let's start with wealth and in this, we like to look at the journey they've been on in terms of their wealth. And this is pretty much Rags to Riches. I mean, it really is. Talk about working from the age of 10 to support your family, flogging your accordion and your bite to buy your first sewing. I mean, this is a guy who's actually really grafted and come from nothing. Yeah. He's found on his bike, delivering newspapers in a bombed out traviso where his family, you know, narrowly avoided being killed. Compare that to today, he owns nearly a million hectares, that's two and a half million acres of Argentina. And of course, he bought a Formula One racing team. Well, he isn't up there with, you know, the tech billionaires that we've covered, but I think he scores really highly just because, God, I mean, his journey from where he started out. I think he would score for me an eight out of ten. I agree. Eight out of ten, for sure. What about controversy? No shortage of that. Yeah, I mean, those campaigns, they really did kick up quite a fuss. And you know, fashion is so subjective. Someone can like a piece of clothing and someone can absolutely hate it. Yeah. And I think in the same way those campaigns straddle that line. I mean, I personally, I remember seeing those campaigns when I was a kid. The photography itself is actually really beautiful and startling and stunning. The imagery, the themes, no matter what you think of it, the images themselves are just quite amazing. Yeah. So that's the controversy on the marketing side of it. Of course, there's the bridge collapse. The bridge collapse. I suppose he's one of the pioneers of fast fashion, which, you know, is notoriously environment. A wasteful industry. Exactly. I think one of the most polluting industries in the world, people will always point to that. Or there are worse offenders you could argue than Benaton in that regard. I would have to, I'm going to give him a nine out of 10 or maybe even a 10 for controversy. Like, I mean, they deliberately courted it. I can't give him a low mark. Yeah, that is true. I don't know though, because yeah, it's a funny one. I feel like maybe my opinion on, on how controversial those ad campaigns were would have differed five, 10 years ago, because now I almost feel like a lot of fashion brands play it too safe. So maybe by courting controversy, you're actually, you know, doing and saying something more interesting than most fashion brands these days. Okay. I'm not saying controversy is a bad thing here. I'm not saying controversy nine. All that's terrible. I'm just saying that they sort of went out of their way to court it. That's true. They actually did. And maybe now you've swayed me. I'm going to give him an eight out of 10, I would say. Okay. And giving back philanthropy, he's set up a bunch of nonprofit initiatives on art and communication. He does residencies for young artists and a research foundation. He's clearly a man for whom art and image is really important. I suppose in a way, they would consider some of those controversial campaigns a form of philanthropy in their own right. Yeah. I mean, raising awareness of issues like AIDS, you know, that scene that we opened the episode with where he's naked. That was actually for an ad campaign to persuade shoppers to bring their unwanted clothes into Benetan to be redistributed through the Red Cross. So there was a message behind it resulted in the redistribution of 500 tons of clothes. That against the many, the tons of clothes he's actually sold, I'm pretty sure it's pretty low. He's so environmentally conscious. He built an environmentally friendly yacht, Tribu, in the early 2000s, a 50 meter luxury yacht, first ship of its type to be awarded a green star certificate of environmental efficiency. Sorry, but that is so billionaire, you know, it's like something you'd find in a satire of the rich. Oh, man, don't worry. Don't worry. It's environmentally friendly. I'm going to give him a three for philanthropy. Yeah. I'm going to upgrade that because I think do you think those campaigns and what they were trying to achieve in terms of bringing important issues to the fore, you could argue as a former philanthropy itself. So I'll give him a five. Yeah. Well, yeah, I think I would give him a five out of ten for that. What about final category, power and legacy? I mean, I think you're probably much more qualified than I am to talk about this. I mean, Benetan changed the way that ad campaigns worked or people thought about clothes, clothes, as lifestyle clothes as who you are, clothes as identity. I think that when you put it into the context of what fashion was like at the time that Benetan was at its peak, to have someone set up a fashion label who still remembered when you had to go in and describe clothes to a fashion assistant who would tell you yes or no, you know, to have someone who set up what you could basically almost ascribe as the first modern high street fashion brand. Yeah. Like that is quite something. Yeah. And we revolutionized the sort of post-war Italian clothing scene. Exactly. And those campaign images, they really did push the boundaries of what was considered acceptable for a high street brand, let alone, you know, more a more kind of a high level fashion brand. Yeah. Power and legacy. Will we remember Benetan in a hundred years' time? You know what? Even though the company has filed a bankruptcy, I wouldn't put it past him to maybe select a successor who could revitalize it. There's a lot of nostalgia nowadays for those fashion brands from the 80s and 90s, you never know. There could be a third act. Do you think there's some latent affection for that brand which could be revived in the right hands? Exactly. Got it. Now watch the space. Okay. I'm going to say probably could have picked up the phone to speak to the head of state of Italy, probably not the president of the United States. I'm going to give a six for power and legacy. I'm going to give him a seven out of ten because I think what Benetan achieved at its height was really quite remarkable. And also it's just a really interesting tale of post-war Italy as well. I think, you know, it's sort of going from desperate poverty after the Second World War through the... Moving from agriculture. Into the Dolce of Vita and everyone wearing lovely scarves and looking like the feel Iran and driving around in Chowbeller and the Vespas and all this kind of stuff. Right up to the modern day through the controversy of the AIDS period. It's a breathless story, I would say. Yeah. You can imagine the 12-part HBO drama, can't you? You certainly can. We're going to have to ask you, though, whether he is good, bad or just another billionaire. What do you think? Email [email protected] or drop us a text or WhatsApp to 001-917-6861176. If you missed that, just rewind on your podcast and you'll get it again and tell us what you think. We've had some listeners get in touch about our episode on Michael O'Leary, the CEO of Ryanair. Dexter wrote 'Dear Zing Simonin' team, thank you very much for making my trip to the gym this morning so enjoyable, as I listen to your podcast on Michael O'Leary, hope you smashed out some PBs while in the gym, Dexter. I cannot add much more to the accurate way you scored this. Thank you. He was born into privilege, so not my favourite kind of billionaire. Though a feisty character, I admire his skills, particularly with negotiating, but he appears not to be a pleasant person. Maybe that's a prerequisite of being a billionaire, but give me Richard Branson any day. Yeah, interesting. Thanks for that, Dexter. Yes, our billionaires pleasant or not on the whole, but have a listen to all of them make your own decision. A listener got in touch on WhatsApp, who didn't give their name, says the episode on Michael O'Leary was another banger, thank you. He has to be one of the good ones given his legacy and how he has changed lifestyles in Europe. The app for checking in is a game changer, a happy Ryanair customer. I think Michael O'Leary is going to be quite pleased with that. He'll be chuffed a bit through that. But David from Pamplona also says, "Hello from Northern Spain, I enjoyed your podcast and Mr O'Leary and declared myself a fan of the man and the airline. I've flown with Ryanair more than a hundred times and I've never had a problem. The product on offer is good value for money if people read the terms and conditions properly. Their expectations might be a bit more realistic." And Steve from Florida, who has got in touch before, so thank you for being a friend of the programme, Steve. As someone who has never flown with Ryanair and hopes never to have to, I do still have respect for Michael O'Leary and what he's achieved. It does show that hard work, determination and a clear purpose can pay off for both the billionaire and all the consumers who have benefit, not to mention shareholders. On the basis of your programme, I would rate Michael as a good and colourful billionaire. Colorful for sure. Good Bad billionaire is a BBC World Service podcast produced by Hannah Huffard. With additional production by Louise Morris, the editor is Paul Smith and it's a BBC Studios production. For the BBC World Service, the commissioning editor is John Manell.