On a hot summer day in June, I walked into a store in Paris upon noticing racks on the sidewalk displaying attractive linen shirts and dresses on sale for 25 to 35 Euros a piece. Everything in the store had a paper tag marked: “100% linen, Made in Italy.” I walked out with a shirt, a pair of pants, a skirt and a dress. There was a clothing label sold on the seam inside each of the garment with fabric explanations and washing instructions, but brand labels were nowhere to be seen. After reading Antonella Ceccagno's book City Making and Global Labor Regimes, I realize that these were very likely made by Chinese immigrants in Prato.
Prato is “a city, an Industrial District (ID), and a migrant hub” (p. 257) in Italy. It is where Chinese immigrants have concentrated since the 1990s, and where their fast fashion clothing businesses flourished. It is a place where under global competition a new labour regime evolved out of old industrial district modes of production, and a new immigrant-owned industry replaced the former native one. It is where Chinese immigrants were first desired and welcomed, and then resented and demonized.
Antonella Ceccagno knows the Chinese immigrant community in Prato inside out. As a consultant working for the Prato government in the 1990s and early 2000s and as a Chinese-speaking Italian researcher, Ceccagno was involved in their economic enterprises and social and political struggles for over two decades. However, this book is not about Chinese immigrants per se, but rather about how global competition, the local political economy and individual immigrants’ ambitions and efforts have combined to reconfigure the local economic life as well as global production. The author uses the changing economic landscape and ethnic relationships in the city of Prato to unpack the dynamics at different scales.
The book is a treatise on Chinese immigrant garment businesses in Prato. Ceccagno painstakingly lays out her arguments in each chapter, tackling one theme at a time, juxtaposing her own analyses and theoretical anchors with those she considers incomplete or erroneous, especially those interpretations which see the Chinese immigrant businesses as ethnic enterprises disembedded from the local context. Between the introductory chapter that presents the theoretical frameworks, research problems and methodological approaches, and the conclusion that wraps up the main conceptual arguments, six empirical chapters focus on different but connected themes. Chapters two, three and four introduce the global and local conditions for the rise of Chinese fashion businesses in Prato and their particular modes of production. The author shows that Chinese immigrants’ entrepreneurship in Prato is not only embedded in the complex structural influences – the global shift in fashion industry, the rise of fast fashion facilitated by large-scale production and the changing system of distribution, and the presence of the Italian’ industrial districts model of micro-production – but also shaped by the opportunity structure of the particular location, Prato, where the traditional textile industry had lost its competitiveness due to labour shortage and lack of technological innovation. As a result, there was not only a need for cheap migrant labour, but there were also available factory spaces vacated by the textile industry. In addition, Italy's immigration regime – the government relying on periodic amnesties to grant legal status to undocumented migrants instead of adopting real labour migration policies, and the law prohibiting self-employment amongst migrants from 1990 to 1998 – facilitated the creation of the particular mode of production seen among Chinese immigrant workshops.
In chapters five and six, Ceccagno discusses the key concept in this book – the mobile labour regime. She shows that immigrant workers’ immobility (the fact that they have to sleep in the workplace) and inter-firm mobility (they move whenever there is a job) worked hand in hand in making short production cycles possible, and thereby making fast fashion faster. Ceccagno further illustrates that this deeply exploitive mobile regime was made possible by outsourcing child care, which she calls “global restructuring of social reproduction” and ethnicization of the workplace, i.e. hiring only co-ethnics.
Chinese immigrants and the natives in Prato have not been getting along. Chapter seven analyses the reason for such animosity. Prato is at a dramatic stage where it is simultaneously seeing the decline of the native middle- to high-end textile industry and the rise of immigrant-led fast fashion manufacturing businesses. Because these two industries occupy different market positions, the native industry cannot directly benefit from the immigrant businesses. The natives’ grievances have spurred the right wing government to institute policies to criminalize Chinese immigrants’ labour practices.
I find the arguments in the book thorough and compelling. Ceccagno's analyses are based on her deep and broad knowledge of both the immigrants and the history of Italian industrial districts. She is also informed by theoretical developments in recent mobility and labour studies, which allows her to see the phenomenon of the Chinese immigrant fashion industry in Prato as an emplaced mobility story embedded in complex global and local processes.
One aspect of this book that I find a bit unsatisfying – it might be my idiosyncratic preference – is the style. The author prioritizes conceptual arguments over descriptive substance. As a result, the book is repeatedly interjected with other researchers’ theoretical statements, either as conceptual tools or as methodological justifications. This book is the outcome of decades of fieldwork. I am sure the author has accumulated a wealth of descriptive data and interesting stories. I wish the book could incorporate more ethnographic details and individual narratives to enliven the discussion. Regardless, this book's value is undebatable. It is an exemplary case study that shows how a localized phenomenon can be used to observe multi-scalar processes and influences taking place beyond the locality. It also provides fresh perspectives on ethnic businesses.
