The previous chapter concluded with Carol Christian Poell extolling the virtue of matter as the foundation of the design process. I want to show in the present chapter that this is not a reductionist statement in the tradition of mechanical materialism, but particular to a considered form of production, which Poell often realises together with Italian weavers Bonotto SpA, who are the subject of this chapter. The case study of such production, its environment and labour conditions underscores the main tenet of this book that materialism is simultaneously concerned with forms of making and political economy, with creative as well as socio-political ideas.

Like many small to medium-sized manufacturers in Italy, Bonotto is a family-owned business, presently in its fourth generation. When I visited the company at the beginning of October 2016 the brothers Lorenzo and Giovanni Bonotto just had sold 60 per cent of their spinning and weaving factory, 30 per cent of their factory for finishing textiles and 13 per cent of Bonotto Editions, their experimental showcase in Milan, to the Ermenegildo Zegna Group. According to Giovanni Bonotto, this was for structural as well as personal reasons. The structural aspect pertains to the steady demise of small and medium-sized textile, fashion and accessory manufacturing across Italy. Only thirty years ago, around the town of Molvena in the Veneto region where Bonotto is based, some fifty family-owned companies were producing or finishing textiles. Today there are but two: one is Bonotto, the other Marzotto; the latter is now focused exclusively on spinning woollen yarns under its own name and for three subsidiaries in the textile province of Biella, in the Piedmont. The personal reason was not to burden his children with the need to take over the family business into a fifth generation, coupled with the opportunity to transfer Bonotto's productive capital to a company like Zegna that, albeit on a much larger scale, retains the workings of a family-owned business. The Bonotto and Zegna families are indeed friends and the sale of a large portion of the business is therefore intended to preserve an independent tradition, rather than having to sell out at a later point in the company's future. This danger of ‘selling out’ remains very real in the current Italian economy.