Act 1
The evolution of the laundry (and Tonello).
A story like a film.
You are about to read the first part* of a visual and sensory tale of emotions, feelings, experiences that have accompanied us in our first 40 years.
We have indeed wanted to reconstruct, also using our imagination and as if it were the subject of a film set between 1970 and the present day in Italy, our evolution and that of the laundry, referring mainly to a garment – jeans – which for all of us has been and is much more than just a “must” of our daily clothing: the “denim synthesis” of thoughts, lifestyles, and worldviews.
It’s a story of passion and tenacity, of collective events and private emotions, of a world initially unaware and then at the forefront of the sustainability revolution.
It’s our story. And perhaps, a little bit, yours too. Happy reading!
The Seventies, somewhere in Italy.
A kind of box. A big one. Of gray cement. Roof in Eternit. Two big, vertical windows in opaque glass. There isn’t even a logo, a brand. There is only sign reading “laundry/dyeing plant”, written in big red letters, almost as if to signal both a danger and the need for color at the same time.
And life.
All around, the fog seems to touch it: an enveloping, solid and penetrating bubble, made of vapor and smog, that always carries a burnt smell. Lifting your eyes and looking further afield: you can see other Eternit roofs on other industrial buildings, more gray boxes. Chimneys pouring out smoke, just like the exhaust pouring from the Transit 1 vans and the trucks that relentlessly come and go in the industrial zone, without getting lost, incredibly, as if they were on autopilot. Or with a GPS navigator which had yet to be invented. Limited visibility. Limited livability. This is the atmosphere.
Get the idea?
The Eighties. Vintage is the new black.
Our machines, the first G1s, are our sensors, the blue eyes of our machines placed in dyeing plants and laundromats.
And while we are now getting close to becoming main characters in this creative and surprising world, the search for the “used look” with artful beaching and wear on the seams, knees, and derriere becomes a magnificent obsession that infects everyone universally and indiscriminately.
