United Colors of Branding

When Benetton began its global redesign of the advertising world, there was really no telling how far they would go. The ongoing strategy of the company has been to affix social concerns to their magazine spreads and television spots, boiling racial and socioeconomic issues down into questionable polemics (ads have employed imagery such as a nun and priest kissing). But the value of Benetton's renowned campaigns lies in their politically charged assertions -- it's enough that they pose questions, even if they don't have any answers.

Still maintaining the quest as more of a journey than a real destination, Benetton's ideas and ideologies have come to rest in a physical location: Fabrica. Founded in 1994, Benetton's "research center on communication," as they put it on their website (www.fabrica.it) is both a commercial workplace and an art-school sanctuary. It's an institution that stands as a testament to the radical thinking of such visionaries as its cofounders, Luciano Benetton and Oliviero Toscani, original director Godfrey Reggio, former Colors magazine editor Tibor Kalman and architect Tadao Ando, who designed the opaque hub of interconnectivities that is Fabrica's physical heart in Treviso, Italy. Fabrica actively generates an expansive tableau of DIY opportunities that let kids explore the mutant margins of branding, with projects such as the new Fabrica special-edition clothing line, which U.S. graphic artist and Fabrica student Nicole Kenney augmented with her anthropomorphically invested monkeys (T-shirt pictured above). Creative director Renzo di Renzo says, "Our basic idea to mix art and culture with market and industry keeps our head in the clouds with our feet on the ground."