Benetton Boss Has No Regrets

According to the Daily Telegraph, Luciano Benetton has no regrets about the controversial advertising he approved.A billboard photo of a Catholic priest in full dress kissing a nun on the lips? "It was a joke, to show that the habit doesn't make the priest", says Benetton. It was banned in Italy after Vatican protests but won the Eurobest Award in Britain.

A newborn baby with an uncut umbilical cord? A death row inmate gazing from his Missouri cell? A dying Aids patient? The blooded shirt of a dead Croat soldier? Mating horses? None is remotely linked to anything sold by the Benetton clothing chain. "I approved them all, and I defend them all. Our photos had a fantastic effect on public opinion. We wanted to probe emotions and stir debate, and we did," he says. The common theme was the battle against prejudice.

What began as a soft play on multiracial themes and world peace, in tune with the exuberant colours of the firm's clothes, escalated into social crusades against apartheid and the HIV epidemic, ending in a scattergun blast of images with no apparent aim other than to shock. Eventually America's Sears chain pulled out of a $100m contract.

As if to prove that name recognition is not everything in fashion, Benetton's share price has languished since the family took the company public - with perfect timing - in 1986. With a capitalisation stuck at €1.3billion, it has been left far behind by Sweden's H&M (€19billion), Nike (€17billion), and Spain's brash newcomer Zara (€14billion).

To be fair, Benetton has paid a price for manufacturing loyally in Italy while rivals switched to low-wage plants in Asia. But markets are not fair. The firm started belatedly switching its European production to Croatia, Hungary and Tunisia at the end of the 1990s.

Royalty aside, Britain has not been an easy market to crack. The Anglo-Saxon world has been hard on Benetton, although Luciano learned his industrial tricks in the 1950s during a stint in Hawick, Scotland, discovering a technique of beating wool under water with a paddle to make it softer, a technique unknown in Italy.

Oliveiro Toscani has been replaced by 27-year-old British photographer, James Mollison. The crusades continue but the hard edge has gone. Today's billboards feature the mournful Simian features of "James", "Bonny", "Pumbu", and "Jackson", great apes from species facing extinction. They illustrate Dr Jane Goodall's latest book James & Other Apes.