Vitale Barberis Canonico

The demanding manufacturing effort undertaken by the mills in Biella and its surroundings during World War I, naturally included the Lanificio Barberis Canonico. At the time, its owner Giuseppe Barberis Canonico, father of Vitale, did not hold back and played his part in supplying the Royal Italian Army with the necessary quantities of field grey cloth.

Beyond the immense human cost, field grey uniforms were perhaps the region’s most important contribution to the Army. Military contracts were also awarded to Biella’s wool mills during World War II, though on a very different scale and with a different meaning. It was the 1915–1918 conflict that defined the home front—a front made up of looms, behind which the people of Biella (and even more so, the women of Biella) stood firm and never gave an inch.

This colour, which became synonym with the Great War, overshadowed the old Savoyard blue. Victor Emmanuel III became the “field grey king”, and field grey became the ideological, political, social and cultural battleground of the historical interlude between the end of WWI and the rise of fascism, a four-year stretch opened by the so-called “Biennio Rosso”. Within that framework, clashing colours paraded: the white of the Catholics, the red of the socialists and communists, and the field grey which – willingly or not – clung to the liberal-monarchist bourgeoisie, the warmongers and capitalists, until the black arrived and covered everything and everyone. This shift in hues can be traced in the newspapers of the time. During the 1922 victory celebrations, just six days before the “March on Rome”, officers were invited to attend official ceremonies in field grey uniforms, while in the streets the Blackshirts celebrated Italy’s new dictator.

But what had happened in the preceding years? Perhaps we need to take a further small step back to grasp the full meaning behind the chromatic and semiotic evolution of that period. The people of Biella first encountered field grey shortly before the outbreak of WWI. That “non-colour” made its debut with the famous “Grey Platoon” (the “Morbegno” Alpine Battalion), an experiment initiated in 1905 by Luigi Brioschi, then president of the Milan branch of the Italian Alpine Club. The goal, commendably, was camouflage. In 1911, during the Italo-Turkish War, an attempt was made in Biella to form a battalion of volunteers – young men and/or students – although the real purpose of this undertaking remains unclear. Perhaps, it was a form of readiness in case of need, or simply an expression of military and nationalist fervour.

The unit was to have “its own non-compulsory uniform. However, it is the duty of each volunteer to possess, as the battalion’s insignia, a field grey cap with a tricolour cockade and eagle feather on the left, and puttees in the same field grey” (Gazzetta Biellese, 6 May 1911). And there it was. In the wool mills, the fabric was already being woven, but it was not yet a recognised colour in everyday menswear. Just over a year later, “Recruits of the 54th Infantry have arrived in town, assigned to the second battalion stationed here. They belong to the 1892 draft class and to earlier call-ups. At the regimental depot, the troops were dressed and equipped in the new field grey campaign uniform. This is the first time that units wearing the new uniform have been deployed in our city”.

From that moment on, it was no longer a novelty. What was new, however, was the “war” that broke out in the wake of the ceasefire of 4 November 1918. Once the flood of orders from the Royal Army had subsided, the textile industry found itself depleted and, by early 1919, unable to withstand the crisis brought on by the abrupt slowdown in production. Switching from field grey back to other colours was no easy task, and there was a kind of anthropological inertia (even more than an industrial one) that proved hard to overcome. Field grey came to symbolise the “enemy” for the socialists. With all the vehemence of proletarian working-class rhetoric, the reds launched a full-frontal attack on the alliance between capitalist and militarist elites, that had amassed unparalleled fortunes from the profits generated by field grey supplies.

There was some truth to that accusation, but also a fair degree of exaggeration, at least in Biella, and at least in a sector like wool textiles, which could indeed yield illicit windfall profits, though not on the scale seen in other industries. Of course, the comrades were not concerned with whether margins were minimal—it was (rightly) a matter of principle. And field grey was stigmatised. A propaganda editorial published in the Corriere Biellese on 24 June 1919, under the telling title Delenda Militia (an uncompromising call for pacifism, though not without contradiction, since more than a few socialists, among them Cesare Battisti and even Benito Mussolini, became fervent interventionists in the lead-up to the war), declared: “In place of the servant in field grey, we want to see the free peasant with his proud chest bared, harvesting the wheat”. So, better the bare skin of freedom than the field grey of the worker doubly enslaved: to capital and to war.

On the other side, industrialists were facing problems of their own, though of a different nature. They attempted some form of resistance on the level of propaganda, but without much conviction or success. For capitalists, field grey was the colour of philanthropy, of charitable gestures, that is, cloth donated to dress the youngest – the children of heroic soldiers – in that same hue. “During the years of the storm, the young children of workers, valiant soldiers at the front or labouring on the home front, received vigilant and loving support, and many industrial firms generously responded to appeals from the School Welfare Authority, donating offcuts of field grey fabric to be made into shorts and full outfits for schoolchildren under the authority’s care”. Better than nothing; but in truth, not much. The greatest challenge, in fact, was the reconversion to civilian production. As early as 25 January 1919, the front page of La Tribuna Biellese carried a headline that captured the mood: “Let us save the Italian wool industry!”

Field grey cloth, once a highly profitable resource, had become dead weight, a burden on industry. Only exports could offer a path to recovery. As for the issue of windfall profits, it was brushed aside with a bit of arithmetic. “As early as January 1916, the Ministry of War set the price of field grey cloth, calculating a 4 percent profit margin for manufacturers. The price surges in raw materials, caused by the Government itself, led nearly all wool manufacturers to suffer losses of around one lira per metre supplied to the State. Indeed, when rags of field grey had to be bought at 6.50 lire, cotton at 20 lire, and croisée wools at 34 lire per kilogram – while the cloth was invoiced to the State at 19.70 lire per metre – it becomes clear, even to the layman, that manufacturers were operating at a loss, and a substantial one at that. The only consolation: ensuring that workers did not go without employment”. A well-meaning narrative the reds refused to accept; and yet, even in that, there was a grain of truth. But truer still was the fact that field grey, which had shielded soldiers at the front, left them not so much free upon their return as workers, but exposed to the lethal chill of unemployment. Field grey gave, and field grey took away. First it was the colour of uniforms, then it became the colour that divided.

Traces of field grey can still be found in the Historical Archive of Vitale Barberis Canonico. One particularly interesting example appears in the winter 1912 swatch book of the Lanificio Giovanni Tonella e Figli. The Great War had not yet begun, but the colour of the Royal Army was already known. At the time, however, no one could have guessed that it would soon become the quintessential “Italian uniform”.