Italy's Designer Outlet Mall Drains Its Cities of Shoppers
The name of the mall was carried along in whispers at the men's wear shows in Milan two weeks ago, written on scraps of paper, covertly passed from one fashion editor to another — from Vicky McGarry of Men's Journal to Michael Nash of Vibe to Stefano Tonchi of Esquire. It was almost as if this outlet mall, McArthurGlen Serravalle, set in the middle of the Italian countryside, had developed the cachet of a hot Los Angeles club, the kind of place so inside you have to know someone who knows someone to find it.

And the mall itself has a vaguely unreal dimension: it is a hilltop mirage floating on the landscape two minutes from the autostrada in an agricultural no-place, in the center of an imaginary triangle formed by Genoa, Turin and Milan. Not long ago, grapes and grain were the mainstays of this sleepy town in the Piedmont. Now its future is banked on less essential commodities, ones for which consumers have an insatiable appetite: premium brands.

Serravalle is Italy's first designer outlet center. Until fairly recently, the country that some historians say invented commercial capitalism in the Middle Ages had to stand behind England, France and the United States in terms of participation in one of capitalism's more curious economic flowerings, the outlet mall.

Financed by the McArthurGlen group, a London-based operator of 12 designer outlet centers in Europe, Serravalle opened in the fall of 2000 with 150,000 square feet of retail space rented to 64 shops and restaurants. Its developers gambled that Italian consumers would forgo their historic affection for the main streets of urban centers and act like Americans, motoring an hour into the countryside for the chance to buy last season's Prada pumps at 80 percent off retail cost. And they have.

These days there are 146 stores, selling not just Prada but Versace, Trussardi, Cerruti, Loro Piano, Frette, Dolce & Gabbana, Swarovski and even Bulgari, whose windows are filled with pearl earrings and diamond-studded watches marked one-third off. On a given Sunday, 35,000 visitors have been known to show up. More than six million people have visited thus far, the developers claim. But some locals insist that number must be an understatement, given the gridlock that routinely forms on the A-7 highway leading there.

"In the beginning we got mostly locals and Japanese," said Lorenzo Aletti, the marketing coordinator for McArthurGlen in Italy. "Now we get 49 percent from the region, and the rest are Japanese, Koreans, Americans and Russians, who are the new rich for Europe.

On a weekday morning a while back, Katsuhiko Yamato and Hiroki Hamaguchi, two travelers from Osaka, moved nimbly through the Dolce & Gabbana shop, selecting with laser concentration from among the piles of shredded jeans at 50 percent markdown, suits for $400, belts for $30 and a stack of deeply discounted shirts. After paying for their bounty, the two men checked their merchandise behind the counter and hurried to the nearby Prada shoe boutique.

"Our itinerary is Florence, Milan and Serravalle Scrivia," said Mr. Hamaguchi, referring to a route that bypassed high culture and Da Vinci's "Last Supper" in favor of shinier commercial shrines.

"We get people coming in and saying, `Can we buy the whole shelf?' " said Maurizio Messina, the manager of the Bally store here. And they can. Unlike luxury shops in the designer-barnacled cluster of 18th-century streets in Milan known informally as the Golden Triangle, at Serravalle there are no quotas imposed. "I have customers who come every three months and buy 100 handbags at a time," Mr. Messina said.

The bargains are just one part of the appeal. "There is a theatrical Disneyesque-type attraction beginning to happen at Serravalle," said Julia J. Calabrese, McArthurGlen's chief executive officer.

The mall is an enfolding environment, a hillside farm rendered postmodern village in pastiche. Gently curved streets conduct pedestrians inward. Buildings have ochre stuccoed walls and porticos. Tasteful cast-iron trash cans are surmounted by acorn-shaped lids consistent with an Italo-rustic theme. Perhaps as important, chrome displays and cool recessed lighting cast the merchandise in a flattering light that is far from the bare-bulb reality that the goods are not this season's and failed to sell when they were.

"For myself it is like Montenapoleone Street, but in the fields," said Fabio Bellini, 28, a chauffeur in Milan, referring to the Fifth Avenue of Milan, a street typically thronged on weekends with orange-tanned men draped in silk sweaters and women whose appearance suggests that personal grooming is a sacred rite.

"Some people don't mind spending full price; for myself, I like a bargain," said Mr. Bellini, who stopped in at Frette, the high-end linen store, to purchase a terrycloth bathrobe for his wife, a set of towels and some Egyptian cotton sheets, before heading to Pal Zileri's men's wear store and then the Toys Center Outlet to get a gift for his infant son, whom he calls Super Mario.

"This is fall-winter 2002," a saleswoman at Versace explained late last month, referring to a $6,500 evening dress (reduced from $14,000) that she was holding for a client from Genoa. Unlike some American outlet malls — where chain retailers dump their disasters, and where manufacturers sell specially produced discount lines — at Serravalle, mustard-colored blazers, mesh leather hot pants and bump-toed clown shoes are nowhere to be found.

Instead there is quarry to freshen a bargain-hunter's blood: Prada loafers that would cost $350 in the United States at $150; cashmere Loro Piano jackets for $400; Alberta Ferretti spring frocks for $85; seasonless-looking Jean Paul Gaultier dresses reduced from $1,000 to $134; $300 cashmere blankets from the high-end stationer Pineider. There were clothes priced so low that the regional competition, a department store mall called Foxtown, 50 minutes and a Swiss border crossing away from Milan, seemed likely to be undercut, outflanked, forgotten. "Foxtown, you get maybe 20 percent off," said Monica Giordana, a data processor from Milan. "At Serravalle sometimes they are throwing it in the street."

At Serravalle, too, there is the custom of displaying what people in the outlet mall industry call double pricing. That is, the pre- and post-markdown prices are shown in the window, with the same intoxicating effect on bargain hunters that gamblers feel when the dealer breaks the seal on a new deck.

"Originally, there was some resistance to double pricing," Mr. Aletti said. Bulgari, for one, was reluctant to submit its pricey baubles to tactics reminiscent of warehouse refrigerator sales. "They did not want to do it at first," Mr. Aletti said. Now the double prices are posted discreetly in Bulgari's window. At a third of their original Italian retail price, Bulgari bracelets cost a fraction of what they might in New York.

If the assembled fashion editors seemed to bypass the jeweler's wares during the men's wear season, they were still to be found stuffing their bags with Nikes ($35), Dolce & Gabbana jeans ($29), Prada mules ($79) and Pineider stationery ($10), and walking to waiting limousines as laden as glamorous pack mules with bulky shopping bags.

"So far, we don't have Gucci or Ferragamo or Tod's, but we're working on it," said Ms. Calabrese of McArthurGlen. So far, the chain has not made quite the same imprint on the Italian landscape that outlet megamalls like New York's Woodbury Commons have in the United States. Still, Italian retailers seem to have glimpsed the future and concluded that it will be populated with shoppers eagerly hunting for luxury goods in settings that make Disneyland look uncontrived.

The second McArthurGlen Italian outlet mall is already in the works. Replete with Ionic colonnades and tasteful replicas of Roman ruins, it is set to open outside Rome in early 2004. - By Guy Trebay    New York Times     6 July 2003

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