Or perhaps these
Too late now: the 350 skilled members of the workforce left the factory for the last time yesterday evening.
Wednesday, 1 August 2012
Richard-Ginori Closes. No-one Wants These Kind of Cuts
The Ginori porcelain factory just outside Florence has closed after more than 250 years of producing infinitely desirable china of every kind. Unfortunately it is also dauntingly expensive but sometimes I wish.....those creamy, wholly undecorated plates, thin as thin can be and very flat - we might have managed those.
Or perhaps these
Too late now: the 350 skilled members of the workforce left the factory for the last time yesterday evening.
Or perhaps these
Too late now: the 350 skilled members of the workforce left the factory for the last time yesterday evening.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
9 comments:
Have the patterns and moulds been acquired by China, like the historic Italian fabric design books years ago?
Not as far as I have seen S, but the Chinese didn't just take over the design books for the fabrics - they seem to have taken over Prato as well.
Didn't I read somewhere some time ago that Wedgewood also closed its doors for the last time? Something to do with the recession.
It's an aesthetic recession too, Nomad. Only the Bauhaus seems to have seized the mass manufacturing bull by the horns and designed lovely things for mass consumption. And didn't they run into a storm of opposition from craft manufacturers?
So now we have mass manufacturing of monumental ugliness and the craftsmen being overwhelmed anyway because so many live without aspiration to the objects they use every day being beautiful.
'Cheap and cheerful' should be seared into the lives of those who consume without thought other than price.
Oh dear I seem to be going grrrr this afternoon - perhaps it's the heat but I fear it's existential regret. I started out on married life equipped with Wedgwood and it's too late now to eat with Ginori. I didn't know. So much.
HG: I agree with you.
We also started out with - and still use daily - our lovely Wedgewood china. It has served us faithfully now for coming up to 26 years (later this month).
A few years ago my better half bought me a made in England Wedgewood 250th anniversary souvenir mug from their shop in Perth, the last one they had left. We hand carried it home to ensure safe transmission (the previous mug we bought having been broken in the suitcase on the way home) the previous year. It is used every morning for my breakfast coffee. No harm in enjoying a few of life's little luxuries!
There must be an economic term for it but I don't know it: having small quantities, or a single object, of what costs a great deal because such things are beautiful, rather than having lots of cheap copies, or just run of the mill, that weren't worth buying ever.
The act of consuming has outstripped the enhancement of life's surroundings (or something along those lines).
Forty years ago my wife (as she then wasn't) and I bought an attractive print, for its beauty. We've just discovered that it's now worth as much as our car.
Mind you, this would be more impressive if our car weren't eighteen years old.
Ah, but Belleek are still going, making dinner plates thin as crisps and warranted to frighten your dinner guests; for everyday robustness we use standard Churchill hotelware chez Readwald, as plain and white as can be, and it bounces.
R, A Belleek cups, saucers, sugar, milk and bowl is my secret delight and vice. When it's just me for tea I use it. It is faintly scalloped and glazed like mother-of-pearl.
After all, I wouldn't like anyone to suffer like that le Carre character who finds the delicate handle of one of the last of his Grandma's Severin (I think) cups hidden in his coat pocket after he broke it off with his clumsy fingers and didn't dare tell her.
In the ecohouse we have white Ginori hotelware: it bounces as well.
Precisely Dearieme. You bought it because it looked at you and I bet you handed over more than you could then afford. (Why is it that when young and poor there is abundance and when older and ready to buy there is not a lot to want?)
I suspect both Raedwald and Nick Drew of caches of paintings, lithographs and prints gained on far too small an income at the time.
Post a Comment