The Winner Stands Alone

"Now it's the turn of the Middle East, precisely because all the tension and the fear that keep the world in limbo are coming from your country. I know this because I'm the director of this company. After all, everything starts with a meeting of the main suppliers of dyes."

HAMID GLANCES AGAIN AT THE designer sitting alone on the terrace, his camera resting on the armchair beside him. Perhaps he had noticed Hamid arrive and is now wondering just where Hamid got the money that had enabled him to become his biggest competitor.

The man now staring into space and feigning indifference had done everything possible to prevent Hamid from being admitted into the Federation. He believed Hamid was being financed by oil money and felt that this constituted unfair competition. He didn't know that the director of the label Hamid was working for at the time had offered him a better job (not that "better" meant his name would appear anywhere; the company had contracted another designer to shine in the spotlight and on the catwalk), nor did he know that two months after this and eight months after the death of his father, Hamid had been summoned to a face-to-face meeting with the sheikh.

WHEN HAMID ARRIVED HOME, HE found it hard to recognize the city that had once been his. The skeletons of skyscrapers lined the city's one avenue; the traffic was unbearable; the old airport was in near chaos; but the sheikh's idea was beginning to take shape. The city would be a place of peace in the midst of war, an investment paradise in the midst of turbulent financial markets, the visible face of a nation that so many people took pleasure in criticizing, humiliating, and stereotyping. Other countries in the region had also now begun to believe in that city being built in the middle of the desert, and money was starting to flow in, first in a trickle and then like a rushing river.

The palace, however, was the same, although another much larger one was being built not far from there. Hamid arrived at the meeting in an excellent mood, saying that he had just received an excellent job offer and no longer needed the sheikh's financial help; indeed, he would pay back every penny invested in him.

"Hand in your resignation," said the sheikh.

Hamid didn't understand. He knew that the business his father had left him was doing well, but he had other dreams for his future. However, he couldn't defy this man who had done so much to help him--not a second time.

"At our first meeting, I was able to say no to Your Highness because I was defending my father's rights, which were always paramount. Now, though, I must bow to your will. If you think you have lost money by investing in my work, I will do whatever you ask. I will come home and look after my inheritance. If I have to give up my dream in order to honor the code of my tribe, I will do so."

He spoke these words without a tremor. He dared not show any weakness before a man who so respected other men's strength.

"I'm not asking you to come home. The fact that you were promoted is a sign that you're ready to set up your own company. That is what I want you to do."

"To set up my own company?" thought Hamid. "Did I hear him right?"

"More and more of the big fashion companies are setting up business here," the sheikh went on. "And they're no fools. Our women are beginning to change the way they think and dress. Fashion has had an even bigger impact on our region than foreign investment. I've spoken to men and women who know about these things. I'm just an old Bedouin who, when he saw his first car, thought it would have to be fed like a camel.

"I'd like foreigners to read our poets, listen to our music, to sing and dance to the songs that were passed down from generation to generation by our ancestors, but no one, it seems, is interested in that. There is only one way in which they can learn to respect our tradition, and that is via the world in which you work. If they can understand who we are by the way we dress, they will eventually understand everything else."

The following day, Hamid met a group of investors from various other countries. They placed at his disposal an enormous sum of money and gave him a deadline by which it had to be repaid. They asked him if he was ready and prepared to accept the challenge.

Hamid asked for time to think. He went to his father's grave and prayed all afternoon and evening. That night, he walked in the desert, felt the wind freezing his bones, then returned to the hotel where the foreign investors were staying. "Blessed be that which gives your children wings and roots," says an Arabic proverb.

He needed his roots. There is a place in the world where we are born, where we learn our mother tongue and discover how our ancestors overcame the problems they had to face. There always comes a point when we feel responsible for that place.

He needed wings too. They reveal to us the endless horizons of the imagination, they carry us to our dreams and to distant places. It is our wings that allow us to know the roots of our fellow men and to learn from them.

He asked for inspiration from God and began to pray. Two hours later, he remembered a conversation he had overheard between his father and a friend in his father's shop:

"This morning, my son asked me for money to buy a sheep. Should I help him, do you think?"

"Since it clearly isn't a matter of urgency, wait another week before giving him your answer."

"But I have the means to help him now. What difference will a week make?"

"A very great difference indeed. Experience has taught me that people only give value to a thing if they have, at some point, been uncertain as to whether or not they'll get it."

Hamid made the investors wait a week and then accepted the challenge. He needed people who would take care of the money and invest it as he wanted. He needed staff, preferably people who came from his own village. He needed another year in the job he was doing, so that he could learn what he still needed to know. That was all.

"EVERYTHING STARTS WITH A MEETING of the main suppliers of dyes."

Well, that isn't exactly true: everything begins when the companies involved in studying market trends (cabinets de tendence in French, "trend adapters" in English) take note of the different things--among them fashion--in which each layer of society is currently interested. This research is based on interviews with consumers, the close monitoring of samples, but, above all, on careful observation of a particular cohort of people--usually aged between twenty and thirty--who go to nightclubs, hang out on the streets, and read the blogs on the Internet. They never look at what's in the shop windows, even at name brands, because everything there has already reached the general public and is therefore condemned to die.

The trend adapters want to know what will be the next thing to capture the consumers' imagination? Young people don't have enough money to buy luxury goods and so have to invent new ways of dressing. Since they live glued to their computer screens, they share their interests with like-minded others, and these interests can often become a kind of virus that infects the whole community. Young people influence their parents' views of politics, literature, and music, and not, as ingenuous adults believe, the other way round. However, parents influence young people's "system of values." Adolescents may be rebellious by nature, but they always believe the family is right; they may dress strangely and enjoy listening to singers who howl and break guitars, but that's as far as it goes. They don't have the courage to go any further and provoke a real revolution in behavior.

"They did that in the past, but, fortunately, that particular wave has passed and returned to the sea."

All these studies of market trends show that society is now heading toward a more conservative style, far from the dangers posed by suffragettes (the women at the beginning of the twentieth century who fought for and achieved the right to vote) or by hairy, unhygienic hippies (a group of crazies who believed that peace and free love were real possibilities).

IN 1960, FOR EXAMPLE, THE world was caught up in the bloody wars of the post-colonial era, terrified by the threat of nuclear war, and although we were also living through a period of economic prosperity, we were all desperately in need of a little joy. Just as Christian Dior had understood that the hope of future abundance could be expressed through clothes using yards of material, the designers of the sixties went in search of a combination of colors that would lift people's morale and came to the conclusion that red and violet were simultaneously calming and stimulating.

Forty years later, the collective view had changed completely: the world was no longer under the threat of war, but of grave environmental problems. Designers were opting for colors drawn from the natural world: the sands of the desert, the jungles, the sea. Between these two periods, various other trends--psychedelic, futuristic, aristocratic, nostalgic--arose and vanished.