About 100 miles south of Moscow, signs for a fabric factory appear.
THE uncle, Jose Cabrera, found him a $6-an-hour job at a Brooklyn fabric factory.
She found work as a bookkeeper in a fabric factory, and studied accounting at a trade school.
"People stop to take pictures of the house because they've never seen anything like this before and they don't know what to think of it," said Adelio Colombo, who is retired from a fabric factory.
The book was a memoir, about the small family fabric factory that Nesi ran briefly and had to sell when competition from China began forcing Tuscany's old fabric-makers out of business; it got a lot of attention in Italy because of its evocation of people fighting for dying local traditions in a global world.
One problem, though, is bringing upstate New York's skills into line with the high-tech needs of businesses, according to Lenore Sealy of Syracuse's CNY Works, a federally funded agency that provides career counselling and training.Her outfit, in a former fabric factory, has seen the numbers using its services double over the past year.
He is responsible for two of the most striking pieces of furniture: a dining-room table that he designed and made out of wood scraps from his studio in an old fabric factory nearby and a religious altar that he found on the street last year and "pimped with some skulls" and a painted stone Madonna from a flea market.
BBC News hears from some key people involved in the journey from fabric factory to catwalk.
Though they had worked in banking before, they survived in Taipei by selling steamed buns on the street for several years until getting jobs in a textile plant, eventually opening their own curtain and upholstery fabric factory.
When he graduated, he got a job in a fabric factory, where he eventually started repairing and maintaining sewing machines.
