Ponzano, the Veneto, 1984

Toscani arrived in Luciano's office three days later.

"Can you do it?" Luciano asked him.

Toscani replied that he could. He had come with a single, simple idea, as Luciano hoped he would. He called this idea "All the Colors in the World."

The image was as simple as it was new. Young children and teenagers from different countries and racial groups were laughing and smiling together, united in all the colors of Benetton.

Toscani was creating the global image that Luciano wanted for his company. The result was bright and beautiful. Toscani disliked using professional models as much as he disliked big advertising companies. The pictures used "real children."

Benetton increased the money it spent on advertising to US $12 million, and started the "All the Colors" campaign in the spring of 1984. The pictures are still as fresh today. Luciano saw them for the first time in Milan.

"I felt a lump in my throat," he remembered later, "and my heart started to beat faster. It was both strange and wonderful suddenly to have an image that fitted us like a glove."

"All the Colors" won a magazine prize in the Netherlands- There were hundreds of letters to the company from people who liked the message, and some from people who did not. In South Africa, the advertisements were banned, except in a few magazines for black people.

"Shame on you!" wrote one person from Manchester, in the north of England. "You have mixed races that God wants to keep apart."

The success of "All the Colors in the World" encouraged Toscani. Again, he shot pictures with a group of "real children aged from four to fourteen and from countries as different as Japan, Ireland, and the Ivory Coast. This time the children held the flags of countries that were traditionally enemies: Germany and Israel, Greece and Turkey, Great Britain and Argentina, and the United States and the Soviet Union. Toscani also noted a remark by a visiting UNESCO official.

"My God," the official said, "it's the united colors we're seeing here!"

Paris, France, 1985

President Gorbachev was at the top of the Champs Elysees; the Soviet leader was going to meet President Mitterand of France. Watched by hundreds of millions of people on television around the world, halfway along the route Gorbachev looked up and said something to one of his assistants. This was a magic moment and a rare piece of luck.