I met Kavita Parmar in Milan during the TEDxNavigli conference I helped to organize in March 2013. The Indian fashion designer gave birth to the IOU project, a Spanish startup whose acronym sounds like “I Owe You”.

Kavita’s company sells clothes made in India, but every item purchased from them has something more than any other item bought elsewhere. In our contemporary society, no one knows the history of the clothes he wears – who designed, weaved and assembled them. Yet behind each there is a long chain of individuals who helped create it. Of these, we know nothing.

To whom we owe our favorite shirt? Who can we thank for the dress that we are wearing?

By purchasing a cloth coming from the project “IOweYou”, you access a section of the company website with a collection of photographs of those who wove it, the story of the cotton with which it was made, the biography of those who designed the model and assembled it. And if you wish, you can complete the story with a photo of yours wearing it.

«The goal – Francesca Sironi wrote in L’Espresso – is replacing capitalism and the efficiency of the machines, the millions of items all the same, sold in shops all the same around the world, with unique stories.» (1) 

Kavita’s idea fosters a feeling that a number of studies in social psychology (2)  have found to be correlated with happiness and well-being: gratitude. The core of IOU project is the idea of opposing anonymity and celebrating the individuality of each suit, bringing to light the faces and stories of the people we can be grateful with.

While the political parties try to win voters by promising to lower taxes, no one is planning to address the issue with Kavita’s narrative approach. As noted by Alain de Botton, who pays taxes surrenders up to half of her income for the communal good, but the whole thing takes place through the anonymous agency of the taxation system:

We seldom feel a connection to those less fortunate members of the polity for whom our taxes also buy clean sheets, soup, shelter or a daily dose of insulin. Neither recipient nor donor feels the need to say “Please” or “Thank you”. (3) 

In the wake of Kavita Parmar, I dream of a Government providing, for each offered service, the names and photographs of the benefactors who – simply by paying taxes – make it possible. In addition to employ many writers, the sharing of such a large number of stories would encourage completely new perspectives and help us to perceive any tax

framed […] as the lifeblood of an intricate tangle of mutually interdependent relationships, with practical benefits for the recipient and spiritual ones for the donor. (4) 

In my country, it would follow a rehabilitation of the reviled, former Italian Minister of Economy and Finances Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, whose exhortation – that «we should have the courage to say taxes are something beautiful and civilized» (5)  – raised an unwarranted hype.

Notes