They are the labels that have always conjured up everything Italy stands for... style, elegance and expensive good taste.
For generations Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana and Prada have been the essence of haute couture and "Made in Italy" meant just that - the chicest handbags from Milan, heels from Rome and gowns from Florence, handcrafted by Italian craftsmen.
Not any more...
Italy's finest fashion houses are leaning increasingly on an army of cheap Chinese immigrants who have turned Tuscany's textile powerhouse into Italy's Little China.
The air here is thick with the reek of dim sum and sweet Chinese tobacco. Workers stand in the street to smoke, hawk and spit amid the bustle of what feels like downtown Beijing.
Women trudge home clutching bags of chicken feet and frozen sea slugs.
A knot of men, shivering in thin suits, queue in the square looking for jobs, offering to do "something, anything" for £2 an hour.
Their faces are as impenetrable as the road signs, painstakingly etched in Mandarin.
But this isn't China. This is Via Pistoiese in the Tuscan city of Prato - Italy's luxury goods capital, home to all the big names. Almost 10 per cent of all the luxury goods produced here are imported directly to the UK.
Your Italian designer heels may still cost £800 back in the UK but they were probably made by a gang of Chinese immigrants working 12-hour days for just three euros an hour (£2.15) - barely half the minimum wage.
They have been coming, looking for a better life, for more than 20 years.
Now this modest city, with its 4,000 haute couture factories and population of 180,000, is home to 2,000 Chinese entrepreneurs and an army of 25,000 low-wage workers. One in five is undocumented and, officially at least, does not exist.
Alessia Hu is one of these "fantasma" - Italian for ghosts.
She was born in China's Fujian Province but came to live in Prato ten years ago with her family.
Fiercely intelligent, she found a job, still in her teens, working as an accountant for Italy's most famous house, Gucci.
"My name is really Lee Hu," she says. "But my parents called me Alessia to help me blend in.
"The Italians are funny like that. They want what we have to offer - they are so proud of their luxury handbags, shoes and clothes - but they would prefer that we weren't seen or heard. OK, so many of us are here illegally, but we came here for a better life. What is wrong with that? And we work hard.
"The Italians know this, but they are not ashamed to pay us almost nothing. The minimum wage for an Italian is five euros an hour. We are paid just three. When I complained, they sacked me." Now 22, Alessia lives in a £70-a-month room in Prato's Chinese Quarter.
She shares two beds, a sink and an oil stove with three female friends and ekes out a living as a seamstress for one of the hundreds of Chinese-owned factories that take on work from the big fashion houses.
"Most of the Italian firms cannot do all the work themselves and so they outsource some of the fine stitching work to legitimate Chinese factories. But many of these use illegal labour to maximise profits," she says.
Alessia's cousin Monica Ye, 35, runs one of these Chinese workshops with her husband Fabio. Both were born in China but, again, changed their names to fit in.
Fabio, 36, once worked for Gucci, in one of their Italian factories on the outskirts of well-heeled Florence. When he was laid off a year ago - in a routine purge - he set up his own factory.
He says Dolce & Gabbana use him to help meet demand for their handbags. "They send me the materials and my team stitch, glue and finish the bags. I pay my 100 workers £2 an hour, but they are happy. They sleep in a dormitory above the workshop and I feed them. D&G sell the bags for up to £1,000 a time."
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Although there is no suggestion that the big houses know that contractors pay below the minimum wage, Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci and Prada all refuse to comment.
And, despite the fact that Fabio's "factory" is in Florence's run-down district of Zana Vespucci, his handbags look surprisingly authentic.
Four Chinese men stand besides a bank of Singer machines, handstitching - forced grins clamped to their faces. In the corner, by a window looking out over a cabbage patch, there is a huge stack of "Made In Italy" labels made from calf leather.
But one worker paints a rather different picture to the ever-exuberant Fabio's tale of happy workers.
As his boss heads back to his silver Mercedes a 22-year-old who came to Italy last year on a student visa from his home in Zhejiang Province watches him leave.
His teeth are black and two fingers on his right hand are missing. He refuses to give his name.
"Life is hard," he says. "I caught my fingers in one of the machines six months ago. The boss was furious. He had to pay fifty dollars for me to see a doctor. The pain is incredible still. He says I have to work day and night to pay him back. But what choice do I have? At least I have food and shelter. In China, I had nothing."
When the early immigrants, their suitcases bulging with cash, arrived in the early 1990s and leased factories, the Italians sneered at them.
Now their numbers have quadrupled and they own a quarter of the city's textile businesses.
The Italian president of the city's Chamber of Commerce admits: "We underestimated them.
What they're doing here is called unfair competition. We need an operation like the one in Iraq, to keep them under control."
But the Chinese would seem to be winning. The foot-soldiers are woefully underpaid but plentiful and mostly grateful. And the generals are raking it in.
Lo Chang, 33, came here ten years ago as an illegal, but now has four employees, with customers across Europe. He imports cheap jeans, fake Ming vases and lighters from China.
"The Italians are lazy," he says. "They don't want to work late, during holidays or at weekends. We work, work, work. And we are not greedy - we come cheap because we know that 'Made In Italy' is ours for the taking."
The first Chinese to come here worked largely from home, making knitwear and leather goods for Italian sub-contractors who then sold the merchandise to big-name designers like Gucci and Versace.
They quickly became the backbone of Italy's textile industry, taking jobs the Italians no longer wanted and making sure that "Made in Italy" remained competitive globally.
Xu Qiu Lin, 40, is the only Chinese member of the city's Chamber of Commerce. He says his workers are legal, he pays his taxes and he sends his staff - 10 Italians and 15 Chinese - home at 7pm on the dot.
Xu Qiu Lin's factory is spotless while the walls are studded with photos of Chinese politicians alongside garish banners saying: "Forward".
"So what if Italian goods are made by Chinese workers?" he says. "We are some of the finest craftsmen in the world. These luxury items are still being made in Italy. We are adding something, not taking away."
Xu Qiu Lin now boasts annual sales of £10million and rising and his gleaming Porsche is parked in the courtyard below where someone has daubed the words "Made In China" on the wall. He points to the sign, laughs, and drives away, still smiling.
Xu, at least, is living la dolce vita.
Many of us are illegal, but so what? The Italians are lazy..we work hard
