The fashion industry has found itself suffering from some unexpected repercussions since the installment of Mario Monti’s technocratic government, I learned after having lunch with Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana of Dolce & Gabbana.

Though the experience will eventually become — surprise! — a Lunch with the FT, before that is published (around Milan fashion week, in about two weeks) I wanted to share the following morsel. Think of it as a taster course:

The government reduced the cap on permitted cash payments to €1,000 (down from €2,500) in December. According to the designers, who acknowledge the law’s positive genesis — it’s an effort to clamp down on tax evasion (one friend described shopping in Italy as entering a multi-dimensional pricing universe, in which there was the “cash price” and the “charge price” — i.e. the recorded price and the one that was a little more…fungible) — in practice it has meant, says Gabbana, that “we are losing a lot of money in the January sales.”