Benetton conjures up two juxtaposing images; cuddly bright jumpers and the quite often disturbing use of photographs to sell a product to middle-class youth around the world.

In this part of the world we were introduced to the delights of Benetton by the hordes of Spanish and Italian students who appeared every year, swaddled in effervescent jumpers to endure the, er, Irish summer.

Since then Benetton has established itself as a purveyor of neat, cheerful clothing and dark, confrontational advertising.

In Jonathan Mantle's Benetton it is the advertising that forms the core of the book. Starting with Oilviero Toscani's beautiful photograph of children of different races holding hands up to pictures of bloody bodies on the street and the various pairings of black and white which generated such light and heat, it is the imagery which is most fascinating.

A UNESCO official unwittingly coined the slogan `United colours of Benetton' when he saw the photograph of the children.

However, there were failures too, some were accused of racism and others led to a drop in sales, noticeably the boycott organised by Jews angered by the pairing of a white youth dressed in Hasidic clothing and holding a sheaf of dollars with a black youth dressed as a native American.

The storm forced Benetton to replace the advertisement, which it did, with a Jewish and Palestinian youth. . . This stands as one of the few miscalculations in what Mantle calls the carrot and stick approach; a confrontational image followed by the more traditional cuddly one.

Indeed it was these campaigns which firmly established Benetton as a global brand; its green rectangle becoming as familiar as Levi's in the wardrobe of affluent youth. However, the imagery was in danger of swamping the product as the public began to identify the company with the advertisements rather than the clothes. To many, Benetton personified that shallow idea of the 1980s, that advertising was the end in itself - a conceit as happily outdated as power shoulders and big hair.

Indeed the ad campaigns were conveniently blamed for the periodic slumps which grip all manufacturers of fashion clothing when they become too big and cumbersome to react to the changing tastes of their customers.

Happily, for Benetton and Mantle, the company came through and is now one of the most successful family businesses in the world occupying a seemingly unassailable position.

Benetton is a thorough gallop through the development of the company from a brother and sister operation to the global giant it is today. It is conventional in structure with everything happening in chronological order which does militate against a thematic approach to the family and its business. However, as a documentary it works well.