Fashion and Luxury Business
The transformation experienced by the fashion and the luxury industries during the 1980s and 1990s has attracted the attention of scholars from a broad range of disciplines in social sciences, from cultural studies to management, in order to explain the dynamics of this change. Following the pioneering works of Elisabetta Merlo & Francesca Polese (2006) and Regina Lee Blaszczyk (2009), business historians engaged in this debate, focusing on the conditions under which fashion designers had succeeded in implementing business models that allowed their companies to grow. They demonstrated that creative activities were embedded in an ecosystem, sometimes called the 'fashion system', in which many intermediaries were involved. In 2012, Blaszczyk and Polese co-edited a special issue of Business History that expresses the growing interest for the fashion industry. During the last decade, research in the business history of fashion and luxury has expanded towards various new perspectives including the internationalization of firms, the relationship with the textile and clothing industry, and the importance of the institutional context, notably regarding copyright protection and nation branding. Moreover, the scope of research experienced a geographical expansion, from France and Italy to other European countries, the US and Asia. The aim of this Collection is to offer a selection of articles published in Business History that illustrate the diversity and richness of academic debates relating to the fashion and luxury industry.
Edited by
Professor Pierre-Yves Donzé(Graduate School of Economics, Osaka University)
Professor Véronique Pouillard(Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo)