Abstract

"Trademarking Innovation: Exploring the Role of Intellectual Property in Italy's Fashion industry, 1861–1939"

Marco Martinez, University of Pisa (marcozenitram@gmail.com), Valeria Pinchera, University of Pisa (valeria.pinchera@unipi.it)

Are trademark counts a valid indicator of historical innovation? Recent literature suggests that trademarks serve as a reliable proxy for innovation in contemporary Europe (Flikkema, Castaldi and De Man, 2025) yet empirical evidence from historical contexts remains scarce. For example, Lopes and Guimarães (2014) argued that, in Victorian Britain, trademarks were more closely associated with marketing innovations than to product innovations. In a recent review chapter, Khan (2024) proposed that trademarks have the potential to enhance our understanding of the relationship between business organisation, innovation, product quality and consumer welfare. Despite these insights, historical studies have predominantly relied on patents—and, to a lesser extent, data from prizes and exhibitions—as proxies for innovation, leaving the role of trademarks to proxy historical innovation largely unexplored.
This paper investigates whether trademarks can enrich our understanding of innovative activities in Italy during the period from the Italian unification of 1861 to 1939. Specifically, we assess the extent to which trademarks served as either an alternative or complementary intellectual property strategy to patenting in the early development of Italy’s fashion industry, from unification in 1861 to 1939. It focuses on sectors such as clothing, footwear and leather goods, where aesthetic quality and product distinction became increasingly central to the modernisation of production and trade (Da Silva Lopes and Duguid 2003; Barrère and Delabruyère 2011; Belfanti and Merlo 2016). Adopting the concept of co-creation, the paper analyses whether firms, inventors and skilled producers employed patents and trademarks as interconnected tools within broader strategies of product innovation and formal protection. To this end, we combine two large-scale databases: the Historical Italian Patent database (HIP; Martinez, Nuvolari, and Vasta, 2025) and a newly compiled trademarks database.