Fashion Systems around the World in the Twentieth Century

While fashion business was centered in Paris until World War II, it has expanded to Italy and the US in the postwar high-growth years, and to a broad range of countries around the world during the last third of the twentieth century. There are today numerous fashion weeks around the world. The objective of this panel is to discuss the global development of fashion business using the concept of “fashion system”, developed by Kawamura (2005) and Donzé & Fujioka (2021), which considers fashion as a business system that includes a broad range of enterprises whose interactions ensure their sustainability. Fashion is not the mere production of clothing, but a creative activity that produces images and cultural values. Designers and apparel manufacturers are integrated within a system of actors, which includes mass medias, retailers, fashion forecasters, etc. The main function of the fashion system is to legitimize designers and companies as producers of fashion. Although fashion is a transnational activity, based on the circulation of designers, the globalization of markets and the internationalization of production networks, fashion systems are strongly anchored in national and local territories. We argue that the structure and specificities of each fashion system (France, Italy, UK, USA, Japan, China, etc.) influence the global competitiveness of fashion companies and explains the pattern of their expansion. This panel is the first step of an international research project bringing together leading scholars in the field of the business history of creative industries. This panel, which will include international specialists on the fashion industry, addresses the following questions: First, what are the main characteristic of national fashion systems? Second, to what extent can fashion systems be defined on the basis of a national background? Third, how did these systems evolve in the course of the long twentieth century? Last, which institutional conditions determined the sustainability of such systems?