"Fashion as a Business System"

This paper is the introduction to the session “Fashion Systems around the World in the Twentieth Century”. It offers a discussion on the way fashion has been approached as a system in scholarly works in history and social sciences (Barthes 1967, Kawamura 2005, Blaszczyk 2008). However, this mainstream literature does not explain the function of the system from a perspective of business and profitability of fashion enterprises. Hence, based on management literature on business systems, this paper will propose a new understanding of fashion as a business system which objective is to ensure the sustainability of enterprises. The concept developed in this paper will be used to analyze various national examples by three other participants in the session (Italy, Germany and China).