Abstract
<JATS1:p>Combining research methods from business and global history, Donzé and Wubs equip readers with a vital and expansive new analysis of the development of the global fashion industry from the mid-19th century to today.</JATS1:p> <JATS1:p>Ranging across Europe, the Americas and Asia over two centuries, Donzé and Wubs bring the work of manufacturers and designers together with trade associations, fashion forecasters and retailers to investigate the transformations of this truly global business - 'capitalism's favorite child' (Werner Sombart). New data and sources reveal unexpected threads and detail within even such well-trodden narratives as Chanel under the occupation, the Nylon revolution, and the retail strategy of United Colours of Benetton.</JATS1:p> <JATS1:p>What impact do the hidden histories of fabric trades such as cotton, wool and silk have on how we dress today? What continues to divide ‘high’ and ‘low’ fashion when low-cost production countries transition into high-income economies? How do technological changes from ‘fast fashion’ to e-commerce trace back to the industry’s beginnings – and what can students, scholars, and industry leaders learn from this history about what the future might hold?</JATS1:p> <JATS1:p>Featuring new work on unstudied areas from Swiss silk companies in East Asia to the influence of finance on modern fashion, this is the most global, long-term, and interconnected history of the industry to date.</JATS1:p> <JATS1:p>This book on the global history of the fashion industry examines its ever-altering supply chains and changing production and consumption relations and locations over the last 170 years. Around the mid-nineteenth century, a new production system arose based on a rapid increase in the exchange of commodities globally, ground-breaking technological innovations (like the sewing machine, artificial dyes, and power looms), and the introduction of mass production based on factory work and the rise in demand for finished clothing for the new city-dwellers. Modern imperialism and the rise of fashion capitals like Paris, Vienna, and London made fashion a Western middle-class and upper-class phenomenon; however, at the same time, the masses in the metropoles and colonies were demanding cheap Western-style clothes. In the twentieth century, with the rise of the middle class around the world, Western-style clothes became the dominant fashion.</JATS1:p> <JATS1:p>The main actors in the fashion industry are explored, including manufacturers, designers, intermediaries, trade associations, trade shows, fashion forecasters, and retailers. It takes fashion as a capitalistic phenomenon that mobilizes consumption and constantly changes tastes to increase sales and profits. Although the new sartorial styles were often invented on the street, it was the industry and its marketers that further developed the styles and extended the demand. This book not only examines the different forms of fashion production but also the connections between these different forms, from catwalk to street fashion and vice versa, especially the role that different actors in the fashion industry have played in this global system.</JATS1:p>