Year three: Going global - entrepreneurship and creativity in the era of fast fashion

In year one, the project focused on the big picture and, in year two, it homed in on case studies that illuminate the inner workings of the European fashion business.

Year three brought these threads together, while connecting the history of the European fashion industry to the wider world. Concurrently, the research moved forward in time to the closing decades of the twentieth century and our own time. Management scholars and fashion practitioners played an important role in fostering the interdisciplinary conversation about developments in this period.

We explored the ‘Going Global’ theme at two large international conferences, two smaller public conferences, two public events in collaboration with the Marks and Spencer Company Archive, an exhibition and seven related public events, two internal research project meetings, face-to-face meetings with our academic advisors and participation in the final HERA II event in Prague.

The two large public conferences in 2016 examined the recent history of the fashion business with reference to themes such as fast fashion, globalisation, environmentalism and luxury brands. Several strands examined the role of entrepreneurship in the global age, examining the re-invention of French haute couture as luxury brands; the emergence of high-street brands for the British teenager in the 1960s; and the recent re-invention of English and Scottish tartan and tweed around luxury and heritage.

The conferences - one at Heriot Watt University, the other at the V&A in London -  engaged with the theme of ‘Going Global: Entrepreneurship and Creativity in the Era of Fast Fashion’ in several ways.

As in previous years, the papers steered away from discussions of genius designers and haute couture gowns that often dominate the fashion-history literature and fashion-history exhibitions. Both conferences pulled back the curtain on the inner workings of the global fashion system to examine the work of designers, brand developers, entrepreneurs, retailers and other fashion professionals who are charged with the tasks of managing knowledge and spurring innovation. We take innovation to mean more than runway styles and to include matters of managing intellectual property, the control and dissemination of designs as intellectual property, and the generation of brand recognition through the careful management of names, logos, product designs and store layouts.

The public conferences allowed team members to circulate early papers on these topics, some of which are now in press in special issues of journals (Journal of Design History and Business History) or in our two project anthologies, European Fashion and The Fashion Forecasters.

A series of smaller public events and workshops on high-street fashion at the University of Leeds were planned and coordinated by the Leeds team in collaboration with Katharine Carter, archivist at the Marks and Spencer Company Archive. Under the theme of Understanding Fashion: exploring social history through fashion, three workshops and one film screening were held between the autumn of 2015 and spring 2016.

Two bonus programmes grew out of a collaboration between the Leeds team and Rethinking Textiles, another research project at the University of Leeds. In October 2015, the Leeds team sponsored a free public workshop called War of the Fibres and, in April 2016, a Rethinking Textiles: Yorkshire Edition conference, both of which linked Yorkshire textiles and the wider world.

Another project initiated by EOC was an exhibition on The Synthetics Revolution: Man-made Fibres and Everyday Fashion at ULITA—An Archive of International Textiles at the University of Leeds. Using Regina Lee Blaszczyk’s research on synthetics as a springboard, Fiona Blair collaborated with curators at ULITA and at the Yorkshire Fashion Archive in the School of Design to curate the exhibition and design a series of public programmes around it.

The exhibition explored the rise of synthetic fibres in everyday clothing in the twentieth century, with particular reference to the Yorkshire region and to links with the global fashion system. It looked behind the scenes of the synthetics revolution to bring the story of man-made fibres and how we interact with them to life ― from stories of technological developments in the early part of the twentieth century to the role of advertising following the Second World War.