Conference in Edinburgh

Entrepreneurship in Fashion: student, academic and industry perspectives

The Edinburgh team, comprised of Principal Investigator Robert MacIntosh and Project Member Andrew MacLaren, organised a free public conference James Watt Conference Centre at Heriot-Watt University on 5 March 2015, Edinburgh.

This free public event explored multiple perspectives around the exciting concept of entrepreneurship in fashion and welcomed thoughts, ideas and debate from the public, the fashion industry, the museum sector and the academic research world.

The conference themes moved beyond the great designer focus in much of the literature on European fashion, and examined the business professionals or ‘gatekeepers’ who ensure that fashion brands connect to the larger culture, past and present. Speakers and round-table guests considered questions such as: Does fashion need good designers or good entrepreneurs? Are there unique barriers to entrepreneurial behaviour in the context of the fashion industry? What is the creative process of entrepreneurship? Is entrepreneurship in fashion born or made?

Participants from industry included Anna Freemantle-Zee, an internationally known Dutch fashion model and Director of the Edinburgh International Fashion Festival; Tom Hendren, CEO at Array Marketing (one of the world’s largest designers and manufacturers of retail merchandising solutions for companies such as Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Tom Ford and H&M); and Colin Temple, Managing Director at Schuh (the UK’s largest footwear retailer). These fashion professionals joined two academics—Laura Galloway (School of Management and Languages, Heriot-Watt University) and Alan McKinlay (PI at Newcastle University Business School)—in a roundtable discussion chaired by Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson of the Centre for Business History Stockholm (CBHS).

The conference also welcomed fashion student Amy Johnson (Manchester School of Art), the winner of a competition to find high-quality undergraduate research on entrepreneurship in fashion. In her talk on ‘Stereotyping Culture: How Our Personal Style Dictates Social Perception’, Johnson suggested that "we all have an ideal self we wish to display, and want to be complemented and accepted by others." The apparel we chose to wear, thus, functions as a social signal, or a ‘gatekeeper’, in everyday interactions. Objects as well as people and laws can function as ‘gatekeepers’.

Current research from Enterprise of Culture team members was showcased in a session by Shiona Chillas of the University of St Andrews. In a paper called ‘Searching for ‘The Real McCoy’ in Scottish Indigenous Textiles’, Chillas explored the role of cultural heritage in the separate yet overlapping fields of textiles and fashion and considered images of ‘Scottishness’ and fashion aesthetics. Regina Lee Blaszczyk (Leeds) presented a short overview of the EOC project and took a glimpse at entrepreneurship in fashion, past and present.

The conference welcomed four other speakers from academia and the museum sector, who explored the conference themes from many perspectives. Danielle Sprecher of the University of Leeds talked about the historic importance of　Leeds as a centre for　multiple tailoring and its connections to London in a paper called ‘A Good Fit? The Collaboration between Fashion Designer Hardy Amies and Leeds Multiple Tailors Hepworths,1960-1980’. Patsy Perry (University of Manchester) and Kathryn Waite (Heriot-Watt University) demonstrated the usefulness of a relatively untried form of digital innovation in　their paper, ‘The Application of Gestural Interactivity Technology to Small and Medium Sized Online Fashion Retailers’. Here we saw a new technology that might open the gates of online stores to shoppers.

Cher Potter (V&A London) spoke on ‘Collecting the New: Employing the Methodologies of Fashion Forecasting to Enhance the Entrepreneurial Strategies of Museums’. Sharon Bainbridge (Leeds College of Art) considered how engaging fashion students with a Bradford company that still manufactures all processes in fibre and cloth manufacture developed a stronger understanding of enterprise, value and the narrative around cloth in a paper called ‘From Fibre to Fabric: Can the Industrial Entrepreneurs of the Past Inspire New Enterprising Designers?’.

Delegates had the opportunity to network at various points across the day with a diverse range of attendees, including　academics, fashion industry practitioners, students, archivists, museum curators, entrepreneurs and the general public. They also had the chance to take away a bespoke EOC conference bag, courtesy of Jutexpo. The conference was supported by a team of volunteer helpers from the MSc International Fashion Marketing course at Heriot-Watt University.

Full details about the conference (including programme and speaker biographies) can be found here.

The public conference was followed by a full-day collaborative research project meeting to discuss the research agenda and a visit to the National Museum of Scotland to hear about the new fashion galleries from one of the curators.