The Enterprise of Culture: the European fashion system around the world

Friday 10 June 2016
10.30am to 5.15pm
Victoria and Albert Museum
South Kensington, London

Fashion is often studied from a purely theoretical perspective, from a costume history or dress history viewpoint or from a popular media-driven vantage point.

The Enterprise of Culture breaks new ground, using the fashion business to examine how various types of cultural encounters – between ‘core’ fashion cities such as Paris and London and ‘peripheral’ areas such as Sweden and Scotland, between style labs and the high street, and between fibre makers, clothing manufacturers and retailers – stimulated innovation and created a new and competitive industry.

This one day event - and our final project conference - showcased exciting new research undertaken by the Enterprise of Culture team and offered an insight into the European fashion industry around the world, looking at topics such as influential brands from Biba and Mary Quant to today’s H&M, Italian fashion and the role of the department store buyer, Scottish tartan and tweed, the international reach of British textiles, luxury and fashion.

Speakers included representatives from the V&A, the Centre for Business History Stockholm, the Yorkshire Fashion Archive, the fashion industry and researchers from the universities of Leeds, Oslo, Newcastle, Erasmus Rotterdam, Heriot Watt and St Andrews.

We welcomed guest speaker Edwina Ehrman, Curator of the V&A’s exciting new exhibition, Undressed: A Brief History of Underwear who took a close look at the creation and marketing of a luxury lingerie brand, Janet Reger.

Fashion journalist, Lou Stoppard, chaired a roundtable discussion made up of representatives from the fashion industry to consider the conference themes in more depth and open the floor for debate.

The full programme can be found here.

For more information, email enterpriseofculture@leeds.ac.uk