Emerging Industries: A Multidisciplinary Literature

Scholarship on emerging industries stands at the intersection of interpretative approaches that developed from questioning the evolution model of the classical industry. According to this research, patterns of firm diffusion in terms of an initial growth period followed by a shake-out, maturity, and decline characterize the industry life cycle. This sequence has been documented across a variety of industries. However, the related literature deals mainly with emerged industries rather than emerging, and with industries that emerge from technological innovations or radical scientific breakthroughs rather than from economic, sociological, and institutional changes, as in the case of cultural industries, including the fashion industry.Footnote ⁸

In contrast to the long-dominant technology-driven perspective, institutional theory has become prominent in the last decades through research in management and organizational studies—as well as more recently in business history—on the emergence and development of new industries.Footnote ⁹ The studies have shown that a search for both identity and legitimacy is the main driver of the entire process of industry emergence and configuration. More specifically, a search for identity is a search for diversity and differentiation from existing industries, which helps reduce uncertainty and enhance the industry’s survival.Footnote ¹⁰ On the other hand, a search for legitimacy is a search for identity in order to meet the socially constructed system of norms, values, and beliefs in which the new industry emerges.Footnote ¹¹

These issues are particularly salient in the case of the fashion industry, in which innovations result from a synergic change in design, aesthetics, and symbolic elements that challenge the existing order and convey value to the product.Footnote ¹² The fashion field’s cultural nature and idiosyncratic setting have fed the still ongoing proliferation of management and organization research studies that highlight the relevance of the historical socio-economic context in explaining the fashion industry’s emergence and development.Footnote ¹³ Recent business history research has, however, paved the way for theoretical concerns to be integrated into the analysis of industries that emerged in the past.

Pierre-Yves Donzé’s research on the emergence and achievement of the modern luxury industry, Mukti Khaire’s research on the emergence of Indian high-end fashion, and Véronique Pouillard’s research on the development and transition of the French fashion industry into a global business are cases in point.Footnote ¹⁴ Building on the theoretical framework that Robin Gustafsson, Mikko Jääskeläinen, Markku Maula, and Juha Uotila proposed, Donzé conceptualized the modern luxury industry from the mid-eighteenth century to date, as characterized by the replacement of the attribute of rarity with high quality as the distinctive feature of luxury products.Footnote ¹⁵

Khaire’s research is an example of using history as a driver or a moderator of the subsequent categorical configurations.Footnote ¹⁶ The early entrepreneurs shaped the cognitive framing in terms of the emerging field, while fashion institutes helped build the new profession’s know-how and legitimacy, after which fashion magazines defined and propagated shared understandings of the industry’s features and attributes. For example, the collective meaning making, which legitimized and thereafter institutionalized Indian high-end fashion, was the result of a dynamic process that developed over time and was conditioned by the existing institutions, cultural factors, and social practices.

Pouillard’s study of the French fashion industry highlights the roles of entrepreneurs, institutions, and innovations in the configuration and achievement of French fashion’s global hegemony, outlining it as an iterative process between new business practices, entrepreneurship, and professional fashion institutions in the dynamics of a dialectical relationship between innovation and commercialization.Footnote ¹⁷

Notwithstanding this research’s relevant contribution, the literature on the fashion industry is still somewhat constrained. Scholars have mainly approached the topic from a country-specific, or even regional- and cluster-specific, perspective.

With regard to the Italian fashion industry, business history research attributed its emergence to the country-branding strategies that created the intangible Made in Italy asset.Footnote ¹⁸ Then, the synergy between the clothing industry and designers prompted the achievements of the Italian ready-to-wear market in the late 1970s and 1980s. In those years, Milan superseded the various fashion centers that aspired to be internationally recognized as the cradle of Made in Italy.Footnote ¹⁹ However, the Italian fashion industry still needs to be further investigated. The literature deals mainly with its huge international success rather than why it remained a niche business compared to the size and market share of the leading companies of French fashion.Footnote ²⁰

Marie-Laure Djelic and Antti Ainamo’s comparison of the fashion industry’s evolution in France, Italy, and the United States revealed that firms evolved by following trajectories determined by their historical powerful legacies, which were deeply embedded in their local and national institutional contexts, thus limiting their convergence potential.Footnote ²¹ Although this study was very influential, it failed to examine the industry’s emerging phase. Consequently, there is room to improve the understanding of the legacies and the trajectories by analyzing the French prêt-à-porter and Italian ready-to-wear industries.

Following calls to synergistically integrate management and organization studies with business history, in this article we merge a historically informed narrative with the theoretical framework of the three key phases of emerging industries to analyze and conceptualize the emergence of the French prêt-à-porter and Italian ready-to-wear industries. Thereafter, we use an institutional theory perspective to identify and examine the role of institutions at each stage in the prêt-à-porter and ready-to-wear industries’ emergence and evolution, thereby providing new insights into the primary roles of institutions beyond entrepreneurship and beyond company scale and scope, and proposing a broader comparative view of the institutional trajectories of these industries.

Historical Sources and Methods

We base our reconstruction of the industries of French prêt-à-porter and Italian ready-to-wear configurations on primary and secondary sources. For the primary sources related to the French prêt-à-porter industry, the research drew mainly on the Women’s Wear Daily (hereafter, WWD) archive; the WWD, published since 1910, is an authoritative fashion trade journal, defined as the “bible” of fashion professionals.Footnote ²² Since the opening of its Paris bureau in 1911, WWD correspondents have played a key role in reporting and disseminating news on French fashion trends and business, thereby establishing a direct contact and relationship with Parisian couturiers and institutions. For the primary sources related to the Italian ready-to-wear industry, our research drew on documents in the Italian Fashion Archive of Giovanni Battista Giorgini (hereafter, the IFAGBG) and in the archives of the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana (National Chamber of Italian Fashion, hereafter the CNMI). As explained later in the article, in 1951, the buyer Giorgini organized in Florence the first collective fashion show of genuinely Italian couture designs, which American buyers attended and which reached a wide international audience. Studying Giorgini’s historical archive is therefore important in terms of Italian fashion’s breakthrough from French fashion. The IFAGBG contains the documents of all the various shows held at the Florentine Palazzo Pitti from 1951 until 1965, which Giorgini organized and supervised. The archive provides relevant data on the strategies of the emerging Italian fashion industry as well as reports by the international press on Italy’s external acceptance and recognition. The CNMI’s historical archive, on the other hand covers the period between CNMI’s founding (1958) and the transfer of its headquarters from Rome to Milan (1989); the latter city, at that time, was already internationally known as the Italian hub of ready-to-wear fashion. Therefore, the CNMI’s archive spans the early stages of the emergence of the Italian fashion industry. The archive’s inventory provides an overview of the documentation, allowing researchers to clearly distinguish two different periods. In the first one, covering the 1960s, documentation was produced and collected for institutional purposes, with the aim to create a common ground in terms of the values, actions, and beliefs of individuals, groups, and associations from different cultural and productive backgrounds. The records related to this period, in which CNMI aspired to become the Italian fashion body entitled to represent Italy’s overall fashion industry, mainly concerns CNMI’s official capacity. Consequently, deeds, minutes of meetings, epistolary exchanges, and members’ profiles are predominant in this historical archive. Thereafter, the nature of the documentation changes, with most of the records referring to the administrative organization of fashion shows. The primary sources in the CNMI’s historical archive allowed us to understand the reasons behind the above-mentioned change; that is, did the CNMI achieve its original goal, or did the course of its actions change? The sources informed us about the (1) three key stages of the emergence of the Italian ready-to-wear industry, (2) the transition from one stage to the other, and (3) the role that the CNMI played in configuring the Italian fashion industry.

We integrated the primary sources with secondary literature that “provides a way to ask historically relevant questions and offers methodological clues and theoretical insights that can reconceptualize the primary sources.”Footnote ²³ This secondary literature includes publications to which we applied additional criteria to select those relevant to our research. Among the sources we gathered and reviewed critically were those published from the 1990s onward, which comprise classic works on the subject; and we explicitly considered “the inter-dependence of fashion with industrial, institutional, and commercial organization.”Footnote ²⁴

The aim in our analytic strategy is to uncover the sequences and to synthetize the complex processes related to the emergence of the French prêt-à-porter and Italian ready-to-wear industries, from their initial stage to the growth stage. The intermediate, co-evolutionary stage includes four sub-processes, each related to technology, markets, activity networks, and industry identity development. Given the fashion industry’s cultural nature and idiosyncratic setting, we regard technology development as a broader competence-enhancing knowledge discontinuity characterized by a synergic change in technology, design, manufacturing processes, and business and service practices that challenge the existing order and provide a product with additional value.Footnote ²⁵

The French Prêt-à-Porter Industry’s Emergence (1930s–1980s)

Recent management and business history research ascribes the origin of the luxury fashion industry to the legacy of Parisian haute couture’s traditions and business practices, configuring new French luxury holdings, such as LVMH and Kering, as distinctive features of this industry.Footnote ²⁶ During the long process that led haute couture to evolve into luxury, the prêt-à-porter industry’s emergence and development were crucial intermediate steps.Footnote ²⁷

According to fashion historians, haute couture’s birth dates back to the mid-nineteenth century. The House of Worth was the epitome of the French maison, paving the way for a new business model. Worth opened his fashion house in 1858, innovating fashion practices and business. He was the first to (1) supply fabrics and trimmings to make his garments, (2) provide a complete outfit by complementing clothes with accessories, (3) to show the fashion collections on living mannequins biannually, and (4) to label clothes with his signature. He was not the only designer in Paris to adopt these new methods. However, his aggressive and effective self-promotion as well as his innovative and technical capabilities earned him the title of the father of haute couture. Worth and his colleagues participated in the founding of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, des Confectionneurs et des Tailleurs pour Dame (Chamber Syndical of Couture, Clothing Manufacturers and Tailors for Women, hereafter Chamber). The Chamber was founded as “an umbrella organization to support and promote individual couture houses and Paris couturiers as a collective.”Footnote ²⁸ In 1911, the Chamber was re-formed. The new Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne conclusively established haute couture as an autonomous business and a profession distinct from that of confection en gros (large-scale clothing manufacturers).Footnote ²⁹

The haute couture industry reached its peak in the 1920s, thanks to the international success of couturiers such as Patou and Chanel. They respectively employed 1,500 and 2,500 workers in their workshops at this time.Footnote ³⁰ In 1925, couture represented 15 percent of the French total export, while clothing was the second-ranked French export.Footnote ³¹ Following the 1929 stock market crash, the reversal in the economic trend affected the haute couture business severely. Between 1929 and 1930, American buyers’ purchases, which represented about 60 percent of the total haute couture sales, fell 65 to 70 percent.Footnote ³² More than 800 couture houses and about 2,650 other clothing firms failed between 1929 and 1933.Footnote ³³

In 1936, the French clothing industry employed roughly 749,500 workers, about half of the 1906 labor force, while apparel fell to the twenty-seventh place as a French export.Footnote ³⁴ In the same year, the Matignon agreements introduced significant social and labor reforms, such as the workweek reduction to forty hours and a wage increase, resulting in haute couture experiencing a substantial increase in its costs.Footnote ³⁵ The crisis reached its apex in 1940, when the Germans occupied France. The early stages of the prêt-à-porter industry’s development are rooted in this difficult scenario.

The initial stage (1930s). The existing industrial order was disrupted by sequential initiatives in the 1930s. In 1930, the Chamber took action to support and safeguard the knowhow of the Parisian couture tradition by creating a school to train female workers for the main haute couture’s business aspects and by adopting initiatives for the protection of the intellectual property rights of haute couture’s designs and creations.Footnote ³⁶ Thereafter, a new generation of couturiers updated their business model by venturing into ready-made clothing, accessories (especially perfumes), and product licensing on the US market in an effort to cope with the adverse economic conditions and the effects of the Matignon agreements.Footnote ³⁷ Among this new generation, Elsa Schiaparelli was the first woman fashion designer featured on Time magazine’s cover in 1934.Footnote ³⁸ In the same year, Lucien Lelong launched the ready-made line Robes d’Edition, which was shown and sold separately from haute couture.Footnote ³⁹ In 1935, Schiaparelli opened a store, the Boutique Schiap, within her new couture house, which sold everything from perfumes to accessories and from bijoux to ready-made fashion.Footnote ⁴⁰ At the time, garment manufacturing was a still rather insignificant sector of the French fashion system, both in terms of the markets and the workers, because only 25 percent of French women wore these products and it officially had only about 80,000 employees.Footnote ⁴¹ In 1935, the French Ministry of Industry sent Lucien Lelong to study the American clothing industry, anticipating the postwar developments in knowledge, markets, activity networks, and industry identity.

The co-evolutionary stage (mid-1940s–1970s). Fashion studies research characterizes Dior as a typical case of the development of French fashion knowledge in the second half of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁴² Dior created his haute couture house in 1946 with the textile (cotton) entrepreneur Marcel Boussac’s financial support. The launch of his first collection in February 1947 was quite successful, catching the eye of buyers and the specialist press. In 1948, Dior opened an American branch on Fifth Avenue, in New York City, which was aimed at the ready-made and accessories business, exploiting the large American market’s opportunities: the most important marketplace at the time.Footnote ⁴³ From 1949 onward, the branch entered into licensing agreements with local manufacturers to produce its ready-made clothing, and it also expanded to Mexico, Cuba, Canada, and Australia.

The overseas branches operated separately from Maison Dior in Paris, developing products for the local markets’ taste and requirements. Dior’s new business model also included establishing subsidiaries in France, which produced and commercialized a large variety of lines: perfumes and fur (1947), ties and shoes (1950), hosiery (1951), and menswear (1954). Dior successfully turned the haute couture model into a global business by means of a divisional structure business model. Dior’s global use of brand licensing was based on the fashion business’s diversification, both horizontally (into a wide variety of products) and vertically (into segmented markets to exploit the emerging middle-class market).Footnote ⁴⁴ Consequently, the Maison Dior business model evolved into a multinational corporation. By 1957, Dior’s huge business accounted for 50 percent of the total haute couture export trade, and 5 percent of overall French exports.Footnote ⁴⁵ Despite the early death of its founder, Maison Dior managed to overcome the economic turmoil of the 1970s and the haute couture downturn, which forced numerous couture houses to close their doors.Footnote ⁴⁶ Today, Maison Dior is a branch of the Dior group controlled by LVMH Holding, and—along with Balmain, Chanel, Givenchy, Lanvin, and Schiaparelli—is one of the few couture houses still in existence, revived thanks to new ownership and new creative direction.Footnote ⁴⁷

It would be hard to imagine Christian Dior successfully turning his haute couture house into a global business without the dynamics that affected international trade during the second half of the twentieth century. Between the 1950s and 1970s, Western countries experienced great economic and social changes. With incomes increasing around the world, there was a general shift toward industrial goods in world production and trade.Footnote ⁴⁸ Furthermore, post–World War II trade policies increased the size of international markets. The larger the market for products, the more the trade was based on a scale advantage rather than on a comparative advantage, therefore benefitting larger firms.

Following the transition from haute couture to prêt-à-porter, activity networks also evolved.

As Table 1 shows, the Chamber initially lobbied for political intervention to favor haute couture and actually succeeded in securing and protecting the haute couture legacy. The distinction between the couture and the categories of couture-création paved the way for configuration of the haute couture industry as the backbone of the luxury industry.Footnote ⁴⁹ Nevertheless, the number of haute couture houses declined steadily, from 106 in 1946 to 19 in 1967.Footnote ⁵⁰ This trend signaled that the industry’s identity and field configuration developments were in progress. It was no coincidence that, in the late 1940s, the term prêt-à-porter was officially adopted in France instead of the common expression confection (ready-made) to distinguish the emerging labeled clothing industry.Footnote ⁵¹

Table 1 Activity Network Development during the Prêt-à-Porter Industry’s Co-evolutionary Stage (Mid-1940s–1970s)

Sources: Barrère and Santagata, La mode. Une èconomie de la créativité et du patrimoine, à l’heure du marché (Paris, 2005), Louis Bergeron, Les industries du luxe en France (Paris, 1998), 102–103; “Chambre Syndicale Endorses Joint Apparel Show,” WWD, 16 Apr. 1957, 4; Comité Colbert, Rapport annuel. Comité Colbert en 2014 (Paris, 2014), 24–28, 36–39, 50–51; Pierre-Yves Donzé and Véronique Pouillard, “Luxury,” in Routledge Companion to the Makers of Global Business, ed. Teresa da Silva Lopes, Christina Lubinski, and Heidi J. S. Tworek (New York, 2019), 424–437; Vincent Dubé-Senécal, “Fashion, Industry and Diplomacy: Reframing Couture-Textile Relations in France, 1950s–1960s,” Enterprise & Society 24, no. 2 (June 2023): 455–479; Grumbach, Histoire de la mode; Journal Officiel de la Republique, 29 Jan. 1945, 426–427; Journal Officiel de la Republique, 6 Apr. 1945, 1920–1921; “National Subsidy for Paris Couture to End by 1962,” WWD, 21 Feb. 1961, 1, 47; Palmer, Couture & Commerce: The Transatlantic Fashion Trade in the 1950s (Vancouver, 2001); Pouillard, “Managing Fashion Creativity. The History of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne During the Interwar Period,” Investigaciones de Historia Económica - Economic History Research, 12, no. 2 (June 2016): 76-89; “Paris Prêt-à-Porter Création,” WWD, 13 Nov. 1957, 6; Pouillard, Paris to New York; “Subsidy Loss Is Threatening Paris Couture,” WWD, 7 Apr. 1960, 1; David Zajtmann, “Une revolution dans la mode: le prêt-à-porter des couturiers parisiens (1965–2000),” Entreprises et Histoire 108, no. 3 (2022): 52–63.

The turning point in the transition from haute couture to prêt-à-porter occurred in 1959 when Pierre Cardin, without the Chamber’s endorsement, showed his prêt-à-porter line at the department store Printemps.Footnote ⁵² Well-known couturiers, such as Yves Saint Laurent (1965), André Courreges (1967), and Emanuel Ungaro (1967) imitated Cardin’s move, which revolutionized the long-established couture commercial strategy by directly marketing and selling updated and affordable high fashion lines.Footnote ⁵³ At the same time, beyond the haute couture system, a new generation of designers, or créateurs de style, took their first direct steps to prêt-à-porter: Jean Cacharel, Daniel Hechter, Michèle Rosier, and Emmanuelle Khanh. All of them challenged the Parisian fashion cluster’s traditional rules by expanding a manufacturing model essentially based on licensing and outsourcing.

Notwithstanding the haute couture paradigm and the production system’s downturn during the 1950s and 1960s, the Paris haute couture cluster improved its strategic role by means of prêt-à-porter spin-off lines. The new system did not, however, replace the haute couture conventions and rules, instead extending its prestigious value and symbolic capital, whose legacy the new artistic property law ensured.Footnote ⁵⁴ From the late 1960s onward, given their slump, Paris haute couture houses reinvented themselves as creative laboratories for the more profitable business of prêt-à-porter, hinging their production on outsourcing and licensing agreements.Footnote ⁵⁵

Growth stage (1980s). The new dynamics and changes in the consumer market in the 1980s profoundly affected the fashion business model in France and beyond. Consumers became creators of their own fashion style by fostering market segmentation. Subsequently, the globalization phase, which introduced strong competition from low-wage countries in Asia, particularly China, impacted the French textile-clothing supply chain’s structure and legacy, forcing fashion companies to redesign their strategies and organizational structures.Footnote ⁵⁶ The new scenario emphasized the crucial role that the supply chain’s intangible assets, such as distribution, marketing, and branding, played.Footnote ⁵⁷ In addition to this functional upgrade, the French fashion system diversified its product portfolios, focusing on the high-end market segment. This industrial transition resulted in large conglomerates being established as a result of the acquisition of and merger with numerous fashion companies as well as the capital resources that the financial markets provided.Footnote ⁵⁸ The achievements of the LVMH and Kering holdings are regarded as a “logical” extension and legacy of the haute couture system’s long product diversification and licensing tradition, which couturiers had initiated in the 1930s, and which Dior had developed in the 1950s.Footnote ⁵⁹ According to Djelic and Ainamo, “it is thus not surprising that a peculiar conglomerate or holding company such as LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy) would emerge in that [French] industry.”Footnote ⁶⁰

The French fashion system capitalized on the haute couture heritage by developing a new business model built on the luxury globalization and on the luxury massification concept, which the Fédération française de la couture supervised and the Comité Colbert endorsed.Footnote ⁶¹ During the long process that allowed haute couture to evolve into luxury, the prêt-à-porter search for diversity and legitimacy was inextricably linked to the institutional setting. Diversity emerged from challenging French mainstream fashion, thus causing institutional change. Legitimacy depended on fully becoming part of institutional change, thereby forcing the existent system of norms, values, and beliefs to adapt to knowledge and market development’s outcome.

The Emergence of the Italian Ready-to-Wear Industry (1950s–1980s)

After World War II, the unfavorable context that had, until then, frustrated any attempt to establish an Italian fashion independent from foreign production and taste began to change. Italy was among the chief beneficiaries of Marshall Plan aid (1948–1952). This American aid allowed the textile industry to initiate an intensive process of technological modernization and to integrate itself vertically into the manufacture of ready-made garments, which, according to the first postwar industrial census, was still in its infancy in Italy. The majority of firms were individual businesses. Only a handful of firms had the skills and capabilities to adopt mass-production methods.Footnote ⁶² The American aid programs were also the means of spreading the credo of productivity, which underpinned the Marshall Plan throughout Western Europe, changing production methods and consumption models.Footnote ⁶³ In the postwar political and economic climate, there was also room for initiatives such as the one that fashion historians regard as the birth of Italian fashion and which they attribute to Giorgini. As noted earlier in this article, in 1951 he organized the first collective Italian fashion show in Florence, which was attended by prominent American department store buyers.Footnote ⁶⁴

Giorgini was a buyer who had already tackled the US market in the 1920s by exporting handmade Tuscan products. Numerous studies have commemorated him as the father of Italian fashion, a pioneer of framing Italian fashion in the image of the Renaissance artistic creativity by means of the continuity myth, and a successful promotor of Italian creations on the American market. Historians also refer to a few other entrepreneurs of that time, such as Emilio Pucci, Salvatore Ferragamo, and Guccio Gucci, as Italian fashion’s co-founders.Footnote ⁶⁵ They, like Giorgini, were all based in Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance, and were very well acquainted with the American market.

In keeping with fashion historians’ narrative, we assume that the initial stage of the emergence of the Italian ready-to-wear industry dates to the early 1950s.

Initial stage (end of WWII–1950s). The collective fashion show of genuinely Italian couture designs that Giorgini organized in 1951 was a breakthrough, establishing Italian fashion as independent of French fashion. By accepting Giorgini’s invitation, the Italian fashion houses ended the custom of presenting their shows individually, each in its own atelier. They also ended the custom of scheduling their own shows a few weeks after the French ones and instead developed their own ideas autonomously instead of working from the new trends launched on the catwalks of Paris.Footnote ⁶⁶ Nothing was left to chance to underline this show’s novelty. Even the date was planned to shortly follow the French fashion dates to entice American buyers to prolong their stay in Europe and visit Florence. The Sala Bianca of the famous Florentine Palazzo Pitti evoked the Renaissance, reviving the origins of Italian aesthetic and artistic culture that made Italian fashion one of a kind.Footnote ⁶⁷ Not by chance, Time magazine titled its article welcoming Italian fashion “Italy’s Renaissance,” providing its American readers with a detailed account of the Florentine show.Footnote ⁶⁸

The Florentine shows challenged the existing order. They called into question Paris’s as yet undisputed status as the unrivaled capital of Western fashion. Affordable and “excellent,” “elaborate,” and informal, the Italian fashion conveyed the gospel of democracy to a wide cohort of influencers, including designers, buyers, journalists, and an international audience.Footnote ⁶⁹ In other words, the Florentine shows prompted the collective meaning making that provided the new-born Italian fashion with diversity from the French haute couture, which was imbued with exclusivity and elitism.Footnote ⁷⁰ Italian fashion’s legitimacy arose from the strong consonance between the democratic ideals and the system of norms, values, and beliefs that emerged from the postwar Western political order.

Given these premises, the questions arise: How did the disruption of the existing order that the Florentine shows set in motion trigger the development of the market, knowledge, and activity networks? And how did these co-evolve, shaping the industry identity and field configuration? The following paragraph answers these questions by focusing on the emergence of the co-evolutionary stage of the Italian ready-to-wear industry.

Co-evolutionary stage (1960s–1970s). Starting with market developments, the first collective fashion show of Italian couture designers held in Florence in 1951 is deemed to have opened the door for the long-lasting partnership between Italian couturieres and American department stores, which fostered Italian fashion’s development. In the short term, however, the Florentine shows revealed the gap between market opportunities and the capacity for Italian manufacturing to fully exploit them.

Although American manufacturers catered to all levels of the ready-made clothing market, there was no large-scale production at the top end. This market expanded in the postwar years, revealing a niche that Italy was well placed to fill, at least potentially.Footnote ⁷¹ The quality and taste of Italian production were beyond question. Its competitiveness relied on the cost of labor, which was lower than in any other industrialized country. Nevertheless, Italian production was a handicraft production mainly comprising accessories and knitwear. The kind of items on the Florentine catwalks were still largely (although not exclusively) the result of highly trained tailors and seamstresses engaged in manual activities in small-scale laboratories rather than in large-scale industrial production. Giorgini himself never made—and probably was not interested in making—the shift from artisan to industrial production. Even though this might be perceived as odd from an ex post perspective, Giorgini’s attachment to artisan products comes as no surprise, given that he was a professional buyer who specialized in artisan products that constituted a large part of Florence’s and central Italy’s output. In addition, the productive structures comprised small-scale laboratories and workshops, with hardly any large companies.Footnote ⁷²

The importance of exploiting the American market became even clearer during the early 1960s. The large and rich American market was a way to overcome the obstacles hindering the Italian clothing industry’s development; namely, the small domestic market and the low national income. The American market was therefore the primary motor for the Italian clothing industry’s growth, which, to a lesser extent, benefitted from the creation of the European Economic Community in 1957. Italy’s European counterparts introduced country-specific systems of sizes, which acted as effective non-duty barriers, making entering their domestic markets difficult.Footnote ⁷³

From the early 1960s onward, the rise of the national market was impressive. A huge increase in income fueled an unprecedented boom in consumption, with income being spent on a larger variety of goods, including those that the Italian population deemed symbols of the modern way of living, such as ready-to-wear clothing, specifically menswear. Although the impact of clothing expenditures on the total household budget decreased from 10.5 percent in 1950 to 8.9 percent in 1970, its amount increased considerably in absolute terms, bringing Italy closer to the average of the most advanced Western countries.Footnote ⁷⁴

Market development prompted technology development. Since the mid-1950s, a handful of Italian textile firms vertically integrated into the clothing business, introduced mass production based on a new system of sizes, adopted the latest technologies for cutting multiple layers of cloth, and started to use modern pressing machines.Footnote ⁷⁵ Technology development was, however, part of a competence-enhancing knowledge discontinuity characterized by a synergic change in technology, design, manufacturing processes, and business and service practices. This kind of discontinuity took the form of collaborations between industrial firms and fashion designers. Advertising campaigns in the major fashion media allow us to infer that, in the early 1960s, collaborations between industrial firms and fashion designers only occurred occasionally. Thereafter, these collaborations became more and more frequent, changing profoundly. Initially, textile firms financed the couturiers, but obliging them to use their fabrics. The partnerships subsequently evolved, with clothing production increasingly involving creative skills. This change ultimately subverted the power relationships between the fashion designers and the industry, with the former licensing fashion brands to the latter.Footnote ⁷⁶ The leading clothing company GFT, which would later become Armani’s industrial partner, was the first to experiment with collaborations with fashion designers from the early 1960s onward.Footnote ⁷⁷ At the end of that decade, the neologism “stylist” entered fashion’s lexicon, signaling the advent of a new generation of fashion designers and heralding Milan’s ascendance as the Italian fashion hub.Footnote ⁷⁸ This new kind of human capital was crucial for firms to react to the industrial crisis in the 1970s and to cope with the changes in the clothing consumption models.

Market and knowledge development occurred largely independently of activity network development. As Table 2 shows, between the mid-1940s and the early 1960s, associations comprising couturiers, entrepreneurs, and economic organization representatives proliferated, reflecting the plurality of the alleged Italian capitals of fashion.Footnote ⁷⁹ However, the capitals’ competition fed parochial rivalries, preventing the associations from representing Italian fashion effectively in the international arena. The number of buyers and press attending the Pitti fashion shows did, however, increase considerably, reaching six hundred people from thirteen countries in 1959; nevertheless, the competitive moves by other Italian fashion organizations resulted in some well-known haute couture and boutique fashion designers withdrawing from the Florentine fashion shows, increasingly undermining the shows’ prominence and image.Footnote ⁸⁰

Table 2 Activity Network Development During the Ready-to-Wear Industry’s Co-evolutionary Stage, 1945–1962

Sources: Elisabetta Merlo, “Camera nazionale della moda italiana (1958–1989),” in Lo stile italiano nelle carte. Inventario dell’archivio storico della Camera nazionale della moda italiana (1958–1989), ed. Elisabetta Merlo and Maria Natalina Trivisano (Rome, 2018), 1–31; Ivan Paris, Oggetti cuciti. L’abbigliamento pronto in Italia dal primo dopoguerra agli anni Settanta (Milan, 2006); Pinchera and Rinallo, “Emergence of Italy as a Fashion Country: Nation Branding and Collective Meaning Creation at Florence’s Fashion Shows (1951–1965),” Business History 62, no. 1 (2020): 151–178.

As Table 2 shows, the various networking activities culminated in the CNMI’s founding. The established associations adhered to this aim, thus becoming an active part of the main debate on classifying fashion into product categories and planning fashion shows. The shared idea behind the debate was to avoid competition among Italian fashion hubs. To do so, each association had to organize fashion shows that would display a specific category of fashion. The first version of the CNMI show had two legally determined main categories: high fashion houses and boutique fashion houses.Footnote ⁸¹ The definitions and rules of subcategories, such as fashion tailors and knitwear boutiques, were derived from the rules of the main categories. This scheme had been conceived to balance the economic interests of both Rome and Florence, which would thereafter respectively host the high fashion shows and the boutique fashion shows. Boutique fashion consisted of women’s casual clothing and sportswear, such as knitwear, pants, blouses, sweaters, skirts, jumpsuits, skiwear, and beachwear handcrafted in small batches and in predefined measurements.Footnote ⁸² Predictably, the equilibrium soon proved precarious. In 1965, the Centro Romano Alta Moda Italiano organized both high fashion and alta moda boutique (high boutique fashion) shows in Rome.Footnote ⁸³ Within a few years, Milan’s emergence as an increasingly attractive fashion hub called into question the original scheme, making the process of interaction and negotiation even more tortuous. In 1971, the CNMI established the new fashion category called alta moda pronta (ready high fashion), which replaced the existing category called prêt-à-porter di alta moda (ready-to-wear high fashion).Footnote ⁸⁴ The decision led to an outraged and worried reaction by the Center of Florence for Italian Fashion, whose president demanded clarity on “what we intend to change by establishing the new sector.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Attempts to give the Center of Florence the tools with which to “reabsorb the Milanese secession which can quickly become dangerous and represent a moment of confusion in the panorama of Italian fashion” were in vain.Footnote ⁸⁶ In 1975, the CNMI helped its members who presented their collections in Milan.Footnote ⁸⁷ This decision unilaterally put an end to the dispute but without providing an institutional solution for the semantic ambiguity underlying the sensemaking process, as a variety of hints from the CNMI’s historical archive suggest. In particular, CNMI members were allowed to present ready-to-wear high fashion, knitwear, and boutique collections at the Milan shows, which also applied to the Florentine shows from 1967 onward. In that year, there was uncertainty about what the Florentine show collections should be called. Draft press releases referred to ready-to-wear high fashion as “prêt-à-porter collections created by high fashion houses.” However, the press release’s final version referred to “prestige high fashion” without any additional specification concerning the producer’s category.Footnote ⁸⁸ Promotional brochures provided a further version; namely, ready-to-wear high fashion.Footnote ⁸⁹ This semantic confusion persisted into the 1970s. At the time, the WWD published a special issue, “Italian ready-to-wear in its 25th year,” while the fashion shows in Milan were experiencing economic crisis and political extremism as a less than promising beginning.Footnote ⁹⁰ In the 1980s, the shows were titled Milano Collezioni, a name that was inherently a sign of discontinuity with the past.

The analysis of market, knowledge, and activity network development provides some insights into the Italian ready-to-wear industry identity and field configuration that can be summarized as follows. A commercial intermediary—Giorgini—took the first steps toward industry identity and field configuration development by initiating interactions between fashion creators as well as between them and commercial intermediaries. The Italian ready-to-wear industry’s foundational phase was therefore the outcome of private and individual initiatives preceding the associations with representatives from interest groups.Footnote ⁹¹ Following the success of the Florentine shows, the associations soon increased in number but failed to create dominant organizational structures. Instead, their proliferation led to institutional disjointedness. Consistent with the field’s origins and institutional vacuum, patterns of coalition emerged between the creative and industrial sides of the fashion business, which strengthened with international competition pressure. From the 1960s onward, the Italian clothing industry acted increasingly as a trans-organizational structure; that is, as a structure that allows disparate constituents to become aware of their common concerns, to unite, and share information. Knowledge and market developments coalesced to accelerate the process of Italian fashion’s identification with aesthetically designed ready-to-wear clothing. Initially, industrial firms’ approach to couturiers was merely aimed at making mass-produced clothing commercially appealing to fashion-sensitive female customers. Subsequently, such industrial firms became progressively creativity conscious to the point that emerging fashion designers would design clothes, select fabrics and colors, and even co-supervise the manufacturing processes. At the end of the 1970s, Italian fashion had become a matter of industrial design and was on the verge of embracing an increasingly wide range of products related to clothing. The field configuration process culminated in licensing contracts, which is testimony to the actors’ mutual awareness that they were involved in a common enterprise. These licensing contracts regulated the use of brands, which are the trademark of stylists’ creativity, thus legitimizing the emerging Italian ready-to-wear industry.Footnote ⁹²

Growth stage (1980s). The Italian fashion industry’s growth stage occurred when the textile and clothing industries were profoundly reconfigured. Concerning the textile industry, the number of employees was equal to 650,867 in 1951, 493,590 in 1981, and 384,829 in 1991. In the same benchmark years firms were 218,602, 60,061, and 46,161. Employees in the clothing industry were 411,546 in 1951, 676,118 in 1981, and 644,353 in 1991. The number of clothing firms decreased from 218,602 in 1951 to 83,282 in 1981. They were 70,890 in 1991.Footnote ⁹³ Despite the similar trend affecting the textile and clothing industry, their reconfiguration was the result of their different reactions to the increasingly fierce international competition. More capital intensive than the clothing industry, the textile industry proved more vulnerable to international competition and experienced great configuration difficulties. More labor intensive but sufficiently flexible to adapt to change, the clothing firms merely downsized and were restructured, concentrating on high value-added activities such as product development, design, finishing, brand building, and advertising.Footnote ⁹⁴

Industrial reconfiguration, however, went beyond existing firms’ reorganization. Starting with Giorgio Armani (1975), a number of fashion companies had entered the industrial scene at the end of the 1970s. They paved the way for the Italian fashion industry’s emergence, marked by a series of close consecutive events. In 1978, Gianni Versace and Gianfranco Ferrè established their firms in Milan, where the first Modit international fair was held that year.Footnote ⁹⁵ In 1979, Armani, who had, in the meantime, signed a licensing contract with GFT, established the Giorgio Armani Men’s Wear Corporation U.S.A., and won the Neiman Marcus award.Footnote ⁹⁶ A few years later, he was on the cover of Time (1982). This American magazine welcomed the arrival of the Italian fashion industry on the international scene, celebrating Armani’s unstructured jacket, which GFT had produced, as a “fashion statement that has truly influenced the world.”Footnote ⁹⁷