This book is a useful resource to understand the dynamics of the global fashion industry in a chronological long-term. The authors specifically build on the scholarship of like-minded business historians, whose perspective on fashion emphasizes the role of commerce over sheer creativity and highlights the work of professionals beyond the designer. This perspective is particularly important for the study of fashion because it provides a nuanced explanation of the many connections, collaborations, and interdependencies that created the basis for the globalized phenomenon that fashion has proved to be in the period investigated.

The timeframe of the book covers the years between 1850 and the present day. Donzé and Wubs acknowledge that there are endless academic discussions about the “beginnings” of fashion and that scholars’ views on this matter are highly dependent on the discipline in which they were trained and the approach they adopt. The bookends of their analysis are thus dependent on the perspective they adopt by considering fashion primarily as a business, a modern phenomenon in which symbolic value is embedded in products that are made available thanks to the technical advancements introduced with the Industrial Revolution. For this reason, the middle of the nineteenth century marks the starting point of their comprehensive and informative book.

The book is divided into 11 chapters that, in chronological order, discuss the major topics needed to understand the developments of the international circulation of fashionable merchandise, and how these brought us, gradually, to today’s crisis of the luxury fashion industry, the increasing pressure felt by brands to implement digitalization and mediatization, and the dissolution of traditional physical stores. Each chapter does more than summarize the most important events and dynamics of the period it discusses, backing up each paragraph with references to relevant works in the field, and with Donzé and Wubs consistently integrating lesser-known research that provides an angle on the global dimension of fashion and its interconnections with practical and relatable information. For instance, when discussing the introduction of the new model of consumption brought about by the rise of department stores, the reader finds out about Japanese department stores and the fact that they had a different approach to customers in comparison to Western ones, with “no window displays and [being] only open to the people who were going to buy something” until the very late years of the nineteenth century (p. 23). The book seamlessly integrates this type of information in each chapter, achieving an effective and widened geographical perspective for the benefit of its readers.

In particular, Chapter 4 provides a very specific point of view on “the material and cultural exchanges between the West, the East, and the Rest”. This is a much needed complement to earlier chapters focusing on the Western dominance over the developments of the fashion industry until the interwar period, in which the authors discuss the technical innovations and the global circulation of goods that initiated fashion as a business, the establishment of the haute couture business model, and the percolation of high fashion trends into their translations into ready-to-wear (p. 6).

Each chapter contains two additional focuses, displayed as “boxes,” in which the authors delve into a case study and examine brand strategies, retailers, collaborations, and cultural phenomena. From the synergic relationship between hip hop and sportswear (in Chapter 10) to the emergence of Western-inspired design schools in Japan (Chapter 4), from the Japanese roots of the US brand Donna Karan (Chapter 8) to the gradual professionalization of fashion models (Chapter 2), these “boxes” provide interesting springboards for further investigations on specific topics.

Overall, the book is an important contribution to the field and a significant aid to teachers in undergraduate courses, providing a welcome addition that works on two distinct yet complementary levels. As a scholarly resource, it widens the discussion of fashion as a business by incorporating case studies that can be productively cited alongside the canon of what we already know. Going back to the history of department stores, for instance, we have long relied on the European and American models (thinking of William Leach’s Land of Desires), with Le Bon Marché as an unavoidable starting point, but Donzé and Wubs remind us that, even in this established realm of information, there is much more to be said and that what the majority of readers do not know about Japanese department stores is, in fact, quite a lot. This is just an example of the many cases highlighted by the authors that greatly inform the approach they so competently contribute to.

The second level on which this book is a timely contribution is the fact that it constitutes an excellent teaching resource, especially for undergraduate students attending the many fashion history courses that have emerged in the last few years (and I here speak both as a fashion historian, sharing the authors’ business historical perspective in the research of fashion, and as a teacher who has struggled to find level-appropriate resources for her students in introductory courses). The book offers students the foundational information they need at an introductory level, with an adequate level of generalization that does not overwhelm them, while consistently challenging them to step outside the traditional Western-dominated geographical and cultural canon. The final chapters, in particular, addressing the disruptions brought by the rise of e-commerce (the Zalando box in Chapter 11 is on point in this case), social media, and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, make it possible for the book to speak to students’ own lived experiences of fashion, anchoring the historical perspective in phenomena that they recognize and are able to critically engage with.