For a long time, a spotlight has shone on the creativity and prestige of haute couture while the emergence of the fashion industry has been relegated to the sidelines, with most attention focusing on the art side instead of the economic one. However, fashion business history scholars have challenged this perspective over the past decades. In this book Véronique Pouillard consolidates this strand, analyzing the fashion industry's development into a global enterprise, as a result of negotiations between art and commerce, and the dialectics between the two major fashion centers of the twentieth century, namely Paris and New York.
Pouillard, capitalizing on her extensive research experience as a fashion historian, presents a compelling history of the industry from the origins of haute couture to the new realm of fast fashion and luxury business. Paris to New York is based on a heterogeneous mix of primary and secondary sources, which are effectively framed according an interdisciplinary perspective aimed to bridge fashion studies with socioeconomic and business history. In particular, the analysis complements previous studies by Alexandra Palmer, Mary Lynn Stewart, and Nancy J. Troy on the business and commercialization of Parisian haute couture, as well as the recent strand of business history research by Pierre-Yves Donzé, Rika Fujikova, and Ben Wubs on luxury industries, focusing on the roles of entrepreneurs, designers, and institutions in establishing, sustaining, and recasting the global hegemony and heritage of French fashion.
As Pouillard explains in the introduction, the book explores creativity in fashion design as a “history of negotiation between innovation and commercialization, which developed within the business and institutional cultures of France and the United States.” At last, through the case of the fashion industry, the author provides new insight “on the idea of a hegemonic Americanization of Europe,” outlining the process of internationalization and dissemination of Paris couture as global style leader until the 1960s (p. 2). Business historians will find this transatlantic history of fashion highly stimulating, especially for this dual-track perspective that examines the development of fashion between France and the United States as a dialectical interplay of dynamics between two different national fashion business models: luxury couture based on craftsmanship and creativity in France and mass production in the United States. Through this narrative line, the author provides paradigmatic examples of the different nature and features of the two industrial clusters, as well as some significant figures and comparisons regarding their overall production, labor organization, cost of labor, and market prices.
The book is structured in seven chapters that follow a chronological approach, starting with the emergence of haute couture in the mid-1850s and ending with the achievement in recent decades of the European luxury industry and the rise of the “democratic” designs of fast fashion retailers, such as H&M, Uniqlo, and Zara. Each chapter focuses on a specific phase and is enriched by case studies of the main actors on both sides of Atlantic, such as couturiers, entrepreneurs, and institutions, setting out the significant aspects and characters of the period.
The author identifies three key issues in the process of internationalization of French couture: the management and capitalization of couture firms, the branding strategies of couturiers, and the protection of intellectual property rights.
The first chapter, on the pioneering though unsuccessful establishment of haute couture multinationals, supplements the recent research of Waleria Dorogova, Lourdes M. Font, and Pouillard herself on the early wave of internationalization of French businesses, shedding light on the entrepreneurial spirit, corporate structure, and financial and economic constraints of the couture business at that time. Pouillard clearly unfolds how the branding strategies of the new generation of couturiers, such as Vionnet and Patou, in the 1920s and 1930s collided with the protectionist trade measures adopted by the United States as well as with that country's different intellectual property rights regime, which allowed New York garment district manufacturers to “illegally” reproduce Parisian designs.
Pouillard's analysis of the French couture resurgence and globalization in the postwar period relies on the seminal study by Djelic and Ainamo (“The Coevolution of New Organizational Forms in the Fashion Industry,” Organization Science [1999]), as well as on Alfred Chandler's classical work, identifying the growth of Christian Dior as a multinational firm as the prototype of the new luxury business model of the fashion industry. By the end of twentieth century the fashion industry had completed its transition to the mass market. Notwithstanding the processes of globalization, deindustrialization, and democratization of the fashion industry driven by fast fashion companies, as Pouillard keenly observes, Paris and New York remain important hubs in the global fashion landscape, while Europe is still at the core of the global fashion business as the second-largest exporter of clothing. Europe's resilience provides important food for thought, paving the way for further research on the role and development of other national fashion systems, such as in Italy.
Tracing the interplay between French and American fashion systems over the course of the twentieth century, with the support of varied sources and powerful figures, this book clearly details the path of the luxury fashion industry as well the dynamics of interaction between design and capitalism.
