In the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was noted that retailers in Britain had started providing increased variety and fashionability to their customers, had added mid‐season purchasing to their previous two‐season calendars, and that a high fashion and low price ‘throwaway market’ had appeared on the retail scene. Since then mid‐season purchasing has evolved into purchasing throughout the year; and the ‘throwaway market’ (now called fast fashion) has become almost the norm. Here we revisit one of those British retailers (Marks & Spencer) together with its Turkish suppliers and observe a trend towards the diffusion of design capabilities to suppliers that is more widespread than is suggested in the literature. We also consider the question of how most appropriately to conceptualize the nature of these retailer‐ supplier relations in today's circumstances. We especially look into the manner in which these relations are reflected in price negotiations, the eventual distribution of the value‐added, and the nature of everyday interactions such as accreditation and reclamation practices. We conclude that even though Turkish suppliers seem to be successfully upgrading into design–a high value‐added activity–the question of whether or not this development has entailed a renegotiation of power between retailer and supplier remains a complicated one.

Since 1984, Erak Clothing, a Turkish contractor, has manufactured jeans as a full‐package producer for international brands, such as Calvin Klein, Guess, and Esprit. Following the creation of its own brand, Mavi Jeans, in 1991, the firm has been transforming itself into an original brand‐name manufacturer and retailer. Mavi Jeans are now sold worldwide at more than 3,000 sales points, including Nordstrom, Macy's, and Bloomingdale's department stores, and five directly owned and operated flagship stores in Vancouver, New York, Frankfurt, Berlin, and Montreal. In this article, the authors tell the exceptional story of the firm's transformation from a full‐package manufacturer into an original brand‐name manufacturer and retailer. They discuss how a peripheral manufacturing firm has managed to achieve a high value‐added competitive advantage by gaining access to global networks of production, consumption, and information in the clothing industry: a buyer‐driven industry in which the world's largest retailers, branded marketers, and manufacturers without factories are the dominant players with asymmetrical influence and power. The case study supports the theoretical position that individual firms have some room for autonomous action and that power relationships have some fragility that can be exploited by firms with strategic intent.

In this paper we discuss two distinct sets of advantages which have helped Turkey to become the world's second-largest clothing exporter: the competency-related advantages of the last decade; and the trade-and-currency-related advantages of the earlier decades. In the late 1980s and 1990s, some fortunate developments in the international currency markets, together with an unofficial trade with Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union, resulted in windfall trade gains for Turkey. During the last decade, a shift in the culture of fashion, from ready-to-wear to fast fashion pushed Turkish suppliers to upgrade into higher value-added activities such as design. While our focus is on the latter advantage, we point out that both sets of advantages have a commonality: namely, a sustainability problem.

a b s t r a c tRecent developments in the retail sector in Turkey have created a dynamic environment, with different resilience strategies of actors forming the sector providing a new context in which to discuss urban transformation. The developments have contributed to the public's awareness regarding multifaceted problems in the retail sector, many of which have a negative impact on urban space. Retailers, citizens and governing bodies variously contribute to this issue with different perceptions of and strategies on how to adapt to the changes. How these dynamics work and influence urban space in the Turkish context is the main focus of this research. A field survey in Ankara revealed that the resilience strategies of traditional retailers are reactive rather than proactive. This situation provides them with the flexibility to adapt themselves more quickly to the changes in the sector. However, as there is no holistic retail policy in Turkey, reactive strategies also result in unplanned use of urban space.

This article examines how globalising dynamics have been affecting Istanbul's urban economy. Our focus is on the part of the clothing industry which is now under tremendous pressure to meet the ever-increasing demands of international clothing retailers. While these retailers have been fuelling globalisation in the clothing industry via global sourcing for some decades now, they have recently placed new demands on their manufacturing supplier firms in Istanbul and elsewhere, and have successfully turned the question of meeting these new demands into a matter of survival. The exact manner in which manufacturers have been coping with these new demands, together with the labour force implications of their efforts (with a special focus on women labourers living in the peripheral neighbourhoods of the city) is the core of this article. attention to significant job creation not only in the sectors connected to the globalisation of capital such as the finance and banking sectors, but also in the labour-intensive manufacturing sector (such as the textiles and clothing industries) which is now even more oriented towards the needs of global buyers and thus under tremendous pressure to meet the everincreasing demands of the global economy. In fact, Eraydın (2008) reports that the manufacturing sector continues to represent more than half of the firms and employees in the city, and