The Hunting of the Fashion City: Rethinking the Relationship Between Fashion and the Urban in the Twenty-First Century

Gilbert, David A.; Casadei, Patrizia

doi:10.1080/1362704x.2020.1732023

Cited by 10 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Many authors, for example, have pointed to the failings of creative city approaches, notably Richard Florida's own partial recantation of his ideas (Florida 2017; Mould, 2019). More specifically, the global fashion capitals face huge challenges associated with the hyper‐capitalization of property markets that severely curtail or eliminate the urban spaces that in the past allowed independent designers, specialist manufacturers and distinctive boutiques to flourish (Gilbert and Casadei, 2020). For example, unaffordable housing prices, higher spatial inequality and economic segregation now pose serious challenges to fashion designers interested in running their business in an established global centre (D'Ovidio 2015; 2016; McRobbie, 2016).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Urban Fashion Formations in the Twenty‐First Century: Weberian Ideal Types as a Heuristic Device to Unravel the Fashion City

Casadei¹,

Gilbert²,

Lazzeretti³

2020

Int J Urban Regional Res

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In recent years, local governments and academic researchers have drawn increasing attention to the idea of the fashion city as a strategic factor for urban economic growth. In addition to renowned fashion capitals, second‐tier cities of fashion have proliferated, giving rise to a large heterogeneity of centres of production, design, consumption and culture. Despite its rising popularity, however, the concept of the fashion city is still weakly codified, and only simplistic tool‐kit strategies have been adopted to transform cities into contemporary fashion hubs. Drawing upon Weber's ideal‐type approach, this intervention develops an analytical framework for thinking about the diverse nature of fashion's relation with cities. The search for the elusive singular fashion city is replaced by three ideal types—the ‘manufacturing fashion city’, the ‘design fashion city’ and the ‘symbolic fashion city’—which can be used as a heuristic device to trigger debate about the distinctive characteristics of fashion centres and speculate about future developmental pathways. The essay stimulates critical reflection on the different kinds of positioning that fashion takes in urban economies and the developmental pathways of different forms of fashion city formations.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Urban Fashion Formations in the Twenty‐First Century: Weberian Ideal Types as a Heuristic Device to Unravel the Fashion City

Casadei¹,

Gilbert²,

Lazzeretti³

2020

Int J Urban Regional Res

Self Cite

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“…Geographers are increasingly applying creative methodologies to apprehend the intersecting scales of fashion, from "getting close to clothes" (Bide 2019) to using Lego to restage and think through difficult conversations and exchanges associated with the catastrophic Rana Plaza garment complex collapse in April 2013 (Cook et al 2018). Most recently geographers have been at the forefront of rethinking the fashion city and fashion's connection to the urban (Bide 2020;Gilbert and Casadei 2020) and are also beginning to think through the ways austerity (Gilbert 2017;Hall and Jayne 2016), the internet (Brydges and Hracs 2018;Luvaas 2018) and Covid-19 (Brydges and Hanlon 2020;Lawreniuk 2020) are transforming the fashion industry and consumers. The overlapping temporalities and terrains-earthly, industrial and atmospheric-evinced through these various geographies à la mode, are testament to the pertinence of a geographic perspective on, and practices with, fashion and style.…”

Section: Geographies à La Modementioning

confidence: 99%

Geographies of Fashion and Style: Setting the Scene

Patchett

Williams²

2021

GeoHumanities

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The papers assembled in this forum examine the Geographies of Fashion and Style through texts, visual images, material objects and processes of growing and making, as lived experiences and performative practices and, crucially, as concepts and practices that travel and mutate over time and place. In this introduction, we chart the Eurocentric cultural episteme of the fashion industry and fashion studies and dismantle it by drawing on, and out, globally-orientated and decentered approaches to the study of fashion and style. Our contribution to debates on fashion and style is to draw out five impulses arising at the intersections of geography and fashion studies and which our collection of papers brings to the fore: Theorizing, Queering, Decolonizing, Ecologizing, and Curating. In doing so, our introduction foregrounds the significance of fashion and style as sites of (micro) political problems and potentials, and is a call and a framework through which to extend and take seriously the diverse processes of fashion and style as sentient to the broader themes and scholarship of concern in the geohumanities.

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“…Unlike Paris and London, fashion ‘traditions’ have been established relatively recently in some world cities – for example, New York and Milan only became fashion cities in the 20th century, proposing high-end ready-to-wear fashion as an alternative to Paris’s high-brow couture. New York came to prominence thanks to an urban renewal plan, including that of the Garment District in the 1930s (Gilbert, 2000: 19); Milan increased its influence for existing know-how and technical infrastructures based on a tradition of furniture and interior design, along with advertising agencies and the publishing industry in the 1970s (Ferrero-Regis, 2008). The fashion city concept therefore has various dimensions: ‘as centres of a culture of design, as central points in production networks, as examples of distinctive consumption cultures, or as the subjects of representation in film or the fashion press’ (Breward and Gilbert, 2006: ix).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The current geography of fashion is a ‘construction’ that is ‘absorbed and understood without reflection’ (Gilbert, 2000: 14). This perceived unproblematic approach to the understanding of fashion and place has seen numerous attempts to re-write the symbolic geography of world fashion cities, with Skov (2011) identifying the continued emergence of more fashion centres worldwide in the formation of a ‘polycentric’ system.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Independent fashion designers in the elusive fashion city

2020

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This article examines the cultural geography of fashion cities, focusing on independent fashion designers’ relationships with their city. Through discussing the Australian city of Brisbane and its place within the hierarchy of fashion cities, we examine the position of modern yet peripheral locations that have what we term an ‘elusive’ fashion identity. The discussion highlights the complexities that make a city a fashion city, specifically the interplay between industry, culture, retail and design, commonly identified as fundamental elements in the construction or transformation of fashion cities. The paper unravels the dynamics and discourses that have contributed to the contemporary conceptualisation of the fashion city; it evaluates the way in which local independent fashion designers (IFDs) can contribute to a reorientation of thinking about cities and their fashion; and it gauges how IFDs sustain a local fashion identity within cities that do not present the commonly recognised characteristics of a fashion city such as infrastructures. We argue that IFDs in peripheral cities have a very different relationship with their city than do IFDs in so-called fashion cities. By examining this relationship, and Brisbane’s modestly placed position on fashion cities’ hierarchy, we propose that, except for the traditional fashion centres, other cities are in a constant state of flux, arguing that the concept of the fashion city itself is elusive. We propose that as cities experience fashion narratives that ebb and flow, they may present multiple characteristics that make them unique at a particular moment, thus they are ‘elusive’ fashion cities.

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The Hunting of the Fashion City: Rethinking the Relationship Between Fashion and the Urban in the Twenty-First Century

Cited by 10 publications

References 37 publications

Urban Fashion Formations in the Twenty‐First Century: Weberian Ideal Types as a Heuristic Device to Unravel the Fashion City

Urban Fashion Formations in the Twenty‐First Century: Weberian Ideal Types as a Heuristic Device to Unravel the Fashion City

Geographies of Fashion and Style: Setting the Scene

Independent fashion designers in the elusive fashion city

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