Growing Fashion Industry: Manufacturing, Wholesaling, and Retailing

Over the last few decades, fashion has attracted many practitioners and scholars from different disciplines, such as business, business history, design, and culture. Each discipline has raised its own research questions; therefore, it is difficult to grasp a complete overview of the development of the fashion industry. The speakers shed light on this development by illustrating the growth of the fashion industry from the perspective of manufacturing, wholesaling, and retailing. In doing so, they aim to get a better understanding of how the fashion industry, in all its facets, has developed during the 20^th century.

1. Design Paradigms and Fields of Production: the Printed Textiles and Wallpaper Industries in Britain, 1919-1940

Emily Baines

De Montfort University (UK)

This presentation examines the production of design within the industries of printed dress, furnishing textiles and wallpaper. Striking contrasts in the design styles produced in printed textiles for the dress and furnishing markets occur, even though they may be manufactured by parts of the same company, while there are stylistic similarities between the products of the furnishing textile and wallpaper industries. In fact, many of the same freelance designers work on pattern design for the home across the different industries of furnishing print and wallpaper. However, the independence between the design trends and patterns produced for printed dress and the furnishing textiles is linked to a separation in the fields of taste construction, with different pools of designers and different ideological paradigms. The presentation will examine the location and network structures of designers in these industries and relate it to an analysis of the design that was produced. The role of innovation in corporate design strategy is also considered, with its sourcing through studio design and freelance supply structures. Marketing strategies of particular retailers and printed textile manufacturers are highlighted, to indicate the product strategy and target market in relation to design. The analysis demonstrates the popularity of Modernist pattern design in dress textiles in the UK market and contrasts the range of established and more innovative design styles produced for furnishing textiles and wallpaper. Inflections in design style were influenced by ideologies of class, showing parallel stylistic offerings to different markets. Vivid and colourful textile, wallpaper and clothing designs from archival research are shown to illustrate the impact of these issues in design style.

2. Fashion Prediction and the Transformation of the Japanese Textile Industry: The Role of Kentaro Kawasaki, 1950–1980

Pierre-Yves Donzé

Osaka University (Japan)

After World War II, the Japanese textile industry experienced a major transformation, characterized by the decline of competitiveness of spinning companies, the relocation of production elsewhere in Asia, and the refocus of companies on the production of Western clothes, due to a change of demand from customers. Consequently, during the 1960s, apparel and fashion companies became the largest sector of the Japanese textile industry. They were characterized by a weak integration in global value chains, a strong focus on the domestic market, and brands uncompetitive abroad (Itami 2001).

This change from textile to apparel was a major challenge for most companies, which had to learn about designing, producing, and marketing Western clothes and “fashion”. The first way to internalize knowledge related to these activities was the cooperation with French and Italian couturiers, and the production under license of goods for the Japanese market, mostly during the 1960s and the 1970s (Donzé & Fujioka 2015). The next step for apparel companies was to launch their own clothes with their own design and brands, and to become autonomous from Western producers.

Fashion prediction played an important role in this process and enabled Japanese textile companies to shift successfully to the production of apparel during the 1970s and the 1980s. Fashion prediction was mostly understood as the way to be able to forecast the needs and the envies of future customers (colors, shape and materials). Employees in the department of marketing of the major producers and trade associations engaged actively in these activities in the 1970s.

This paper focuses on the case of Kentaro Kawasaki, trained as an engineer and marketing director of Chori Co., a textile company based in Osaka and founded in 1948. Engaged actively in several academic and trade associations linked to the textile industry, Kawasaki contributed to the modernization of his company and industry through his activities of fashion prediction, with a strong accent towards new fibers and new technology to answer customers’ new needs. Under his influence, Chori has become a developer of new fibers, yarns, and clothes, in close relation with the chemical industry (it became a subsidiary of Toray in 2004). Moreover, beside his career as an engineer at Chori, Kawasaki carried out works for a better understanding of the nature of “fashion”. He published a book in 1981 (The idea of fashion technology: from fashion prediction to planning goods, in Japanese) and became professor at Kyoto Bunkyo University, where he pursued his research until the early 1990s.

3. Clothing: The driving force and the Achilles’ heel of Japanese department stores, 1970–2015

Rika Fujioka

Erasmus University Rotterdam (Netherlands) and Kansai University (Japan)

 Department stores were the largest retailers in Japan until 1972 and continued to grow in sales until 1991. While sales grew in all departments within the stores, the clothing department grew especially fast. It accounted for 35 per cent of the total sales of all department stores, and was beyond doubt the main driving force behind Japanese department stores between 1970 and 1990. With the growing ready-to-wear market, department stores developed along with clothing manufacturers. As clothing manufacturers introduced consignment and concession sales and provided shop-floor sales staff, department stores could expand their merchandise without any risk from purchasing large quantities of stock or from growing their own workforce. Also, as department stores expanded the size of their stores and introduced customer relations marketing, clothing manufactures rapidly increased their sales of branded products. 

After the collapse of the economic bubble in 1991, however, this driving force greatly diminished under the effects of globalisation. Global competitors such as fast-fashion retailers grew rapidly, and large-scale Chinese vertically integrated manufacturers became the perfect partners for them to make value products efficiently. As a result, the driving force of department stores became their Achilles’ heel. The clothing companies’ strategy was to offer a wide variety of product brands, and this was an initial success in terms of expanding their sales area within stores in the 1970s and 1980s, because customers recognised and became loyal to different brand names. However, the sales of each brand encompassed many different types of products, which meant a relatively small transaction volume for each product compared with those handled by fast-fashion retailers in a globalised market. Consequently, clothing manufacturers for Japanese department stores lost their negotiation power, as brands preferred the better deal on offer from Chinese textile companies, who could provide price competitiveness at the point of sale.  

Even if department stores now choose not to become global companies themselves and compete with fast-fashion retailers in price, they still have global competition when it comes to purchasing their merchandise. The success story of department stores has therefore now come to an end. This study will shed light on the changing competitiveness of department stores and clothing manufacturers in Japan, and examine the impact of globalisation on department stores.