Integrating Design and Fashion Marketing

Fashion business processes and time are more and more related to the retailing and consumer rhythms than to traditional manufacturing timetables (Sheridan et al. 2006). Relation between design and marketing capabilities are evolving generating a field of innovation for the fashion firms. This special section of Journal of Global Fashion Marketing aims to offer a discussion about specific aspects of the interface between fashion design and marketing. More precisely the two articles included in this special section uses secondary research and interviews in depth with management of specific kinds of fashion firms. The first article, by Preiholt (2012), aims to uncover the reasons why fashion appears in terms of collective selection in a movement towards individual style in the way people dress. Here, fashion is viewed in terms of collective fashion trends and personal style. Thus, it is the clothes, dressing habits, and garments that are observed in the research. The paper shows how the theory of symbolic interactionism can be used as an analytical tool to bring transparency to the movement from collective selection towards individual style in the fashion industry. This theoretical approach, which is connected to social interaction helps avoid the classical research trap of making statements through the study of cause and effect. The analysis is made based on examples of meanings created around the garment through an observation of the process from the initial meaning the person gives to as a symbol in social interaction, to the final stage when it becomes an individual style. There are four such phases that together create the final picture of why fashion is heading towards individual style. All these phases have different sources, and naturally provide different answers to the initial research question in this paper. Once the garment is turned into an individual style and, as customers seek more details in garments, there then occur a collapse of the “total look” towards hyper individuality. The second article, by Guercini and Ranfagni (2012), examines the bureaux de style (style agencies) as producers of fashion trends and their interactions with textile firms in order to analyze their contribution in terms of knowledge and of competence to textile innovation processes. The business relationships for innovation has considerable current importance in the textile sector. Although this industry is considered mature, product innovation, based on the generation and exploitation of fashion trends, represents a fundamental strategic option to face the increasingly competitive pressure. In particular the paper tries to answer the following questions: How do the bureaux de style produce knowledge to generate fashion trends? What are the interactions between bureaux de style and textile firms in the production and sharing of fashion trends? What contribution do these interactions make to the textile product innovation? The research of Guercini and Ranfagni is based on an examination of the literature, on an analysis of secondary data and on deep interviews with managers of bureaux de style located in Italy and in France. The relation between fashion design and marketing is analyzed in these papers under different views and generate insightful perspective about the future of the fashion industry and important managerial implications. We believe that integrating fashion design and marketing is a fundamental topic to understand future of innovation in the fashion business and further research on the topic is needed in the next future.