Capturing the Resilience of the Textile Companies as a Specific Response of the Fashion industry

This chapter examines the most recent innovative activities of textile companies in Spain and their expansion into sanitary textiles and digitalization. In light of the global crisis caused by the COVID-19, we consider highly relevant to review the challenges of one of the most important fashion sectors, e.g., the textile industry, through this evolutionary period and the resilience of clusters. From this territorial perspective, we explained the industry’s restructuring and survival through three main elements: companies, relationships, and institutions. Companies are fundamental because they pave the way forward with their strategic responses. Relationships or clustering is the interactional network without which the model does not work. Institutions refer to sets of organizations including associations and regional government that support the sector, endowing it with representativeness and legitimacy. Using this theoretical framework, we studied some of the main changes in processes, products, and markets of the Spanish textile industry trying to capture one of the specific responses of the fashion industry. The findings indicated that textile firms more actively involved in their immediate context generated and obtained more external economies, which could benefit from more territory-based industrial policies. The chapter ended with an illustrative example: the Valencian textile cluster.