The Historical Roots, Changing Nature and Geography of Contemporary Textile and Clothing Production in Poland: Beyond Shrinking

The contemporary geography of the Polish textile and clothing industry is strongly linked with the country’s history and shaped by the current economic and cultural forces leading to its shrinkage and evolution. Its first phase of dynamic development took place in the nineteenth century under foreign rule with visible clusters of manufacturing in various parts of Poland. It also significantly transformed and grew in the period after 1945. During the times of the Polish People’s Republic, the light industry continued to expand in terms of the number of employees and the top-down initiation of industrial textile and clothing production in new, more peripheral, locations without previous significant light manufacturing traditions, but it lagged behind in terms of technical innovations and responding to market demand. Despite the peak of employment and production volumes in the nineteen-seventies, the beginning of subcontracting for Western firms as well as the existence of a few leading and more innovative fashion houses shaping aspirations of Polish consumers, changing economic prospects triggered the regression of the sector in the last two decades of socialist rule. In the period following 1989, Polish manufacturers of fabrics and clothing had to face new problems linked with the general processes of socio-economic transformation and the opening of the Polish economy to the forces of globalisation and sector-specific issues. In addition to transformation turbulences and challenges, they had to deal with increasing competition from imports from Europe and Asia and the closing of sales channels to the countries of the former Soviet bloc. The nineteen-nineties and the early two-thousands marked increasing reliance on outward processing traffic to Western Europe, the privatisation and collapse of large factories, the disappearance of many major brands and the most difficult period for Polish fashion. Although large-scale production vanished almost completely, a few well-known fashion brands survived, and many new, initially smaller, market-oriented brands were born. Those which managed to survive and maintain a prominent market position today follow global trends and therefore tend to offshore most of the production while concentrating on and retaining key logistic and creative elements of the fashion production chain in PolandPoland. Moreover, in recent years, the trend of the declining importance of the fashion industry in the structure of the entire industry in Poland has slowed down, and diverse, although uneven, upgrading phenomena have been observed. The authors discuss key factors responsible for this state of affairs. These include product and process upgradingUpgrading, internationalisation and horizontal integration of related fashion sectors, the expansion or returning of leading Polish fashion firms to more value-added phases of the value chain, the dynamic development of smaller fashion brands and local manufacturers addressing interesting market nichesMarket niches such as sustainable, bespoke or souvenir clothing in major cities and their surroundings. A greater relative importance of the production of technical textiles needed in the interior décor, furniture, automotive and hospitality industries and of the manufacturing of functional, workwear and corporate clothing has been observed. This chapter shows how the trends mentioned above shape the current changes in the geography of the textile and clothing sector in Poland. It takes into account the extent to which the contemporary location of firms in the textile and apparel industry is still linked with its historical clusters. It also considers how it is changing following the transformation of traditional light industry into creative industryCreative industries and therefore how it is linked with more general location trends of firms in the creative sector and with regard to their proximity to potential consumers.