Fashion Entrepreneurship

The Creation of the Global Fashion Business

Neri Karra

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781315458755
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Fashion & Textile Industry
• Index: Business

Fashion generates over a trillion dollars in sales annually and has the priceless ability to beguile its customers around the world. Fashion Entrepreneurship: The Creation of the Global Fashion Business provides the first authoritative history of the global fashion industry, from its emergence to the present day, with a focus on the entrepreneurs at the nucleus of many of the world's influential brands. It shows how successive generations of entrepreneurs built and developed their brands, democratizing access to fashion brands throughout the world.

This book analyzes the careers of the greatest fashion entrepreneurs from the nineteenth century onward, including such legendary names as Charles Worth, Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, and Giorgio Armani. It shows how this distinct form of entrepreneurship has arisen and what lessons new entrepreneurs can learn from the past to create thriving fashion businesses in today's rapidly changing modern world.

Filled with fascinating stories from the world of fashion, as well as detailed business analysis and practical advice for people looking to create successful brands, Fashion Entrepreneurship is an essential read for students of fashion and entrepreneurship, and anyone looking to understand, and succeed in, this most glamorous of industries.

Part IFashion rising

DOI: 10.4324/9781315458779-2

1The birth of fashion entrepreneurship (1845–1895)

DOI: 10.4324/9781315458779-3

“My work is not only to execute, but above all to invent. Creation is the secret of my success.” ¹

Charles Frederick Worth

Introduction

In 1845, a 20-year-old Englishman from an unfashionable, provincial town arrived in Paris, with five pounds in his pocket, barely a word of French, and a headful of dreams. It was a remarkable risk, but the young man already had previous experience of doing something similar. At the age of just 13, he had left his home in Lincolnshire to go and live in London, providing for himself after his father’s bankruptcy as an apprentice tailor at Swan and Edgar’s department store in Piccadilly, which sold lengths of fine fabrics and trimmings to a wealthy and privileged clientele. By day he sewed clothes and offered advice to customers on new styles and trends. In spare moments he strolled to the nearby National Gallery to immerse himself in the work of the great artists on exhibition, paying particular attention to the dresses draped around the goddesses, heroines, and luminaries there depicted. By night he slept under a table in the workshop. When, “having heard much of French fashions,”² he suddenly decided to emigrate to Paris, his prospects seemed even worse than they had in London. However, while he may have lacked financial capital and French language skills, he had talent, artistic flair, entrepreneurial ideas, and a determination to be successful and make a better life for himself in the city that was “the capital of the nineteenth century,”³ and, even then, the international center of the world of fashion.

Within two years of his arrival in Paris the young man was working as an assistant draper at a textile house. Within ten years one of his designs had won a first-class medal at the Paris World Fair. Within 13 years he had founded his own fashion house. Within 15 years he was dressing princesses and empresses, one of whom famously said of him, “so extraordinary were his clothes that he became our master.”⁴ In February 1883, a journalist watching Worth, then aged 57, holding court among his wealthy and aristocratic international clientele, described the once humble draper from provincial England as “the only absolute monarch left in Europe.”⁵ Remembered today as the father of haute couture, Charles Frederick Worth was one of fashion’s greatest and most innovative designers. But, as well as that, he was also one of history’s greatest entrepreneurs: a key figure in the creation and development of the $1.5 trillion fashion industry.

Through Worth’s remarkable story, we can understand how fashion developed from a local craft to a global creative industry, and how individual designers went from the status of humble artisans to celebrated artists. We shall also see how fashion is not just about the creative flair of designers, although of course that is crucial, it is equally an entrepreneurial process, through which inventive businesspeople established institutional frameworks and gave rise to a formidable industry that is as strong today as it has ever been. In order to understand how Worth revolutionized the world of fashion, it is necessary to first understand the status quo that existed before his arrival in Paris. It is also essential to consider the cultural, societal, and technological changes that were taking place in the nineteenth century, which created the conditions in which fashion entrepreneurship could rise. Let us, therefore, begin our examination of the development of fashion entrepreneurship by looking back at the early history of the industry, in the world before Worth.

The prehistory of fashion: the world before haute couture

The practice of wearing clothes is so old as to be impossible to date properly. Scientific debate about when humans began putting on garments has produced a wide variety of dates, ranging from 40,000 to 3 million years ago. What is certain is that clothing, whenever people started using it, is a key human necessity, common to essentially every culture. However, while clothing is universal, fashion, in the sense of popular and frequently changing trends in what people wear, “does not belong to all ages or civilizations.” In contrast to the practice of just wearing clothing, “it has an identifiable starting point in history,”⁶ a clear beginning at a particular moment in a specific place. That moment was the late medieval era, and that place was Western Europe, particularly in the aristocratic courts of France and Italy.

Fashion, as just defined, scarcely existed before the mid-fourteenth century.⁷ Before that date, clothes tended to be draped rather than fitted or sewn, drew on a limited range of colors, and were uniform in style over decades, even centuries. However, from around the eleventh century, among the aristocratic courts of southern France in particular, a form of cultural revolution started to take place, placing emphasis on romance, courtly love, and greater importance on appearances. The latter gave fresh impetus to fashion’s older twin industry, beauty, as elites in society were increasingly encouraged to look after their appearance and to showcase beauty. It was not until the fourteenth century, however, that these trends gave birth to what we can now identify as fashion. Significantly, the fourteenth century was also characterized by a tendency toward decorative excess.⁸ Therefore, it is important to view the rise of fashion and beauty with another form of “seduction”: art⁹ (a subject, like beauty, to which we will return frequently throughout this book).

So it was that in the middle of the fourteenth century, in Western Europe, a radically new type of dress emerged that was more complex, brighter, and clearly differentiated gender: short and fitted for men, long and close to the body for women.¹⁰ Perhaps even more significantly, from that date onward, styles of clothing began to change relatively rapidly, a crucial component of the concept of fashion. Significantly, the names of the innovators who created this new concept, and the new clothes of this era, are long since lost to history. It seems likely that they were women, and the details of the lives of very few women from outside the highest aristocratic circles survive from this period. But what we do know, at least, is where they were operating. Fashion was not universal, it was a creation of the Western world, which at that time meant Europe, and specifically the courts of France and Italy,¹¹ two countries that will continue to feature heavily throughout our exploration of the past, present, and future of fashion. Fashions spread around and from these countries by such means as aristocratic marriages, diplomacy, trade networks, and the very first form of fashion media, the so-called “Pandora dolls” that were dressed up to illustrate the trends of the day in a portable form that could be felt as well as seen.

Another theme that we will return to frequently throughout this book is the ways in which fashion responds, and contributes, to the cultural and societal changes of its time. In which context, we can ask what were the particular characteristics of the fourteenth century in Western Europe that induced the birth of this new phenomenon of fashion? Some of the changes of that era were scientific and technological in nature, the discovery of new dyes, which allowed a brighter array of colors, the development of magnifying glasses, which permitted more detailed work, or the invention of buttons, which created new possibilities for putting clothes together (including fastening the silk tights that were highly popular among the men of the age). Other changes were societal, the growth of cities, creating new communities that fostered innovation and the exchange of ideas away from the stultifying traditions of country life, and the related rise of bourgeois merchants who expressed their newfound wealth through elegant clothes in the latest styles. In this sense fashion was the product of a commercial, not just a creative, revolution.

Still other characteristics were cultural. The fourteenth century was also a time of intellectual foment, as Europe started to leave behind the legacy of the long Dark Ages and to begin the mental journey that would move the continent’s culture from medievalism to the new world of the Renaissance. One of the key early figures in this transition was Petrarch (1304–1374), the Italian poet, scholar, and humanist who was also one of history’s first fashion victims. Growing up in precisely the time and place in which the concept of fashion began, Petrarch’s later letters to his brother, lamenting their youthful follies, shed intimate light on the concerns of the first fashion-conscious young people:

You remember how strong and how foolish was our desire for fine clothes … How we had to dodge the animals coming every which way in the streets, so that our perfumed, spotless gowns wouldn’t get a splash of mud or have their folds disarranged by jostling!... Why all this anxiety in our minds? To please the eyes of others … suit popular fads [and] follow the fashions of the vulgar mob.¹²

The criticisms of an aging Petrarch were, however, hardly sufficient to stop the continuing growth in importance of fashion in the lives of the young, rich, and powerful in the Europe of the Renaissance period that came to its full maturity in the century after his death. The Renaissance amplified and accelerated many of the same trends that had contributed to the birth of fashion in the fourteenth century, new technology, increased urbanization, and unprecedented cultural change. The growth of fashion in Europe was, undoubtedly, connected to the new philosophies and attitudes that characterized the Renaissance. One of the key intellectual concepts of that era that had enormous consequences for the development of the fashion industry was the glorification of the individual. In the medieval past one’s worth was a result of one’s conformity and self-abasement in front of the demands of God. By the time of the Renaissance, one’s individuality was a trait to celebrate, reflected both in the unique portraiture of the time and the varieties of fashionable clothing. As each person was increasingly appreciated as a unique and creative spirit, so it was natural that people should seek to express their individuality through fashion. Similarly, as new learning questioned old certainties, so it was that people felt liberated to create new styles that broke the bonds of convention and tradition. Glorification of the creative spirit of the individual, which began in the world of high art, would also, after a time lag of several centuries, help to inspire a new vision of the once humble clothes maker as an inspired and creative fashion designer, worthy of celebration in his, or her, own right. These changes, deriving from art, would later have important implications for the development of fashion entrepreneurship by the new breed of artistic designers epitomized by Charles Worth. (We will examine in more detail the cross-fertilization of influences from the worlds of art and fashion in Chapter 2).

During and after the Renaissance, increasingly elaborate clothing became not only a way to express and symbolize individuality, social status, and wealth, but also an important contributor to economic growth, especially in France. As early as 1665, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, finance minister at the court of Louis XIV, boasted “Fashion is to France what the gold mines of Peru are to Spain.”¹³ The court of the “Sun King” at Versailles, of which Colbert was part, became the center of European fashion. Much of its finery was supplied by the city of Lyon, which had been the capital of France’s silk industry ever since the twelfth century following the importation of ancient Chinese techniques. By the eighteenth century, the French government, recognizing the truth of Colbert’s words, was introducing policies and incentives to support textile manufacturers and further encourage the fashion industry in the interests of the national economy.

Meanwhile changing fashions (“that most sensitive of social barometers”)¹⁴ continued to reflect the shifting spirits of each new age. On the eve of the French Revolution, the styles of the court of Versailles communicated the sense of aristocratic decadence with which they continue to be synonymous. Already by this time “fashionable clothes ... meant French clothes”¹⁵ and the world’s first fashion magazine, Cabinet des Modes, was launched in 1785 just one year before the storming of the Bastille (1786). Previous fashion publications had been irregularly published almanacs marketed only to the extremely wealthy, such as Galerie des Modes et Costumes Français (1778–1787) and The Lady’s Magazine (1770). But Cabinet des Modes (latterly known as La Magasin des Modes Nouvelles Francaises et Anglaises and Le Journal de la Mode et du Gout) had an affordability that was in keeping with the democratic spirit of the age. It was also published regularly (every 15 days) and acted as fashion reportage, advice, and a mail order catalog for anyone keen to purchase the clothes displayed in its pages, an early example of the symbiosis of fashion media, marketing, and distribution. Another innovation was its recommendations of certain clothes for particular seasons or, even, days. The magazine did not survive the Revolution (it folded in 1793), but it did inspire imitators around Europe which would lay the foundations for the mighty fashion ...