Transmission Mechanisms in the Creative Economy Fashion Design Processes and Competitiveness Fashion Practice PUB20190620 74369 1s92qy3 (original) (raw)
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The creative economy's boundaries are porous as creative ideas permeate all its subsectors. The critical element is to put in place the so-called effective transmission mechanisms for all subsectors to flourish and in turn generate viable business models and consequently wealth. In this paper, the authors take fashion practice as the unit of their discussion and attempt to explore empirically how the transmission mechanisms can be put into WenYing Claire Shih is an associate professor at the Department of Fashion Design at Hsuan Chuang University, Taiwan. Her research interests focus on the product development, manufacturing strategies, and relational networks in the textiles and clothing sectors. Her recent studies include art in fashion design, product development operation by investigating how an art avant-garde may configure mindsets at the pre-initiatory stage of fashion design processes. Qualitative research methods are employed through the case studies of the selected five Taiwanese progressive fashion designers. The findings confirm that the transmission mechanisms from art to fashion are indeed in motion, as Taiwanese fashion designers are influenced by the art current's fundamental tenets. Moreover, the authors identify a phase before the commencement of any formal design processes which they name noegenesis, a term borrowed from psychology. It is argued that noegenesis has the potential to provide designers with their singular vision, which simultaneously may serve as a potential differentiation advantage in markets.
Fashion Practice, 2019
The creative economy’s boundaries are porous as creative ideas permeate all its subsectors. The critical element is to put in place the so-called effective transmission mechanisms for all subsectors to flourish and in turn generate viable business models and consequently wealth. In this paper, the authors take fashion practice as the unit of their discussion and attempt to explore empirically how the transmission mechanisms can be put into operation by investigating how an art avant-garde may configure mind-sets at the pre-initiatory stage of fashion design processes. Qualitative research methods are employed through the case studies of the selected five Taiwanese progressive fashion designers. The findings confirm that the transmission mechanisms from art to fashion are indeed in motion, as Taiwanese fashion designers are influenced by the art current’s fundamental tenets. Moreover, the authors identify a phase before the commencement of any formal design processes which they name noegenesis, a term borrowed from psychology. It is argued that noegenesis has the potential to provide designers with their singular vision, which simultaneously may serve as a potential differentiation advantage in markets. Keywords: creative economy; transmission mechanisms; art avant-garde; Taiwanese fashion designers; design processes; noegenesis
A Typology of Creativity in Fashion Design and Development
Fashion Practice, 2014
Creatively harnessing the zeitgeist, or spirit of the times, and translating its influence into unique, timely, and marketable merchandise has been the key to survival of fashion-focused companies since the dawn of the twentieth century. We combined a cognitive perspective on creativity with cultural materialism to develop probing questions for a grounded theory study of the question: How does the creative process for design and development function in the global fashion industry of the twenty-first century? A typology for creativity in fashion design and development emerged from data gathered in a series of in-depth inter-10 Mary Ruppert-Stroescu and Jana M. Hawley views in an international context. We defined Leadership Creativity and Adaptive Creativity at extreme ends of a continuum. Leadership Creativity overrules current archetypes and shifts the sector in a new direction while Adaptive Creativity integrates existing paradigms into a direction the sector is already trending. This typology outlines eight descriptive attributes relating to the environment in which fashion design and development functions, and designates distinct components of those attributes that categorize the creative type. The majority of work in fashion design and development today reflects Adaptive Creativity. Specifically naming and describing these attributes and the interplay between Leadership Creativity and Adaptive Creativity, the typology lends structure to otherwise ambiguous parameters related to creativity in fashion design and development.
OVERCOMING THE CREATIVE CRISIS OF THE FASHION INDUSTRY
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The paper uses the advent of generative AI in fashion to critically examine the tenets of contemporary fashion design. As an exemplary case study, the work of Demna Gvasalia's at the helm of Balenciaga is critically scrutinized and discussed as the result of the fashion industry's ever-increasing speed and high demand of products at every price range. Within a hyper-globalized industry, fashion designers are forced to accelerate their design process with low production costs and high profits in mind. Given the systematic denial of fashion design understood as intentional creation by mainstream luxury fashion labels, fashion's creative process is already heavily revolving around self-reference and copying, much like generative AI. The integration of visual literacy and academic referencing competences in fashion design education are proposed as strategies to break the cycle of copying and self-reference in fashion and to expand, deepen and diversify the practice of fashion design.
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Recent research on innovation in the cultural industries has focused on aspects used in the design, creation and coordination adopted in the design of new creative products. In the chapter, we focus on the process of design by exploring the practices carried out within the textile industry in the Campania region, focusing on high-end silk tie designs. We investigate design processes associated with stylistic innovation, understood as change in the aesthetics and symbolism associated with products. Innovation in design language or meanings of products is key to sustaining the competitive advantage in creative industries such as the fashion industry. Particularly in cases where prevailing norms limit the use of new designs and current forms are highly institutionalized, creating novelty and product differentiation are ongoing challenges. Using interviews with a high-end tie fashion designer in the Campania region, we explore the creative design process, to better understand how designers create and maintain differentiation in high end products.
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Innovation, conformity and other ambivalences in fashion design
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This article problematizes the creation in fashion design. A noticeable majority of companies in the fashion market accompanies trends, which are edited by bureaux de style, disseminated by fashion designers at week runway shows and advertised as successful bets by the fashion media. This investigation results from the development of a research about the agency of fashion designers. The given scope emphasizes the dialectics of creation x adequacy and innovation x security. More specifically, the paper addresses the considerations of three interviewees conducted for the validation of the research’s results. During the dialogues - which consisted of informal telephone conversations aided by a semi-structured script – the professionals reported their reflections on deliberate acts of creation and the business logic of fashion design corporations.
This paper assumes the fashion sector as a privileged field for the observation of several research and product development processes that have noteworthy similarities and potentials of application in many other design oriented sectors. The fashion field has, in fact, elaborated research procedures and planning instruments over time, which are rather unique (such as trend research practices) that are also reaching out of this specific sector. In addition to elaborating and developing finished products, fashion companies, and other bodies, such as private agencies or associations, perfect intermediate outputs of the research and product development procedures, which they implement by using both distinctive languages that are, by now, codified and planning potential scenarios – planning trends –– whose aim is not to supply homologous development instruments for collection development, but that of offering design opportunities meant to support the creativity of the companies, thereby offering multiple visual scenarios. The production of these “research products” – trend books – represents a field of noteworthy interest, not only for the fashion market, but for many other design-oriented sectors that are progressively elaborating similar practices. In these, what takes on a greater value is the planning research project, instead of the finished product, since this becomes the instrument of the company’s strategy, whose potential effects do not regard a simple collection or family of products, but entire generations of products. The objective of this paper is to offer an overall view of these practices as well as to demonstrate the progressive convergence of sectors that are apparently very distant from one another, as for example, fashion and electronics, towards the said practices.
Culture and Transition Design in the Fashion System
Conference Proceedings of the STS Conference Graz, 2022
This research investigates the possibilities of design as a strategic framework for harnessing the transformative potential of the sociocultural dimension in types of innovation that enable a sustainable transformation of the fashion industry. Creative Economics has identified various impacts of culture on a diversity of innovation levels, but this causal relationship, by assuming culture as a "soft" component of innovation, undervalues its capacity for agency, which has been a claim in cultural sociology and fashion studies. To fill this research gap, this article adopts Design for Sustainability (DfS), a recent perspective that integrates strategic design into systemic innovations. This framework is better suited to connect a transformative conception of culture as it understands systemic innovation in terms of structuration processes catalyzed by design. The DfS framework is used as a lens for reviewing the literature around the connections between design and cultural-based innovation towards sustainability. 32 references are analysed under a transdisciplinary heuristic tool that allows integrating culture, design and systems innovation in fashion, and the selection criteria of the references analyzed. The results map a multiplicity of approaches that privilege the cultural dimension of fashion system such as craftsmanship, fashion design activism or social fashion design, and allow us to explain why these cultural practices, instead of marginal, should be considered as potentially transformative. These results suggest that cultural economics should include the transitional perspective of design to increase the value of culture in innovation and, on the other hand, that a cultural turn of innovation, as proposed here, would improve the analytical capacity of the DfS approach.
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This paper questions the proposition that creativity-led cultural industries can prosper in peripheral locations. To that end, it examines the apparent success of New Zealand's designer fashion industry in the first years of the twenty-first century. The paper critiques the conclusion that New Zealand's fashion success was the outcome of national industry policies that nurtured and promoted place-based creative talent. It also critiques the micro-scale, network-based research methodologies that produce such a conclusion. The paper deploys novel quantitative methods to show how retail market structures and trade regulations shaped competition in the isolated and newly integrated Australasian fashion market. New Zealand's creative success is shown to have relied on advantageous cost relativities and favourable macro institutional arrangements. The paper concludes that convincing explanations of creative industry success must consider the effects of higher order processes and structures that are not revealed by micro-scale, actor-based methodologies.