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The Importance of Fashions in Taste to Business History: An Introductory Essay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2012

Dwight E. Robinson
Dwight E. Robinson
Affiliation:
Professor of Business Administration, the University of Washington
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Abstract

Viewing the evolution of business through the unique perspective of the student of fashion behavior, this essay recasts many traditional generalizations and seeks a meeting ground for fashion study and business history.

Type
Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 37 , Issue 1-2: Special Illustrated Fashion Issue , Spring/Summer 1963 , pp. 5 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1963

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References

1 Business Week, June 2, 1962, p. 34. Time, July 6, 1962, p. 60, points out that to “get high-fashion goods,” President Eugene Ferkauf sometimes has “to go through cloak-and-dagger maneuvers that the CIA might study with profit.” The explanation is, of course, that suppliers of highly stylized goods tend to be very selective in their choice of retail outlets.

2 For a masterful review and analysis of the effects of fashion on the competitive organization of an industry see Meiklejohn, Helen E., “Dresses: The Impact of Fashion on a Business,” Hamilton, Walton and Associates, Prices and Price Policies (New York, 1938), pp. 299–393.Google Scholar See also the amusing and workmanlike article on “uneconomic” entrepreneurial behavior in the dress industry, “Adam Smith on Seventh Avenue,” Fortune, vol. XXXIX (January, 1949), pp. 73–79, 120–22. See also Robinson, Dwight E., Collective Bargaining and Market Control in the New York Coat and Suit Industry (New York, 1949)Google Scholar, especially Chap. I, “The Conditions of Labor-Management Relations,” pp. 3–27.

3 Langley-Moore, Doris, The Woman in Fashion (London, 1949), p. 90.Google Scholar Miss Langley-Moore presents a list of some 33 trades and professions in which women were regularly and frequently employed.

4 This is not to say that secular change is unimportant. The kind of taste change that led Western man between the twelfth and twentieth centuries from the worship of the Virgin to idolatry of the machine is something to which fashion is only indirectly related.

5 See Frazer, James G., The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Abridged, ed., New York, 1948)Google Scholar, especially Chap. 3.

6 Schumpeter, Joseph A., The Theory of Economic Development (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), p. 21.Google Scholar

7 For an examination of Wedgwood's dependency as an industrial innovator on fashions in taste see Robinson, Dwight E., “The Styling and Transmission of Fashions Historically Considered: Winckelmann, Hamilton, and Wedgwood in the ‘Greek Revival,’” Journal of Economic History, vol. XX (December, 1960), pp. 576–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 See “Das Risiko der künstlichen Veralterung in der modernen Absatzwirtschaft,” Jahrbuch der Absatz und Verbruchsforschung (Heft 1/1962, 8. Jahrgang, Verlag Modeme Industrie, Munchen), pp. 1–31.

9 (London, 1931), p. 13. Italics added.

10 Ibid., p. 17.

11 See, for example, Latour, Anny, Kings of Fashion (London, 1958. First published in Germany in 1956 as Magier der Mode), p. 8.Google Scholar

12 There is no intention here, of course, to deny that necessitous demands — as for coal — can also lead on to technological innovation.

13 An example of such research is McKendrick's, N. “Josiah Wedgwood: An Eighteenth-Century Entrepreneur in Salesmanship and Marketing Techniques,” Economic History Review, Second Series, vol. XII (April, 1960), pp. 408–433.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Wedgwood's letters of themselves would have established his intense concern with fashion even had the writer not been looking for it.

14 See Evans, Joan, Dress in Medieval France (Oxford, 1952).Google Scholar This noted scholar freely discusses “variations of fashion,” as if they may be taken for granted, in her first chapter covering 1060–1080. For example, on p. 6 she writes: “The chief variation of fashion lay in the style of the sleeves of the bliault. The elbow-sleeves of the women's bliaults went out of fashion about 1050.” Henry Adams speaks of “the fashions of the court-dress of her time,” as denoting the “florid” personality of Eleanor of Aquitaine, who married Louis VII in 1137. Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (New York, 1905), p. 67.

15 Robinson, Dwight E., “The Economics of Fashion Demand,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. LXXV (August, 1961), pp. 376–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Homo Ludens (New York, 1950), p. 102.

17 The author's suspicions along these lines were substantiated in a letter from Fritz Redlich to Andrew F. Brimmer, August 30, 1961, reporting conversations with Hindu women. This reminds us that in observing Western dress fashions we place primary emphasis on the garment-manufacturing trade, improperly neglecting the impact of fashion on the textile industry. Indeed, the couturier's ability to introduce new designs in women's dress rests partly on his command of novel and luxurious materials in which to carry out the former. In a fashion show, the attack on women's resistance to strikingly novel designs is supported by the evident expensiveness of the fabrics used. Without the prestige impact of the latter, new designs might be adjudged ridiculous rather than daringly effective. In colloquial terms, the couturier who cannot afford “to knock their eyes out” with sumptuous fabrics, simply cannot “get away with” extreme designs.

18 (London, 1947), p. 70.

19 Rodier, Paul, The Romance of French Weaving (New York, 1931), p. 35.Google Scholar

20 There has always been a tendency on the part of nobilities to regard the middle class as deficient in the manly virtues. According to Thomas Carlyle, Queen Elizabeth I used to “boast that she had a Cavalry Regiment, where of neither horse nor man could be injured; her regiment, namely, of Tailors on Mares.” Sartor Resartus; On Heroes, Hero Worship (Everyman's Library ed., London, 1908), p. 217.

21 Evans, Dress in Medieval France, p. 15.

22 My friend Millard Rogers, art historian and Art Director, Center for Asian Arts, University of Washington, attaches the highest importance to the connection between travel and fashion. His own observations of the arts of the early Middle Ages have disclosed a surprising amount of Oriental influences in the West and such influences tend to be coincident with widespread waves of enthusiasm for novel designs.

23 Evans, Dress in Medieval France, p. 14.

24 Again generalities about ideal types must be avoided. Precursive outgrowths of luxurious behavior occurred in the very early Middle Ages. Cunningham, W., The Growth of English Commerce during the Early Middle Ages (3rd ed., Cambridge, 1896)Google Scholar , finds evidence of dependency on luxurious and exotic goods in the reign of Alfred. See especially, pp. 85 ff. (Once again, I am indebted to Millard Rogers.) Perhaps one proviso should be added: Things have a way of getting off to fast starts in history once conditions are favorable — Gothic-cathedral building, for example. Thus there may be reason to ask whether the thirteenth century may have actually established the foundations of middle-class sub-cultural attitudes, even though their proliferation did not occur until later.

25 Rodier, Romance of French Weaving, p. 68.

26 Evans, Dress in Medieval France, p. 25.

27 Ibid., p. 8.

28 Ibid., pp. 52–53.

29 Davenport, Millia, The Book of Costume (2 vols., New York, 1948), vol. I, p. 190.Google Scholar

30 Newton, Eric, The Arts of Man (Greenwich, Conn., 1960), p. 172.Google Scholar

31 See Lewis', W. H. description of the effect produced in French court hair styles by the arrival of “an English woman of no great consequence.” Louis XIV: An Informal Portrait (New York, 1959), p. 149.Google Scholar

32 Van der Kamp, G. and Levron, J., Versailles and the Trianons, tr. by Whitehom, Ethel (Essential Books ed., Oxford, 1958), p. 126.Google Scholar

33 Latour, Kings of Fashion, p. 80.

34 Ibid., p. 131.

35 Cater, Harold D. (ed.), Henry Adams and His Friends: A Collection of His Unpublished Letters (Boston, 1947), p. 489.Google Scholar The continuation of Adams' remarks is revealing and amusing: “and perhaps that is its [Paris'] future. I am a colonist, battling with the savage natives.”

36 Colbert himself said: “‘Fashion is to France what the gold mines of Peru are to the Spaniard.’” Quoted in Latour, Kings of Fashion, p. 63.

37 For a sophisticated review of Balenciaga's life and work see Beaton, Cecil, The Glass of Fashion (New York, 1954), pp. 304–314.Google Scholar See also Ballard, Bettina, In My Fashion (New York, 1960), pp. 199–201.Google Scholar

38 In 1962 Givenchy opened, for the first time, in the same week as Balenciaga.

39 A day's time, on some occasions even a few hours, can make the difference between profit and loss to a Seventh Avenue manufacturer.

40 See Dior's candid and informative autobiography Christian Dior and I (New York, 1957), especially pp. 15–40.

41 Excellent description and analysis of the economic and business organization of the couture is found in Garland, Madge, Fashion (Penguin Books ed., Norwich, 1962).Google Scholar See especially: Chap. 3, “The Construction of the High-Fashion Market;” Chap. 5, “The Rise of the Ready-to-Wear Market;” Chap. 6, “The International Market;” Chap. 7, “Fabrics;” and Chap. 8, “The Buyers.”

42 Kings of Fashion, p. 64. Italics added.

43 Ibid., pp. 82–86.

44 Ibid., pp. 1–26.

45 Dior assures us (honestly, I am sure) that the textile manufacturers had no influence over his designs. They were merely interested that he support the position of French couture. Dior, Dior and I, pp. 39–40.

46 See an interesting article by Paul Clerget, formerly Director of the High School of Commerce of Lyons, entitled “The Economic and Social Role of Fashion,” in Revue Economique Internationale, vol. II (April 15–26, 1913) and reprinted in the Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, 1914), pp. 755–65.

47 This suggests an interesting consideration. Before the present century, the discarding of outmoded commodities was a form of waste from the standpoint of the affluent alone. Most goods seem to have been pretty well used up before they reached, through a series of gifts or resales, the most indigent. Today, as John Kenneth Galbraith insists, this seems no longer true. Mechanized production appears to be able to run ahead of actual physical consumption based on wear and tear to an extent that was impossible under mercantile forms of business organization prior to the nineteenth century. Thus our highly productive modern economy needs fashion change more than ever before. Whereas, in former times, fashion could call forth great expenditure of resources mainly by superannuating the possessions of the well-to-do, in the era of advanced mechanization it has won the power to inflict vast costs on the manufacturer simply by visiting discontinuities on his elaborately planned production runs.