Content area
Full text
We are, after all, in the midst of a full-blown nostalgia boom, a fact not lost on most successful product designers and advertisers […] People aren’t just suckers for old-fashioned goods and services, they also yearn for the marketing of time gone by (Brown, 2001a, p. 84)
Introduction
This article deals with the use of the corporate heritage in fashion branding. Far from being just a matter of glamour, fashion is primarily a matter of business, and brand management is crucial to fashion business. The long-standing practice of labeling fashion articles with signatures, trademarks and logos dates back to the second half of the nineteenth century. At that time, Charles Frédérick Worth (1825-1895), traditionally considered by fashion historians to be the inventor of the concept of haute couture, in an attempt to prevent the counterfeiting of his designs, put labels onto the clothing he manufactured. Worth, and the other French couturiers who after him made use of labels or logos – for example, Paul Poiret (1879-1944), who worked in Paris between the end of the 1800s and the First World War, chose to mark his own designs with a rose – intended to intertwine their identity with the products that they tried to sell to develop customer loyalty. By introducing this innovation, they intended to offer their European and American customers an outward sign of attributes, such as refinement and exclusivity, inherent in apparel designed to be worn only by the elite (Vergani, 2006).
The modern concept of fashion branding has its roots in the work of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel (1883-1971) during the interwar period. By interpreting the transformations which the new century had brought to the role of women and which the First World War had consolidated, Chanel did not use brand to distinguish fashion designs made for a specific social class but rather to capture a specific lifestyle which was expressed in the simplification of female clothing, the technical characteristics of the material used – jersey – which up until then had been used only for underwear and sportswear, and the masculinization of ladies’ garments by introducing articles and features – such as jacket and pockets – which had hitherto been the prerogative of menswear. Chanel recognized two important dimensions of branding that...