Fashion's World Cities

This collection of essays was produced as part of the 'Cultures of Consumption' project 'Shopping Routes: Networks of Fashion Consumption in London's West End 1945-1979'. Its content was derived from a project conference that aimed to set the historical development of London as a World Fashion City in the context of a continuing global network of fashion centres.

Whilst individual studies of fashion cities including Paris, London and New York have been published before, this is the first time that the broader concept of the world fashion city, utilizing a comparative and multi-disciplinary approach, has been addressed.

The editorial approach followed four key themes: a consideration of how the urban landscape produces particular versions of fashion culture, the ways in which those landscapes are defined and connected by their relationship to other places, the manner in which representations across a range of media produce a powerful composite mythology of the fashion city, and the role that fashion production and consumption plays in the formation of local class, gender, ethnic and generational identities.

The book supported and re-framed research by international scholars working in the disciplines of geography, cultural studies, sociology, fashion studies, anthropology and social history to demonstrate the ways in which the concept of fashion city can be examined and interpreted.

Alongside new readings of the more familiar sites of Paris, New York, Milan and Tokyo, the editors set out to encourage a consideration of cities whose presence disrupts a simple understanding of a fixed Euro-American global fashion order. Essays on Moscow, Dakar and Mumbai and an introduction focusing on Shanghai demonstrate the shifting and contingent nature of the field.