38 - Couture, Prêt-à-Porter, and Fast Fashion since 1945

Summary

This chapter considers the major cultural and productive changes that occurred in the global fashion system after the Second World War, beginning with an emphasis on the West after 1945 and moving to the analysis of East Asian nations from the 1980s. In the thirty years after the end of the war, new players in Europe (especially of the new Italian prêt-à-porter) and North America (casualwear from the United States) came to challenge a system still dominated by Parisian fashion. A generation later, in the 1980s, the rise of Japanese fashion signalled the decline of a prevailing Western-centred system and the rise of a radical and experimental fashion centre. In the twenty-first century, the transformation of the Chinese economy and the development of digital technologies has led to new collaborations around what are called ‘national made ins’. A fluctuating global geography of fashion is based not just on one country succeeding another, but on the emergence of new cultural and production models.