A new world order? Fashion and its capitals in the twenty-first century

This chapter has its focus on fashion’s world cities, but sees this ordering neither as a given, nor necessarily as a permanent fixture. The first section of the chapter relates the idea of fashion capitals to the wider literature on global or world cities. The following section reiterates arguments made in the first edition of Fashion Cultures about the historical development of a world ordering of fashion centres, connecting these developments to wider shifts in economic, political and cultural power. The final section of the chapter considers the changing urban hierarchy of fashion’s centres in the twenty-first century, and particularly the hollowing-out of its capitals, and the potential emergence of new sites of creativity.