Unpicking the fashion city: Global perspectives on design, manufacturing and symbolic production in urban formations

In recent years, fashion design has been treated as a key element of the cultural and creative industries (CCIs), and the idea of the ‘fashion city’ has emerged as a potential strategy for the revamping of cities. This chapter argues that there is not a singular model of the ‘fashion city’, and that treating fashion simply as a CCI underplays its complexity. It proposes an analytical framework for thinking about the fashion’s relationship with cities. The chapter highlights the different trajectories of ‘fashion’s world cities’, specifically Paris, New York, Milan, and London, and identifies the existence of two broad tendencies within strategies to develop ‘second-tier cities’ of fashion like Auckland, Toronto, and Antwerp. The suggested framework highlights the different positions that fashion plays in urban economies, associated with manufacturing, design and symbolic production and the various forms of creativity associated with different forms of fashion city.