Creation of fashion trends and role of the bureau de style for textile innovation

The aim of this paper is to examine the bureaux de style as producers of fashion trends and their interactions with textile firms in order to analyze their contribution in terms of knowledge and of competence to textile innovation processes. The business relationships for innovation has considerable current importance in the textile sector. Although this industry is considered mature, product innovation, based on the generation and exploitation of fashion trends, represents a fundamental strategic option to face the increasingly competitive pressure. From a theoretical point of view, the achievement of our research goals has led us to analyze the scientific paradigms of knowledge generation and of cognitive networks as conceptual frameworks. In this perspective, the process of new product development is encouraged by the integration of knowledge between an inter-enterprise network and an intra-enterprise network, which can considered in the various functions of the firm (marketing, research and development, production, purchasing). Resting on these theoretical frameworks, our empirical analysis focuses on the processes of knowledge generation produced by the bureaux de style. In particular we examine a) how the bureaux de style produce knowledge to generate fashion trends; b) the interactions between bureaux de style and textile firms in the sharing and production of fashion trends; and c) the contribution of these interactions to textile product innovation. In a relational perspective the bureaux de style constitute part of the cognitive network for innovation in textile firms; they produce creative knowledge that can influence the realization of seasonal collections. Our study is both exploratory and original: in the management literature in fact, specific studies on the bureaux de style and their role in the fashion sector have not yet been carried out. Our work is based not only on the study of the literature and an analysis of the results of research on this topic, but also on primary sources consisting of information gathered through interviews with four important bureaux de style in France and Italy, which, in the opinion of Italian textile manufacturers’ associations, are considered to play a major role in trend generation.