Swedish fashion industry actors have managed to put themselves in a position where they can successfully compete globally

Summary and Conclusion

In this paper, we try to come to grips with the knowledge-based strategies through which

Swedish fashion industry actors have managed to put themselves in a position where they

can successfully compete globally from a home base in Stockholm. We have focused on

Swedish firms that use the exploitation of symbolic value and brands for commercial gain

Spaces and Places of Swedish Fashion 543

and international expansion. More precisely,Sheath wedding gowns ,

  we have described how these firms are

linked, at the moment, into a localized cluster that is at the centre of a web of global

relations connecting on the one hand garment producers in low-cost countries and on

the other hand retailers in high-cost markets elsewhere in the world. Also, we have

explored the idea that place, notably through notions of “origin,” plays a role in the

process of production of immaterial value. Our overall findings resonate well with

Scott’s claim that:

“The clothing industry is one of those increasingly familiar but puzzling sectors of

production in the modern world whose outputs play upon a cultural register of

aesthetics and semiotics,First Communion gowns ,

  while producers are at the same time subject to the discipline

of profitability criteria and price signals in the context of market competition.”

(Scott, 2002, p. 1287)

We will end this article by returning to the three sets of questions we started out from.

Our first set of questions was to do with the “systemic” nature of the Swedish fashion

industry. We have shown how the fashion industry comprises an industrial system where

there is a distinct global division of labour. In that sense, fashion has a multifaceted

relationship with space and is produced under conditions simultaneously characterized

by both localization and globalization. The consistent use of outsourced production

in the fashion industry, and the combination of different market logics are signs of a

genuinely globalized industry. It is not unreasonable to say that the production of

“Swedish” fashion garments occurs in a widely dispersed but integrated network of

units in both developed and developing countries. At the same time, we found

considerable evidence to suggest that the aesthetic and design-based innovations that

are imperative to the production of fashion tend to cluster around certain hotspots, and

that Sweden in general and Stockholm in particular display some characteristics to

qualify as one such hotspot.

http://anne468.livejournal.com/8346.html