Fashion and Textiles

Call for Paper: Emergent Fashion Enterprise Challenges and Solutions

Influenced by technical innovation and concerns around ethicality and sustainability, and accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, fashion as a commercial enterprise faces existential challenges. Seismic shifts in consumer attitudes and behaviour, the evolution of brand-consumer relationships and disruptions to the fundamental structure of the global fashion system are challenging fashion businesses and professionals to radically adapt their policies and practices. In turn, being at the heart of commercial and technical innovation, of social and political change, gives the fashion business an opportunity to drive transformation far beyond the shape, cut and colour of clothing.  The aim of this special issue is to provide a platform for the study of emergent challenges and their solutions within the fashion system.  Encapsulating (but not exclusive to) the impact on fashion consumption of evolving consumer lifestyles and beliefs, through the application of new technologies throughout fashion design, distribution and promotion, to the response by fashion businesses to the challenges of the pandemic, the special issue will provide a contemporary snapshot of a moment of critical change within the fashion and textile industry.