The Evolution of the Italian Textile and Fashion Industry: From Tradition to Innovation: Guest Editors' Introduction

Fashion is a critical industry for many countries nowadays. The most important nations in the world have companies within this industry. The fashion industry changed radically over the last years. This business is not anymore just a matter of design, high quality of raw materials and creativity. The variety of managerial practices, organizational forms, production processes, and innovation activies of fashion and textile firms became impressive over the last decades. Despite the increased complexity of these industrial sectors management and organization literature about the fashion industry is quite scarce. Management literature often focused on the perspective of large fashion companies (e.g. Djelic and Ainamo 2009), mostly about sourcing strategies, marketing actions and supply-chain management. In general, public policies and flexibility of international partners are indeed critical drivers in orienting decisions of sourcing by large fashion firms (Abernathy, Volpe and Weil 2006