Fashion, product innovation, and consumer culture in the late 19th century: Alle Città d’Italia department store in Milan

Abstract

Unlike product invention, product innovation has been overlooked as an issue relevant to the study of the economic, social, and cultural change. It is only in recent times that historians started to explore product innovation in order to understand the origins of consumer society. This article deals with fashion as a kind of product innovation and aims to explain how 19th-century fashion transformed clothing into a product designed and desired primarily for its ever-changing expressive and decorative qualities. The research is based on the mail order catalogs delivered by the Italian department store Alle Città d’Italia in the 1880s. Analysis of this valuable and largely unexplored historical source allowed us to conclude that (1) the innovative nature of 19th-century fashion had mainly to do with the services – ready-to-wear dress and novelty – provided to consumers rather than with the product’s physical components; (2) department stores and haute couture – the sole internationally acknowledged agency of fashioning at the time – both contributed to transform novelty and continuous change into distinctive characteristics of fashion; (3) fashion played a major role in modernizing consumer culture, shifting the focus from material elements to the services inherent in consumer goods.