Working 'En Atelier' to Organize Diffuse Creativity in the Fashion Industry

Abstract

In this paper an ideal type of creative process inside Fashion Industry is analyzed: the “travail en atelier”, a way of organizing the design of new fashion goods. The “travail en atelier” structures the collection process into a collective work, using an “intensive technology”, it “craft administrates” and regulates the work via the authority of the fashion designer (representing the unity of direction of the process), via deadlines and via intermediary objects. Significant relationships of the process pass through intermediary objects connecting different professionals as designers, pattern makers, etc. The data are taken from semi-­‐structured interviews collected through a “Strategic Analysis” sociological inquiry and participant observation in French and Italian Fashion Houses. The “travail en atelier” is a concept apt to describe in organizational terms a way of working already sketched in the sociological literature about fashion, when talking about “diffuse creativity” as a main quality of the collection process. The concept allows to relate these peculiar qualities of the design process in fashion industry to some general problems of management of the innovation inside the organizations and to outline some guidelines for further comparisons with other creative industries as industrial design and architecture. Several hypothesis are advanced about the origin of this way of working : French haute couture is the natural candidate for it, but new developments in the study of fashion system have shown that Italian fashion system may have played a role in structuring the “travail en atelier”.