The Emergence of Los Angeles as a Fashion Hub

Abstract

The US fashion industry is a useful lens through which to view the transformation of the country’s urban economic systems. Initially an industrial vanguard, fashion has evolved into a more design-oriented sector and a central part of the ‘cognitive-cultural economy’. Fashion is also a clear demonstration of place-specific comparative advantage and specialisation, intensely linked to ‘place in product’. The paper traces the fashion industry’s evolution from 1986 to 2007, focusing on New York and Los Angeles. The composition of the industry in each locale demonstrates each city’s comparative advantage and these advantages may be key determinants of their future fortunes. Using geographical information systems (GIS), fashion’s current spatial form is studied. Within the industry’s sub-sectors, spatial patterns and similar geographical clustering emerge. The industry may be facing somewhat of a reconfiguring of its economic geography; however, the fashion industry’s spatial-structural patterns persist within each city. We also find that fashion, like high technology and Hollywood, tends to produce regional network agglomerations, strong headquarter cities and co-location of particular sectors. Our findings are consistent with the larger theoretical and empirical observations on the post-industrial landscape.