Fashion and Institutions: The AIIA and the Ready-to-Wear Industry in Italy (1945–1975)

The Italian Clothing Industry Association (AIIA) was the first employers’ association founded to protect the interests of the nascent Italian ready-to-wear industry. According to the literature on the subject, there were three factors that allowed business interest associations (BIAs) to operate effectively at a meso-organizational level: their internal organizational structure, the activities of bureaucratic support of companies and lobbying in defense of entrepreneurs’ interests, as well as the ability to adapt to the more general context in which they worked. Based on a detailed empirical analysis, this article examines what the AIIA accomplished in each of these three areas. There are two objectives: (1) analyzing the circumstances that led the AIIA to fail in its purposes of representing the Italian ready-to-wear industry, and (2) investigating, in a typical creative industry, the hidden costs in terms of competitiveness of BIAs’ planning efforts and their consequences for the creation of an efficient and internationally competitive fashion system.