Fashion Design Companies. An Overview of Spanish and British Firms

The sector that includes fashion design companies can be considered a creative industry. In this paper we are interested in finding where these companies are located and their relationship with industrial clusters. Industrial and firm location has been a subject of great importance in economics since the seminal work of Alfred Marshall (Principles of political economy. Macmillan, 1890; Principles of economics: An introductory volume. Macmillan, 1920) who, through observation, devoted himself to analysing why companies are co-located in particular places. In addition, in recent decades there has been an increase in the number of empirical studies into the driving forces behind the location decisions of industrial firms (Arauzo-Carod et al., Journal of Regional Science, 50:685–711, 2010). Another burning issue is the study of the creative industries and their location. The term “creative industries” is still a recent category in political, academic, and industrial discourse (Cunningham, Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy, 102:54–65, 2002), but a major debate is emerging about the role of creativity and culture as determinants of local economic development (Power and Scott, Cultural industries and the production of culture. Routledge, 2004; Ginsburgh and Throsby, Handbook on the economics of art and culture. Elsevier, 2006). In this work we approach these issues from a perspective of agglomeration economies, applying a comparative analysis to the case of Spain and the United Kingdom.