Global Fashion Brands

Fashion branding is more than just advertising. It helps to encourage the purchase and repurchase of consumer goods from the same company. While historically fashion branding has primarily focused on consumption and purchasing decisions, recent scholarship suggests that branding is a process that needs to be analysed from a style, luxury and historical pop cultural view using critical, ethnographic, individualistic or interpretive methods.

In this collection, the contributors explore the meaning behind fashion branding in the context of the contested power relations underpinning the production, marketing and consumption of style and fashion as part of our global culture. 

Dr Joseph H. Hancock, II is a full tenured professor at Drexel University, where he has taught in the Department of Design for over twenty years. He has worked in management, branding, merchandising and leadership for landmark companies, including The Gap, The Limited Corporation and Target Corporation. He is the principal editor for the journal Fashion, Style & Popular Culture (Intellect Books). He has written and edited over twelve books, including Bloomsbury Press publications such as Fashion Brand Stories, Marketing Fashion, and his latest book, to be published in October 2026, Fashion Forecasting.  Dr Hancock has been featured on the national networks ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS, as well as publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Fashion Talk and Women’s Wear Daily. He is the world’s leading authority on cargo pants and conducts most of his work using a storytelling framework.

Dr Gjoko Muratovski is an award-winning designer and innovation consultant working with a wide range of universities, Fortune 500 companies and various governments from around the world. He has been a member of several prominent thought-leadership organizations, including the European Commission, Forbes Councils, Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies, Oxford Digital Leaders Network, Yale Higher Education Leadership Summit and the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows Program. During his tenure in the United States as the inaugural Ullman Endowed Chair and director of the Ullman School of Design, Dr Muratovski collaborated closely with the late Myron Ullman, former group managing director of LVMH, CEO of LVMH USA and chairman of De Beers. He currently serves as the chief innovation officer at Icona Design Group, an Italian automotive design consultancy with a portfolio that includes clients such as Lamborghini, Alfa Romeo and Maserati.

Contact: Icona Design Group HQ, Strada della Manta 22, 10137 Turin, Italy.

Veronica Manlow is a professor in the Management, Marketing and Entrepreneurship Department in Brooklyn College’s Koppelman School of Business. She and Shaun Borstrock are editors of In Pursuit of Luxury’s Luxury Studies journal and are organizers of the International In Pursuit of Luxury Conference. She is the academic director of the Innovation + Entrepreneurship Lab at Brooklyn College where she is working with a variety of community and City University of New York (CUNY) partners. Along with Shaun Borstrock, Mark Bloomfield and Silvio Carta, she is the author of Crafting Luxury: Craftsmanship, Manufacture, Technology and the Retail Environment (Intellect, 2022). She is editor, along with fellow CUNY colleagues Eugenia Paulicelli and Elizabeth Wissinger, of The Routledge Companion to Fashion Studies (Routledge, 2021). Her current research investigates luxury labour performed by artisans in a variety of settings ranging from independent workshops to the factory floors of large conglomerates. She is also conducting research on luxury salespersons, their career trajectories, strategies they employ and the challenges they face. She was a guest editor of a Special Issue on ‘Luxury Production’ in the Journal of Design, Business & Society published in October 2018. Her Ph.D. is in sociology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Contact: Brooklyn College, 2900 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11210, USA.

Anne Peirson-Smith, Ph.D. is professor of fashion, School of Design, Northumbria University. She teaches and researches fashion marketing and sustainable fashion management and communication, with an industry background in branding and public relations. Anne’s research interests cover sustainable fashion management, marketing and branding; fashion marketing and public relations. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on marketing sustainable fashion and is associate editor of the Journal of Fashion, Style and Popular Culture (Intellect Books) and The Journal of Global Fashion Marketing. She co-authored Public Relations in Asia Pacific: Communicating Effectively Across Cultures (John Wiley, 2010); Global Fashion Brands: Style, Luxury & History (Intellect Books, 2014), Transglobal Fashion Narratives (Intellect Books: 2018) and The Fashion Business Reader (Berg/Fairchild Publishing 2019).