Catwalking and Coolhunting

Abstract

At the advent of the New Economy of the 1990s, it often seemed as if the fashion industry had invaded the corporate world and the business media. Anxious firms fidgeted in dressing rooms behind the podium while the new specialists put the finishing touches to their outfits: brand-builders , image-designers , performance stylists , coolhunters and event-managers . Fashion shows became events, and gradually catwalking became established as a technology for choreographing the new. During the twentieth century, the Paris fashion system became firmly established, and everybody learned to wait for the autumn show. Coolhunting was a search technology, aimed at locating and organizing potential energies of newness. It started in the fashion quest for youth-culture trends, but, like catwalking, was transplanted into new fields of the economy, as, for example, in Tony Blair's 1997 campaign, Cool Britannia , and the idea of 'cool companies'.

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