1920年代の銘仙市場の拡大と流行伝達の仕組み

抄録

This paper examines the fashion business by focusing on the entrepreneurship of a Japanese wholesales merchant Inanishi & Co. in the 1920s in order to demonstrate the dynamism of the creation of fashion. Inanishi played a central role in making season colors and designs using the silk textile “Meisen,” which was one of the first leading commodities accepted by the masses in Japan.
In the late 1910s department stores in Japan enjoyed increased bargaining power in the consumer market. Against the backdrop of this power they decreased the volume of trade with wholesalers while starting to deal directly with the silk textile producers. The reason for this shift was to increase the number of sales promotions and shift their strategy to fit the mass market. For that purpose they made use of Meisen.
Inanishi was deeply concerned about their weakening power as a middleman and wanted to find a place for themselves in business relations with department stores. As the Meisen market expanded from the late 1910s, Inanishi noticed that achieving both product differentiation and mass production had become the new business challenge for the textile industry in the 1920s.
Inanishi designed a unique fashion creation system by utilizing both silk textile producers and department stores. Inanishi tried to survive by collecting fashion information from major department stores, and then spreading it to silk textile producers by publishing the monthly magazine “Sensyoku-no-Ryuko” and organizing a textile fair twice a year. By getting information from these two channels, producers may also have been attempting to decrease the uncertainty in the distribution process. As a result of complicated interaction between the department stores, the wholesalers and the silk textile producers, the fashion creation and diffusion system was constructed.