The current research explores whether the foreign professional experiences of influential executives predicts firm-level creative output. We introduce a new theoretical model-the Foreign Experience Model of Creative Innovations-to explain how three dimensions of foreign experiences-breadth, depth, and cultural distance-predict an organization's creative innovations (i.e., the extent to which final, implemented products are novel and useful from the standpoint of external audiences). We examined 11 years (21 seasons) of fashion collections of the world's top fashion houses and found that the foreign professional experiences of creative directors predicted the creativity ratings of their collections. The results revealed individual curvilinear effects for all three dimensions of foreign professional experiences: moderate levels of breadth and cultural distance were associated with the highest levels of creative innovations, whereas depth showed a decreasing positive effect that never turned negative. A post-hoc analysis revealed a significant three-way interaction showing that depth is the most critical dimension for achieving creative innovations, with breadth and cultural distance important at low but not high levels of depth. Our results show how and why leaders' foreign professional experiences can be a critical catalyst for creativity and innovation in their organizations.

We examine the impact of key personnel’s loss to competition on their former employers’ creative performance. Using archival data on the career histories of designers and the creative performance of their fashion houses between 2000 and 2010, we find that a house’s outward centrality in the network of personnel mobility—resulting from personnel departures—has an inverted U-shaped relationship with the house’s creative performance. This relationship is moderated by the house’s inward centrality in a network of personnel mobility stemming from hiring competitors’ employees, the tenure of its creative directors, the accomplishments of these directors, and the house’s status. Our results suggest that organizations can enhance their creativity by relying on ideas obtained through relationships with their former employees long after these employees left to work for the competition. However, this effect is contingent upon characteristics of the organization that may be associated with its capacity to absorb these ideas and its ability to signal legitimacy of the resulting output to the external audiences.

Faced with high uncertainty, how do producers in the cultural economy make creative decisions? We present a case study of the fashion modeling industry. Using participant observation, interviews and network analysis of the Spring/Summer 2007 Fashion Week collections, we explain how producers select models for fashion shows. While fashion producers conceive of their selection of models as a matter of "taste," or personal preference, we find that their decisions are shaped by information sharing mechanisms in social networks, principally through a mechanism known as "optioning," which enables producers to know each others' preferences and to align themselves with similar status actors. For cultural producers, choices are a matter of strategic status considerations, even as they are expressed as a matter of personal taste.

In this article, we synthesize and analyze sociological understanding of fashion, with the main part of the review devoted to classical and recent sociological work. To further the development of this largely interdisciplinary field, we also highlight the key points of research in other disciplines. We define fashion as an unplanned process of recurrent change against a backdrop of order in the public realm. We clarify this definition after tracing fashion's origins and history. As a social phenomenon, fashion has been culturally and economically significant since the dawn of Modernity and has increased in importance with the emergence of mass markets, in terms of both production and consumption. Most research on this topic is concerned with dress, but we argue that there are no domain restrictions that should constrain fashion theories. We identify venues around which sociologists could develop further research in this field.

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