Migrating Enterprise and Migrant Entrepreneurship: How Fashion and Migration Have Changed the Spatial Organisation of Clothing Supply to Consumers in the Netherlands

From the 1960s onwards the clothing industry in the Neth- erlands and elsewhere in the European Union, experienced a deep crisis. Numerous firms went bankrupt and workers lost their jobs. Imports from low wage countries started providing the bulk of retailers’ collections. However, in the 1980s a surprising development took place. In Amsterdam a substantial number of new small clothing firms mostly run by Turkish immigrants were established focusing on short-cycle production. During the 1990s most of these disappeared again. At the same time the import pattern changed to the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe. Stephan Raes shows that the large retailers have become the most powerful players in the sector, and he places the developments against the background of transformations in the political economy of the Netherlands and Turkey.

Stephan Raes is an economic anthropologist who currently works at the department of foreign economic relations of the Ministry of Economic Affairs in the Netherlands.