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Empire style fashion, Greek-Roman style robe with bare shoulder and chest and short sleeved with long gloves which created a slim silhouette, was worn even in winter season in Europe, where average temperature is 0-5°C. Most women suffered with catching cold and thousands caught flu and tuberculosis of the lungs, called muslin disease. The purpose of this paper is to find out clothing insulation of the robe by measuring the thermal resistance and to guess how cold they felt in this robe in winter time.

The authors performed the investigation on original robe shape with based on historical evidence and data, such as drawings, sketches, pattern books and sewing books, and reproduced a representative robe costume and tested its thermal insulation. The fabrics of robe were thin wool, silk and cotton following the literature evidence and preserved costume. Thermal insulation of the robes was measured using thermal manikin with the test method ISO 15831. The authors analyzed the thermal insulation of reconstructed robes with an inner cotton breech as for daily use and tested them wrapped with cashmere shawl on manikin shoulder as for severe cold weather.

The dress robes had the range of 0.61-0.67 clo regardless of the type of fabric materials, and 0.80-0.81 clo with the cashmere shawl. These values were not enough for women to keep body temperature or comfort in winter time.

This study combined fashion historic theory for costume reproduction with clothing science and technology for thermal insulation. Combination of costume history, construction technology and measurement engineering is the ingenious idea, and the combination of historical and scientific research evidences interdisciplinary originality.

Women in Western Europe wore empire style robes which were made with a light and thin fabric revealing their body. To stress the silhouette of their body, they applied oil to it or sprayed water on the robe so that it would cling to the body, and most women suffered from muslin disease, meaning flu and tuberculosis of the lungs in winter season. The purpose of this paper is to examine the thermal insulation of the robe with spencer jacket in dry and wet environment through thermal manikin experiments.

Three kinds of spencer jacket were made based on historical evidence and data, and experimental work for thermal insulation was conducted using a thermal manikin. The study measured the total thermal resistance of dress-jacket set: weight of the clothing before and after wetting, thermal insulation of the spencer jackets and set of clothing in dry and wet conditions, electric power consumption of the set of clothing in the wet condition and temperature inside the clothing and surface temperature of the wet set of clothing.

The thermal insulation of the robe with spencer jacket in the wet condition was in the range of 0.135-0.144 clo, which was about 80 percent lower than the range of values of 0.73-0.79 clo measured in the dry condition. This means that women felt uncomfortable in wetting condition or raining environment even when wearing the robe with a spencer jacket. Thermal insulation of clothing was dependent to the air gap under garment, clothing layers, ventilation through fabric and body part.

In this study, the thermal insulation of an empire style robe with spencer jacket in wet condition was measured using a dry thermal manikin, not with the sweating manikin. The authors measure the electric power consumption according to drying time of the clothing set at the body parts. In order to study the effect of different materials and clothing wetting, comparison experiments were conducted in dry and wet conditions using the rinse cycle of washing machine.

Managers as Actors Those of us who manage are playing on an organisational stage every day. We enter early every morning to take up our roles, whether it is as chief executive, marketing manager, personnel adviser, production executive or any of the numerous other roles that have to be performed if work is to be done effectively.

Shortly before the Second World War, a woman who had never accepted her orphan status, Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel, nicknamed ‘Little Coco’ by her father and known as ‘Coco’ to her relatives, became the first women in history to build a world-class industrial empire. By 1935, Coco, a fashion designer and industry captain, was employing more than 4,000 workers and had sold more than 28,000 dresses, tailored jackets and women's suits. Born into a poor family and raised in an orphanage, she enjoyed an intense social life in Paris in the 1920s, rubbing shoulders with artists, creators and the rising stars of her time.

Thanks to her entrepreneurial skills, she was able to innovate in her methods and in her trendsetting approach to fashion design and promotion. Coco Chanel was committed and creative, had the soul of an entrepreneur and went on to become a world leader in a brand new sector combining fashion, accessories and perfumes that she would help shape. By the end of her life, she had redefined French elegance and revolutionized the way people dressed.

In the last few years, signs of material excess by organizational and political leaders have often evoked public outcry. The paper aims to argue that there is insight to be gleaned from drawing together strands from the leadership literature with the literatures on moral economy and conspicuous consumption. The premise is that views of leader conspicuous consumption are shaped by their moral economy, the interplay between moral attitudes and economic activities. The paper seeks to juxtapose tales of Cleopatra and Antony's display of wealth with current media accounts to contribute to the leadership literature on ethics, specifically its intersection with power and narrative representation.

The paper adopts an analytic approach, with an international orientation and an interdisciplinary perspective. It acknowledges the role of narrative representation in shaping leadership and the psychological ambivalence with which societies approach their leaders' practices, focus here on desire-disdain and discipline-decadence. Cleopatra and Antony's conspicuous consumption generated a legacy of condemnation for millennia. Drawing from the retellings of their story, four moralizing representations – by Plutarch, Shakespeare, Sarah Fielding and Hollywood – are analyzed and juxtaposed with current media accounts. Altogether, the paper combines the interest in leadership across history with moralizing perspectives on the display of wealth by leaders.

The intersection of the literatures on leadership, moral economy and conspicuous consumption draws together several dynamics of relevance to leadership. First, evaluations of the display of wealth on the part of a leader are contextual: they change across time and place. Second, interpretations of conspicuous consumption involve aesthetic judgment and so sit at the nexus of morality and taste. Third, following tragedies, tales of leader conspicuous consumption offer critics another knife to dig into the fallen tragic hero. Fourth, views of conspicuous consumption are gendered. Last, conspicuous consumption by leaders attracts condemnation through support for social responsibility and sustainability.

The paper establishes a novel articulation between the literatures on leadership, moral economy and conspicuous consumption.

China represents around 20% of the world's population, and her economy is still performing well under economic crisis. Historical events have shaped different parts of China with different economic developments and cultural encounters. The most prominent difference is between Hong Kong and the Mainland. This chapter would like to examine the development and issues of fashion retailing in China. For better understanding, this chapter starts with a brief discussion on apparel industry development and fashion culture in Hong Kong and the Mainland, follows by historical development and then presents systems of fashion retailing in both Hong Kong and the Mainland. Desktop research and exploratory research techniques were employed. Stores of international fashion luxury brands in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing were visited. Comparison of branding issues, particularly for luxury market in Hong Kong and the Mainland are discussed, so are future directions of fashion retailing in these places.

Officially, of course, the world is now post-imperial. The Q’ing and Ottoman empires fell on the eve of World War I, and the last Leviathans of Europe's imperial past, the Austro-Hungarian and Tsarist empires, lumbered into the grave soon after. Tocsins of liberation were sounded on all sides, in the name of democracy (Wilson) and socialism (Lenin). Later attempts to remake and proclaim empires – above all, Hitler's annunciation of a “Third Reich” – now seem surreal, aberrant, and dystopian. The Soviet Union, the heir to the Tsarist empire, found it prudent to call itself a “federation of socialist republics.” Mao's China followed suit. Now, only a truly perverse, contrarian regime would fail to deploy the rhetoric of democracy.

This is the first of two papers in which the design theories underlining the work of contemporary European and Japanese fashion designers are explored. In this paper, four general, major influential factors are discussed; specifically, the historical factor, the aesthetic factor, the cultural factor and the marketing factor. In order to investigate the underlying design theories of European fashion designers, two European fashion designers with international reputations are discussed, namely, Christian Lacroix and Karl Lagerfeld. These design theories are contrasted with those of two Japanese designers, Issey Miyake and Rei Kawakubo. The images of their customers, sources of inspiration, and possible underlying design theories are analysed with reference to their contemporary work.

This paper aims to show the representation of entrepreneurship in movies (blockbusters) as a source of influence on popular representations.

The author uses semiotics to contrast dominant representations in popular movies about Chanel with the reality of her professional life as can be found in archives about the fashion world and couture workers.

The changes in the account of the entrepreneur's success may disregard important elements such as the importance of collective work and the role of social history on entrepreneurial ventures.

Is entrepreneurship really a source of information in the general representations of what it is to be an entrepreneur and what explains the success and failure of entrepreneurial venture when we observe that popular representations are so far away from what research can describe and interpret using primary data?

By displaying the discrepancy between entrepreneurship theory and popular representations, especially in the movies, one may be able to grasp some of the reasons why entrepreneurship needs more in-depth analysis of actors' representations in relation to the image of popular entrepreneurs in the public eye.

This purpose of this paper is to investigate the policies and consequences of state‐directed consumerism in Iran during the reign of Shah Abbas I (1587–1629) of the Safavid dynasty.

The research is based upon several secondary literatures, especially Middle Eastern studies and art history, as well as primary source materials in the form of architecture, its decorative elements, and other works. The visual content and consumption themes of a selected tile painting are described and analyzed.

The Shah strengthened the state by building infrastructure, encouraging international trade, and creating a robust silk industry where he controlled production and marketing. He utilized his city and its architecture as a means of communication to impress his subjects and foreign visitors and to increase domestic demand for silk textiles. These promotional efforts led to a surge in spending, which occurred about the same time as similar booms in England and France. Economic problems and rising Islamism dampened this episode of Persian consumerism in the latter part of the seventeenth century.

The set of visual data sources is small and limited to works from just one city, Isfahan.

The research fills gaps in the marketing and consumption history literatures which have not as yet fully considered the use of state resources to promote domestic consumption, consumer marketing in the Middle East, and the promotional roles played by architecture and its decorative elements.