Sewing Connections between Artists’ Legacy and Fashion… A Matter of Tailor-Made Economics and Marketing

Abstract

Artists, fashion and foundations can connect in different ways. Operating and independent foundations tell biographies and legacies of artists. During their life and as for their legacy, artists can influence styles, frames, fashion being one constitutive way of life. Fashion corporations and foundations can be inspired by artists and artists can be supported by them. The aim of this article is to estimate how much accounting data of American artist-endowed foundations give evidence of their connections through art-keting with multiple stakeholders in order to support creativity, above all, fashion. Art-keting includes several and complex phenomena, from co-marketing to contaminations and hybridizations. It encompasses both relationship marketing and social media communication. The methodology includes the analysis of economic performance as for data in 990 Forms and a multiple regression analysis of 2016’s accounting main lines of a sample of the biggest US artists-endowed foundations. If artist-endowed foundations connect with fashion thanks to multiple projects, their assets grow thanks to art-keting.

Keywords:

• Artist-endowed foundation
• fashion
• economics
• marketing
• US

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The differences between fashion and art are underlined also by Fashion-history. In fact, Steele (2012) reported that fashion is an industry with a creative element, a commodity with a commercial nature. In contrast art is a field of high cultural production associated with a greater aesthetic realm (Steele 2012; Jelinek 2018).