Smart-Phones, Smart Shops. Innovating Fashion Retailing Through M-commerce.

While in a recent past both buying behaviors, and retailing and consumption spaces have been transformed first of all into e-tailing, which nowadays is the natural extension of the traditional systems of brick-and-mortar stores and showrooms, nowadays new opportunities offered by the development of Web 2.0 and social media, and new interactions characterizing online communities have been leading a continuing innovation process of the consumption system. The interactive and collaborative experience of consumers on increasingly more sophisticated social platforms is triggering significant processes of production of value through appropriation and recontextualization dynamics which enable an active and shared participation of consumers into their own consumption experience. The development of smartphones functions and apps not only represents a retailing opportunity for fashion brands but it also creates the conditions for new consumption contexts where spatial and temporal variables are annulled to favoring diffused and shared buying experiences. The paper will present best practices of M-commerce within the Fashion System and will offer a reading of new values for experiential shopping enabled through m-tailing, focusing on the role of design in building distribution scenarios, virtual sets and services finally looking for the integration with new concepts of brick-and-mortar stores.