Italian Designers for Yucatan Industries. Designing Intercultural Knowledge Transfer for Fashion Design

Globally diffused but very locally specialized, the fashion industry represents great opportunities for territories and enterprises, while making them deal with a high level of complexity in managing common practices and differences. In such a complexity, designers become crucial figures with the role of experts that can imagine and investigate new meanings for products and processes through a deep exploration of multiple cultures, values, signs, traditions, customs, and their translation into innovative solutions. With these premises it is not uncommon for research in fashion design to become an intercultural experience that involves international designers together with a local reality. Here, the duty of designers that operate on a territory –different from the one where they come from– is to deeply understand its most specific aspects and the way-of-doing things, to value the product and the existing design methodologies while bringing innovation on the process. They act within the concept of cross-fertilization as the interchange between different cultures or different ways of thinking that is mutually productive and beneficial, but also in its more recent definition of a mutual exchange that generates new knowledge and innovation. The paper reports the activities, the methodologies and the results of an action-research made with the aim to foster this methodological cross-fertilization between designers’ know-how and the specific features of the local production for fashion enterprises in the specific Mexican territory of Yucatàn. The process of knowledge exchange applied the methodological framework previously elaborated by the authors and made of three main moments of comprehension, action, and consolidation.