Explaining the Popularity of Cultural Elements: Networks, Culture, and the Structural Embeddedness of High Fashion Trends

When organizations strategically adopt cultural elements—such as a name, a color, or a style—to create their products, they make crucial choices that position them in markets vis-à-vis competitors, audiences, and other stakeholders. However, although it is well understood how one specific cultural element gets adopted by actors and diffuses, it is not yet clear how elements fare when considered within an industry choice-set of elements. Their popularity depends on idiosyncratic features (such as the category they belong to), or on structural factors such as their embeddedness (through connections to producers, audiences, or even other cultural elements). We develop an integrated perspective on the popularity of cultural elements in markets. We use a network perspective to show that the popularity of elements is fostered by being structurally embedded among many unconnected elements, in addition to not being affiliated to actors widely exposed in the media. We develop our study by using a unique data set of fashion stylistic elements in the global high-end fashion industry from 1998 to 2010.