Brand of Products and Brand of Signs: How to Manage this Relationship in Fashion through Corporate Archives

In the fashion industry, brand has always been a competitive paramount. It has a real value as a strategic asset with which the company ensures a continuous competitive advantage over competitors and thus the perception of consumers. The construction of the brand recognition scenario represents the ideal place able to offer a view of all the tinged values inspiring the products/lines/categories proposed by a company. Within this scenario, not only the fashion retail system becomes the narrative context of the brand where designing spaces, displays and interactions we connect the distributive strategy to the product/stylistic strategy and the communication strategy; but also the corporate archives are progressively assuming this role and functions, offering peculiar solutions. The paper aims to explore the brand recognition strategy, mediated by design and related to the brand heritage, reading the corporate archive not only as a self commemorative intent and consolidation of the corporate image, but as active resource continuously integrated in the brand identity construction