Fashion foundations are increasingly supporting and promoting cultural heritage, filling the gaps of public institutions. This also gives significant advantages to the fashion brands. The presentation will analyze these new forms of public-private partnership.

The recognition that fashion is an expression of personal and collective identity produces inherent tensions in the notion of fashion as part of cultural heritage. The presentation will propose cultural property law as a legal framework to conceptualize and perhaps even reconcile fashion's nature as the expression of both local and global, and personal and collective identities.

The presentation will focus on the phenomenon of cultural appropriation in the fashion system. Some relevant case studies will highlight the crucial value of reputation in fashion and how this affects the way in which disputes involving cultural appropriation are dealt with.

Conflicts in the fashion world have peculiar features that promote their solution out of court. The presentation will explore the different ways and methods in which these disputes are solved in the general framework of ADR.

The presentation will deal with the concepts and meanings of openness and transparency referred to fashion museums and archives (both private and public) and how they adapt to technological developments.