Institutional pressures and isomorphic change in a high-fashion company: the case of Brioni Roman Style, 1945–89

Abstract Towards the end of 1945 a small tailoring shop named Brioni was opened in Rome to craft elegant garments for the international social elite. Although the original business idea proved successful, in the post-war period several endogenous and exogenous factors stimulated changes in managerial behaviour. The main object of this paper, which is informed by institutional sociology, is to elucidate the economic, coercive, mimetic and normative pressures that shaped key decisions of senior management in what became a high-fashion company. The most important isomorphic changes are portrayed as is the role played by two key actors in the company whose entrepreneurial activity stimulated institutionalisation processes inside the high-fashion environment. ‘In memory of Nazareno Fonticoli and Gaetano Savini:two pioneers of the high-fashion world’