Luxury fashion flagship hotels and cultural opportunism: The cases of Hotel Missoni Edinburgh and Maison Moschino

This article gives an insight into the phenomenon of brand extension into the hospitality business by Italian luxury fashion labels and conceptualizes it in terms of luxury fashion flagship hotels. Examining the cases of Hotel Missoni Edinburgh and Maison Moschino this article investigates the different ways in which they refer to Italy and its culture. It is argued that within Hotel Missoni Edinburgh and Maison Moschino there are strategies of cultural opportunism at play that are aimed at deploying their Italianicity as a means to strengthen their association with their parent brands and increase their prestige, but also to augment their offerings, maximizing the brand extension potential of those labels. Through a semiotic analysis, it is contended that Hotel Missoni Edinburgh and Maison Moschino capitalize not only on parent brands Missoni and Moschino but also on the positive connotations associated with Italy and its lifestyle, so that they can convey meanings that concern a broader sociocultural context and that revolve around issues of national identity. The hotels portray versions of Italianicity based on different traits but both contribute to the creation of a myth of Italy that involves the commodification of the Italian national identity and promotes its symbolic consumption

Brand extensions into the hospitality industry by luxury fashion labels and national identity: the cases of Hotel Missoni Edinburgh and Maison Moschino

The luxury fashion industry is closely intertwined with the phenomenon of brand extension. Italian labels have been particularly active in this regard, consistently associating their name with a variety of products and extending into sectors that are sometimes rather distant from the core where they operate, like in the hospitality business. This thesis gives an insight into this phenomenon that sees Italian luxury fashion labels expand their brands into hôtellerie by unpacking the relationship it holds with Italianicity. Examining the cases of two iconic Italian luxury fashion labels, Missoni and Moschino, and the hotels associated with their names, Hotel Missoni Edinburgh and Maison Moschino, this thesis investigates the different ways in which they refer to Italy and its culture. It is contended that within Hotel Missoni Edinburgh and Maison Moschino there are corporate strategies at play that are aimed at deploying their Italianicity as a means to increase their prestige and strengthen their association with the identity of their parent brands. Moreover, it is contended that the hotels employ strategies of cultural opportunism that see the deployment of characteristic traits associated with Italy and its culture as a way to augment their offerings, maximising the brand extension potential of those labels. However, while Missoni Hotel Edinburgh and Maison Moschino rely on traits of Italianicity for their identity, they also contribute to the construction of ideas of Italianicity

The challenges of luxury fashion flagship hotels: The case of Maison Moschino

In the last few years, many luxury fashion labels have ventured into the hospitality industry. Italian houses have been particularly active in capitalizing on their brand value by employing brand extension to create branded hotels where customers can experience a lifestyle that reflects the spirit of the label. After a phase of rapid expansion, however, this phenomenon appears to have slowed down. Taking the case of Maison Moschino, the first foray of fashion brand Moschino into the hospitality industry, this article explores the rationale for such brand extensions. In light of the failure of that venture, the opportunities and the risks involved in brand extension are examined

At home with the Missoni family: narratives of domesticity within Hotel Missoni Edinburgh

This article explores narratives of domesticity present within the spaces, services and discourses of Hotel Missoni Edinburgh. It is argued that the hotel employs a series of marketing strategies evoking the Missoni family as a simulacrum of hosts through references to their home, their domestic practices and their lifestyle to emphasize effects of domesticity with the aim to create a sense of closeness and intimacy between the brand and its consumers. The gastronomic offerings of Hotel Missoni Edinburgh also refer to ideas of family and domesticity, elements associated with Italy and its lifestyle but also characteristic traits of the Missoni brand identity. It is further discussed how Hotel Missoni Edinburgh also employs a series of spatial strategies aimed at augmenting the connotations of domesticity of the hotel to recreate the feel of the Missoni household, producing a sort of hybrid space, also in terms of privacy, that is coherent with the Missoni brand ethos and appealing to costumers

Cutoff-independent regularization of four-fermion interactions for color superconductivity

We implement a cutoff-independent regularization of four-fermion interactions to calculate the color-superconducting gap parameter in quark matter. The traditional cutoff regularization has difficulties for chemical potentials \mu of the order of the cutoff \Lambda, predicting in particular a vanishing gap at \mu \sim \Lambda. The proposed cutoff-independent regularization predicts a finite gap at high densities and indicates a smooth matching with the weak coupling QCD prediction for the gap at asymptotically high densities.Comment: 5 pages, 1 eps figure - Revised manuscript to match the published pape

A predictive formulation of the Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model

A novel strategy to handle divergences typical of perturbative calculations is implemented for the Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model and its phenomenological consequences investigated. The central idea of the method is to avoid the critical step involved in the regularization process, namely the explicit evaluation of divergent integrals. This goal is achieved by assuming a regularization distribution in an implicit way and making use, in intermediary steps, only of very general properties of such regularization. The finite parts are separated of the divergent ones and integrated free from effects of the regularization. The divergent parts are organized in terms of standard objects which are independent of the (arbitrary) momenta running in internal lines of loop graphs. Through the analysis of symmetry relations, a set of properties for the divergent objects are identified, which we denominate consistency relations, reducing the number of divergent objects to only a few ones. The calculational strategy eliminates unphysical dependencies of the arbitrary choices for the routing of internal momenta, leading to ambiguity-free, and symmetry-preserving physical amplitudes. We show that the imposition of scale properties for the basic divergent objects leads to a critical condition for the constituent quark mass such that the remaining arbitrariness is removed. The model become predictive in the sense that its phenomenological consequences do not depend on possible choices made in intermediary steps. Numerical results are obtained for physical quantities at the one-loop level for the pion and sigma masses and pion-quark and sigma-quark coupling constants.Comment: 38 pages, 1 figure, To appear in Phy.Rev.

Narratives of Italian craftsmanship and the luxury fashion industry: representations of Italianicity in discourses of production

In the last few years many luxury fashion labels like Gucci have emphasized, in their communication, the various types of craftsmanship involved in the creation of their pieces as a mean of providing history and additional value to their products. This article investigates this phenomenon with a specific focus on issues of national identity and ‘Italianicity’. First, the different strategies concerning representations of craftsmanship in discourses of production that are employed by Italian luxury fashion labels are examined. This phenomenon is investigated through a series of case studies with the aim of identifying situations of dialogue and contradiction between the strategies employed. Moreover, the article examines how both the celebration of Italian handmade craftsmanship in fashion and issues of technological developments are addressed in the discourses of production of luxury fashion goods. Also, the history of the Italian fashion system and its distinctive traits will be considered in this respect. However, narratives of Italian craftsmanship are not only present in the communication of Italian luxury fashion labels examined here. References to craftsmanship ‘made in Italy’ also features in the discourses of production employed by non-Italian luxury fashion brands like Marc Jacobs. In this respect, this article considers how Italian craftsmanship is strictly intertwined with connotations of quality, arguing that it can be productively employed by luxury fashion labels both to provide additional value to products and, more broadly, to enhance the reputation of their brands. Moreover, it is argued that luxury fashion labels do not merely capitalize on ideas of Italianicity that are already present but instead contribute, in an ongoing proces, to recreate them through narratives that emphasize certain values associated with them. In this sense, the Italian luxury fashion labels examined here also contribute to reinforce the positive image of their brands

Extension of the Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model at high densities and temperatures by using an implicit regularization scheme

Traditional cutoff regularization schemes of the Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model limit the applicability of the model to energy-momentum scales much below the value of the regularizing cutoff. In particular, the model cannot be used to study quark matter with Fermi momenta larger than the cutoff. In the present work an extension of the model to high temperatures and densities recently proposed by Casalbuoni, Gatto, Nardulli, and Ruggieri is used in connection with an implicit regularization scheme. This is done by making use of scaling relations of the divergent one-loop integrals that relate these integrals at different energy-momentum scales. Fixing the pion decay constant at the chiral symmetry breaking scale in the vacuum, the scaling relations predict a running coupling constant that decreases as the regularization scale increases, implementing in a schematic way the property of asymptotic freedom of quantum chromodynamics. If the regularization scale is allowed to increase with density and temperature, the coupling will decrease with density and temperature, extending in this way the applicability of the model to high densities and temperatures. These results are obtained without specifying an explicit regularization. As an illustration of the formalism, numerical results are obtained for the finite density and finite temperature quark condensate, and to the problem of color superconductivity at high quark densities and finite temperature.Comment: 7 pages, 5 eps figures - in version 3, substantial changes in text, results and conclusions unchanged. To be published in Phys. Rev.