Analysis of the Prato district: specialization, crisis, and transformations

The work was edited by Tommaso Ferraresi and Leonardo Ghezzi.

In recent months, Prato has returned to the center of public discourse on fashion, often through an emergency lens: orders slowing down, margins shrinking, companies struggling to plan beyond the season. The media, trade associations, and local players all agree that this is not just a cyclical crisis, but a structural one: it affects demand, supply chain times, energy and financial costs, international competition, and even labor tensions and economic legality. In this scenario, the widespread impression is that of a production system that continues to produce—and in some segments to do so with unparalleled responsiveness—but that it does so in conditions that are more fragile, fragmented, and polarized than in the past.

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