What We Can Learn by Tracking the Movements of Fashion Designers

Industries of all kinds – those that make clothing or cars or semi-conductors or software – have long clustered together, whether in the same neighborhood or a specific city. And the benefits of this kind of agglomeration are thought to be many. Similar companies located near each other can share the same production resources, producing economies of scale. Competing workers can share adjacent bar stools, producing new ideas and faster innovation. Companies can feed from the same talent pool, snagging workers from each other.

"We go on and on about how important economic clusters are, whether in fashion or on Wall Street, and we talk about, 'oh proximity is important, density is important,'" says Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, an associate professor at USC's Sol Price School of Public Policy. "But what do we mean by that?"