BEYOND THE RUNWAYS: DEVELOPING FASHION AS A TOURISM PRODUCT IN BRAZIL THROUGH MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES, EXPERIENCE, AND DESTINATION POSITIONING
Tourism. Fashion. Tourism product. Symbolic consumption.
The argument put forward in this study is that fashion in Brazil is an underutilized tourism product because it is viewed exclusively as a commercial enterprise. However, understanding it in symbolic and marketing terms—and as a cultural experience—reveals it to be a means capable of reaffirming tourism as an expression of desire, while also presenting itself as a latent attraction. The interconnection between tourism and fashion stimulates the search for experiences imbued with creativity, innovation, consumption, culture, and identity, as well as the need for joint action among the government, the market, the community, and tourists. In this sense, the objective of this study is to investigate fashion as a tourism product in Brazil based on destination development and positioning strategies utilized in their symbolic, marketing, and promotional dimensions. Regarding methodological characteristics, this research is exploratory and descriptive in nature, employing a qualitative approach grounded in the Theory of Symbolic Consumption (Bourdieu, 2006; 2009) and Complexity Theory (Morin, 2002). The sample will include public tourism managers, fashion designers, local producers, and representatives of organizations in the tourism trade and the textile/apparel sector in fashion production hubs across Brazil. Data collection will be conducted through bibliographic and documentary research, as well as semi-structured interviews. The bibliographic research will include a review of the literature on tourism and fashion, while the documentary research will be used to catalog institutional materials for the creation of an iconographic corpus. For the analysis of textual data, the software programs VOSviewer and IRaMuTeQ will be used, along with content analysis (Bardin, 2016), while semiotic analysis (Mello, 2019) will be applied to visual data related to fashion promotion in Brazil.