"Decoding Heritage & Luxury Branding for Premium Fashion Brands: From Starting a Business to Building an Empire"

This thesis explores the topic of heritage and luxury branding in the fashion industry and identifies the codes that are used by fashion brands to communicate their vision and values, attract the right type of audience and develop business. The research combines data from 109 academic articles, 18 published books, 4 business industry reports, more than 80 podcast episodes and 8 exclusive interviews with the founders of the creative agencies specializing in luxury and heritage brands. The thesis consists of four chapters, covering the theoretical foundations, existing conceptual models, historiographic overview of the subject and the business perspective. As a result, the research provides an extensive overview of the existing theories related to heritage and luxury branding, demarcates the codes used in heritage and luxury spheres, offers an integrated model of heritage and luxury branding codes based on the previous academic findings and analyzes examples from field trips completed by the author. Ultimately, this thesis can be considered as a guide to the topic of heritage and luxury branding and can be helpful for both researchers and practitioners as it aims to solve business problems through academic perspective and shows the codes that can be used by emerging premium fashion brands to elevate their brand image and position themselves among the established heritage and luxury brands.