Abstract

There is increasingly agreement that tourism can fruitfully stand as a complementary sector to Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs). In particular, in this paper we will analyse the way in which «cultural heritage and fashion», «place» and «tourism» are defined in the digital communication of 23 fashion museums and foundations open to the public in Italy. Our aim is to investigate one of the most problematic aspects that literature has highlighted, namely the fact that Italian cultural heritage as connected to CCIs is fragile from the point of view of management efficiency, demand enlargement, and cross-fertilisation with cultural tourism. As a consequence, it often fails to increase the positive socio-economic impact that CCIs might provide to the local economies and their development. The study presented has been conducted through text-mining algorithms that have helped in highlighting the type of integration between «cultural heritage and fashion», «place» and «tourism». The meanings emerged in the official communication of fashion museums and foundations pinpoint for a lack of awareness for the complexity that the relationship between these three domains entail.