Clothing Cultures - Volume 2, Issue 3, 2015

Popular media celebrates the iconic Hong Kong dress – the cheongsam; yet, its existence is threatened as Hong Kong’s population of master tailors is rapidly dwindling. Hong Kong’s fashion identity is closely intertwined with the changing patterns of the global fashion industry. Hong Kong once buzzed with factories supplying the world’s wardrobes, but recent developments resulted in the loss of its manufacturing base, and as fashions changed the once ubiquitous cheongsam was consigned to fashion history. With the recent focus on heritage and slow fashion, making has become a key component in fashion marketing. Companies in the United Kingdom and United States are reviving old brands and launching new ones, using abandoned industrial equipment and reinvigorating local economies. This increased focus on country of origin, artisanship and sustainability also offers opportunities for Hong Kong to reposition itself, and this article surveys the contemporary fashion landscape in order to inform a debate on cultural heritage in fashion and its marketing.

By revisiting relevant literature and case studies, this article first outlines Euro-American fashion media’s influence on and the development of the Chinese fashion media industry. The participant field research created chances for interviews with sixteen Chinese fashion media insiders from 2011 to 2013. Apparently, Hong Kong journalists take a pessimistic view of the local fashion industry. Mainland fashion media personnel, by contrast, take an optimistic view of the industry’s potential in China. The interview data suggest that such contradictory visions may arise from differing political changes and cultural biases. It is argued that the fashion media industry has never reached a cultural renaissance in either Hong Kong or China proper, despite their respective economic boom over the past decades. Fashion was taboo, a sign of bourgeois taste, and considered morally inferior in the communist ideology. Against this backdrop, colonial Hong Kong, where fashion was adopted to manifest a modern Chinese identity, did not share this ideological change. With the arrival of 1997, the situation changed under the fast-growing Chinese economy and information flow. The shifting fashion industries and cultural politics in the two regions construct new relations between the post-socialist country and its postcolonial city.

To many of us, artists are cool and clever; they defy and challenge societal expectations, and represent freedoms that most can only dream of. Visual artists have long exerted influence on the fashion world, as commentators, partners and muses. On a purely creative level, the relationship between artists and fashion designers is logical. Recently, the alliances between art and fashion appear to have extended further into other areas of the industry – namely, retail and marketing. While mainstream brands occasionally venture into artist partnerships (Damien Hirst and Levi’s, 2008), it is primarily luxury retailers that have explored such alliances – Louis Vuitton, Hermès and Prada, most notably. For these companies, outcomes have grown to more than simple product development. The alignments have morphed into all-of-brand, cross-platform, global marketing strategies. This article explores the next wave of fashion/art liaisons, notably the increasing presence of exhibition galleries in luxury brand flagship stores, specifically Louis Vuitton, and attempts to contextualize this development from the art, museum and fashion perspectives.

In this article I contend that the gathering momentum of the Chinese fashion industry has reached an important tipping point. Typically this impetus has been constrained by two key forces that have shaped the perception of Chinese development. Chinese culture and Chinese politics have long held an almost insurmountable presence over many aspects of daily life, including cultural and creative expression; however, this is changing rapidly, in part because of China’s global ascendency as an economically powerful nation, but more importantly because of borderless exchanges of aesthetic information due to globalization and the integration of digital and social media in daily life. This new perspective means that Chinese fashion designers must increasingly be born global, with a focus on creating innovative and agile business models as well as distinct aesthetic design signatures that resonate no longer with a country-specific consciousness but invoke a sophisticated world-view.

In The Body and Society, Turner indicates that ‘There is an obvious and prominent fact about human beings; they have bodies and they are bodies’. Human bodies are simultaneously dressed bodies. In M. Butterfly, Song’s dressed body lures/ seduces Gallimard into his calculated scheme, whereas his undressed body triggers the collapse of Gallimard’s fantasy and foregrounds the undermining subversion. Thus, Song’s un/dressed body plays a vital role and deserves further investigation. By addressing the un/dressed body it not only delves into the mechanism of deconstruction but also focalizes the inextricable connection between body and self-identity. The focus on the dressed and undressed body can exemplify how the representation of self through fashion can be carefully calculated to make and then break a person. Thus, this article seeks to address the un/dressed body to redress the core issues, such as power relation, sexuality and sexual orientation, dramatized in Hwang’s M. Butterfly in order to show the seminal relation between the body and shaping of identity. Moreover, it goes beyond to re-examine and challenge the dress/ body/self as a totality by arguing how both Song and Gallimard become fashioned victims through the experience of the sublime in the economy established by the bodily scheme.

Tchotchke: Mass-Produced Sentimental Objects in Contemp orary Art, Gund Gallery, Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, 16 January–31 May 2015

Women Fashion Power: Not a Multiple Choice, Design Museum, London, UK , 29 October 2014–26 Ap ril 2015

Sustainable Fashion: Past, Present, and Future, Jennifer Farley Gordon and Colleen Hill (2015) London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney: Bloomsbury, 237 pp., ISBN h/bk: 978-0-8578-5184-0, p/bk: 978-08578-5185-7

Shoes: An Illustrated History, Rebecc a Sh awcross (2014) Bloomsbury: London, 256 pp., ISBN: 9781472531001, h/bk, $40.00

Cultural Threads: Transnational Textiles Today, Jessica Hemmings (2015) London, UK: Bloomsbury, 248 pp., ISBN: 9781472530936, p/bk, $47.45

Luxury: Fashion, Lifestyle and Excess , Patrizia Calefato (2014) London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney: Bloomsbury, 116 pp., ISBN: 9780857853318, p/bk, £16.19; h/bk, £49.50

The Visible Self: Global Persp ectives on Dress , Culture, and Society, Joanne B. Eich er and Sandra Lee Evenson (2015) New York and London: Fairchild Books, 406 pp., ISBN: 97816099018702, p/bk, $115.00

Who’s Who in Fashion, Price Allford, Holly and Stegemeyer, Anne (2014) 6th ed. London and New York: Fairchild Books, An Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc., 476 pp., ISBN: 9781609019693, $93.99

Fashion and Museums : Theory and Practice, Marie Riegels Melch ior and Birgitta Svensson (eds) (2014) London: Bloomsbury Academic, 210 pp., ISBN: 9781472567932, p/bk, $24.50–$29.85