Born Global: Chinese Fashion designers and the Digital Response

Abstract

In this article I contend that by emphasising the economic flows of fashion instead of the aesthetic field, an alternate view of a fashion system emerges that focusses on the increasing importance of Chinese fashion design to the domestic economy, while an intensifying presence on the global stage is re-creating China’s importance as a production powerhouse as well as a design force. The consumption of fashion is understood to be fundamentally ‘a cultural practice where clothes function as symbols that indicate social markers such as status, group allegiance, personality and fashionability.’1 Yet new applications of digital media have changed the field irrevocably and the concept of fashion is now made acutely manifest in the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s depiction of liquid modernity.2 In China new centres of fashion are emerging in sites of increased financial activity, which in turn contradicts the hegemonic supremacy of traditional European fashion capitals. In this context, digital media allows Chinese designers and consumers alike to respond quickly. Traditionally profits were repatriated to Europe, yet increasingly financial capital now flows in reverse to Asia for the benefit of Asian investors. In this way, China’s reputation as manufacturer to the world is being reshaped by a political mandate that underpins a new creative and financial impetus that challenges established models, offering China as a future powerhouse of global fashion design.