Negotiation between Fashion Marketers and Journalists in Asia

Abstract

The article investigates how global fashion, beauty and luxury industries and Hong Kong print media business appropriate, negotiate and re-create the meaning of ‘fashion’ and its vicissitudes in and through the encoding and channel stages of marketing communication. The researcher applied interdisciplinary theories on marketing, media, culture and communication studies. As participant observation peculiar to Hong Kong/Asian fashion industry has not been done before, the research provides original, updated insights to the ecosystem of Asian fashion marketing and journalism, also the practicality of Western fashion theories in Asia. Primary research data were acquired through participant observation in the renowned Chinese fashion magazine MILK X Monthly (Summer 2011), and through which interviews with 16 out of the 55 invited veteran Asia-Pacific fashion marketers were facilitated. How the fashion marketers and editors prioritize and represent various fashion brands as ‘luxury/street fashion’ via the bricolage of textual and visual signs in the editorial production process under various internal and external influences were scrutinized. The results indicate that the consensual censorship of editorial content and pagination derived from economic factors prevails in MILK X Monthly; the pros of having the same fashion marketer handling both advertising and public relations; and the cons of fashion corporate guidelines to external communication and media relations building in Asia-pacific context. It also demonstrates the unobserved parts of fashion communication in local context upon which future research on other fashion media can be built.