Shanghai Fashion Week: A Socially Engaging Mass Entertainment with a Professional Infrastructure

Abstract

This paper uses a cultural event in the global fashion ecosystem that has been largely ignored, the fashion week, as an entry point to elaborate on the explicit cultural characteristics of Shanghai Fashion Week (SHFW) alongside the significant rise and construction of the Chinese design and fashion cultural system in the past five years. Under the structural interconnectedness between art and capitalism in the global fashion industry, together with the drive of the socialist ideology of the public ownership of the means of production in China, SHFW is now showing discrete cultural characteristics, absorbing as much knowledge as it can from the legitimate fashion week system and incorporating this in the domestic industry context. This paper also argues that SHFW has built up an interactive and dynamic infrastructure or ecosystem within the domestic fashion culture, enhancing its socialist characteristics with the intertwining of a core professional fashion week and a mass carnival event. Its deep engagement with both the general public and professional insiders is a unique cultural characteristic that distinguishes it from Paris Fashion Week and London Fashion Week.