Two different tales of fashion media industry development in Mainland China and Hong Kong

Abstract

Abstract 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.