The Chinese have the money, apparently. The constant lumping together of the continent of Asia, and country of China, into an easily digestible sound bite in order to convey prosperity and buying power. The problem is, is that this undermines genuine interstate and international cultural differences that should otherwise be acknowledged, learned and celebrated. This is exemplified by the fact that, alone in China, there are dozens of spoken dialects that more often than not aren't understood by each other.
When you fail to separate the pure economic analysis from the people who buy, and the people who don't buy, cultural phenomena that remain largely unexamined. Instead you get a two-dimensional flat-pack understanding of people. This manifests an unsubstantiated judgement of Asian consumers as irrational shopping addicts, and by extension a nation and continent of the fashionably victimised. It's a reductive process, and fashion, among other key cultural and economic forces, can do better.
In many ways this assumption is ironic. Insofar as the key demographic that is said to drive the industry is in fact the least thought about, or perhaps respected. From a "Western" understanding, to get a scope of the diversity of the Asian, or even East Asian people, we only have to look to popular culture. Men's clothing hasn't always been the accepted form of self expression in general western society, often for gendered contrivances surrounding self adornment and its supposed vanity. More and more, however, these gendered stereotypes are being upended.
Aggregators of men's fashion news like HYPEBEAST have paved the way for a widened and open appeal of menswear. Print publications such as YOHO, Popeye and BRUTUS have issue that focus to some more or lesser extent on men's fashion. And no examination of men's fashion for 21st century would be complete without mentioning fertile hotbeds of "WDYWT" (What did you wear today?) and "ID on the jacket?" posts, the internet forum. 4chan.com/fa/, Superfuture, fuk.co.uk, KanyeToThe, Reddit, and also the HYPEBEAST forums all fall in to this category when tackling the subject. You only need to scroll down the main boards to get a sense for a palpable, international East Asian presence.
Business of Fashion is one such platform that perpetuates this pan-Asian idea. Launching their "State of Fashion 2017" report earlier this year, some insights into the commodification of Asian markets are conceded by Vogue China editor-in-chief Angelica Chung. “You can’t really treat China as one whole thing. The North, South, East, West, Centre — they are all different. The climate is different, the lifestyle can be different, the language is often very different and what they are influenced by is different.” Cheung continues “Everything is changing; the world is changing; China is changing and in China, because it was complicated to start with, it’s even more difficult for people to catch what’s happening". This sentiment is one that has been echoed only but recently, when behemoth luxury houses started to scramble due to the economic slowdown of China. Minh-Ha T. Pham also takes the exploitative understanding of Asian markets to task in her book "Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet, Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal Style Blogging" she makes the observations that "The garment factory worker and sweatshop worker have been key historical scenes of women's subjugated labour since the late nineteenth century. Over the past forty years, globalisation has added to this economic category of gendered labour a decidedly racial register. Asian female garment workers are imagined to be biologically predisposed (with their nimble fingers) to the semiskilled tedious and repetitious work of apparel mass production. Perceived as a docile and easily controllable work force..."
So what needs to be done in light of this? Well men have a lot of room to run into as far as fashion is concerned. In fact, that's where a certain amount of fashion's future is stored. Though, with the slowing down of markets, the rest of the world's developed countries will come to its senses that very little actually separates Asia from the continents and countries of English native speakers.
Buying power might be there due to production, and population density, but that can't be the only thing relied on. Going in to 2016, Burberry had to close multiple smaller outlets around China due to reading too much in to the successes of an "emerging market". Anything to avoid actually making better products, right? Savvy business strategy of Denma and Guram from Vetements' South Korea launch needs to be not copied, but learned from.
