No country illustrates fashion’s shifting dynamics more clearly than China. In the last century, its image was defined by scale — the sheer magnitude of its manufacturing output. “Made in China” has become shorthand for affordability, uniformity, and speed. Similarly, it came to mean disposability; fast fashion at scale, and clothing that could be bought cheaply and discarded just as quickly. Nuance is ever more important: this is true, and on the other hand, we cannot reduce an entire country or culture to an aspect of global supply chains alone.
In reality, China’s manufacturing ecosystem is highly stratified, and alongside the mass production that dominates global perceptions, there are regions renowned for specialist craft, luxury textile development, and small-batch production. Suzhou, for instance, is steeped in silk traditions, while cities like Shenzhen are home to tech-integrated fabrics and innovation labs that annually receive designers and brand-owners around the world for prototyping and access to material technologies yet to be scaled in Europe or the US. This reveals the range — from artisanal heritage to experimental design — complicating the idea that “Made in China” monolithically denotes lack of quality, or inexpensiveness.
A deliberate repositioning of China as a tastemaker in its own right (and I must note, this has always been the case — I mean here specifically in the context of the global stage), has been both intentional and inevitable, tied to the country’s expanding soft power. Under Mao’s China, fashion was bent into the service of the state’s political vision: the Mao suit as a uniform of equality and collectivism. Revolutionary zeal dominated the clothing of China’s recent political history (during years of relative isolation from the world) and dress became an embodiment of the values of the nation. In the decades since, the shift has been dramatic; with economic liberalisation, China’s rapid growth has uplifted around 800 million people out of poverty over the last forty years, into a newly empowered middle class, ultimately redetermining aspirations and consumer behaviour. One of the ways this was achieved was through positioning themselves as an indispensable manufacturing centre in the world. This rising demographic, armed with disposable income and a hunger for cultural capital, has become a driving force behind China’s luxury market and, increasingly, the country’s influence on global fashion.
Among China’s distinct design voices, Angel Chen, a Central Saint Martins graduate, has become one of the leaders of the neo-Chinese wave; her explosive use of colour, eclectic patterning, and experimental textures have earned her international acclaim and collaborations with brands from H&M to Canada Goose. SHUSHU/TONG, the Shanghai-based duo of Liushu Lei and Yutong Jiang, both trained in London, have carved out a cult following with their hyper-feminine yet subversive aesthetic; bows, ruffles, and babydoll silhouettes that play on the tensions between innocence and power. Meanwhile, Zhaioyi Yu represents a wildly conceptual approach, with a firm vision as a couturier with his signature, cascading sculptural forms with Chinese symbolic references.
Asia truly does refuse monolithic characterisation: its fashion is deeply local and unflinchingly global, rooted in tradition and perpetually reinvented. For instance, South Korea’s cultural presence has seen a rapid ascent, as the K-pop girlys will tell you. Seoul has emerged as a trend epicentre, propelled by the cultural phenomena of K-pop and K-drama, and designers like Minju Kim, whose voluminous constructions captured international acclaim on Next in Fashion, epitomising the essence with which Seoul’s digitally fluent, trend-hungry consumers often signal what the world will covet next.
Tokyo, by contrast, is contemplative, a city reared in an avant-garde lineage and philosophical rigor. As I have explored previously in this column, when discussing Asia’s global influence, Japanese fashion always comes to mind; and our western understandings of minimalism have largely been trained through the enduring legacies of Japanese visionaries such as Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto, and Issey Miyake. In Japan, fashion is a way of inhabiting, interrogating, and reimagining the world itself; to them, we owe an immense debt of creativity and conceptual daring.
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