Fashion media communication in Hong Kong

Abstract

Though fashion is a significant global creative industry, it is still often regarded as wasteful and deceptive. Participant observation at a Hong Kong high fashion magazine, Stylistic (false name), was used to remap the relationships among the conflicting notions of fashion, attempting to determine which fashion theories best describe the contemporary fashion industry in Hong Kong. This paper discusses how Hong Kong's fashion media present luxury brands as fashionable and how editors, copywriters, designers, sales managers and photographers adapt those meanings. The observations are interpreted in terms of two schools of fashion theory and the exploitative and creative aspects of postmodern fashion are discussed. © 2014 Taylor and Francis.