Four Myths of Fashion: An Ethnographic Research on the Fashion Media Industry in Hong Kong and Mainland China

Abstract

Fashion meanings are constantly shifting as they interact with the specific sociohistorical, economic and cultural situations, and its specific manifestations in Asia deserves further scholarly exploration. This ethnographic research aimed at explaining how today’s fashion media represent fashion in synchrony with the cycles of ever-changing Western and global fashion. The author took the readers on a journey of remapping the conflicting notions of fashion. In the course of participant observation at a Chinese fashion magazine and interviews with thirty-plus fashion industry personnel in Hong Kong and mainland China, four myths of fashion were gradually discerned on the personal, organizational, industry and national levels. Sequentially, each level corresponded to each myth, and each myth involved two specific pairs of conflicting or even paradoxical imaginaries of fashion. They became the readers’ critical spectacles to look through the constraining and enabling nature of fashion in a real social setting in the Asian context.