Dr Anne Peirson-Smith
Department of English & Communication
City University of Hong Kong
enanneps@cityu.edu.hk
Anne received her PhD from Sheffield University, UK in 1996. Over the past twelve years in Hong Kong she has been teaching media studies, public relations, advertising and persuasive communication, and is currently researching into the tensions between the global and local roles of the creative industries in South East Asia and the use of visual symbolism in advertising campaign strategies. In addition, she has a professional background in public relations consultancy and management skills training for numerous international clients both in government and industry.
Going "Glocal"- The Cultural Contradictions of the Post-Colonial Hong Kong Fashion Industry.
The paper investigates the nature of identity ambivalence historically encoded in Hong Kong's post-colonial discourse of fashion production from the viewpoint of cultural intermediaries in the fashion industry. Over 50 interviews were conducted with the cultural producers and intermediaries from the Hong Kong fashion and promotional industries. The findings suggest that the unifying purpose is in seeing fashion as an economic pursuit: to increase sales and maximize profits, in line with the Asian monetarist model/myth. This contradicts comparative studies of creative industry professionals in other cultures. Nevertheless, fashion designers appear unable to meet the desires of fashion consumers who seem to prefer Western based designer labels to local brands, often resulting in financial failure for the cultural producer. The intra-relationships amongst creative fashion professionals appear to be fraught with contradictions. Although designers rely on publicity to raise the profile of their fashion labels, many lack marketing acumen or promotional resources. Equally, the fashion media professionals are in the business of selling images rather than clothes, and so attempt to balance the interests of their readers in the wider international world of fashion design, or resort to sensationalist coverage. Hence, a dislocation of localized fashion design and globalized media practice is evidenced.
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