Fashion System Shanghai: The Advent of a New Gatekeeper

The term fashion system describes inter-relationships between production and consumption illustrating how the production of fashion is a collective activity. For instance, Yuniya Kawamura notes that systems for the production of fashion differ around the globe and are subject to constant change, and Jennifer Craik draws attention to the ‘array of competing and intermeshing systems cutting across western and non-western cultures.’ In China, Shanghai’s nascent fashion system seeks to emulate the Eurocentric system of Fashion Weeks and industry support groups. It promises emergent designers a platform for global competition, yet there are tensions from within. Interaction with a fashion system inevitably means becoming validated or legitimised. Legitimisation in turn depends upon gatekeepers who make aesthetic judgments about the status, quality and cultural value of a designer’s work. Notwithstanding the proliferation of fashion media, in Shanghai a new gatekeeper has arrived, seeking to filter authenticity from artifice, offering truth in a fashion market saturated with fakery and the hollowness of foreign consumptive practice, and providing a place of sanctuary for Chinese fashion design. Thus this chapter discusses how new agencies are allowing designers in Shanghai greater control over their brand image while creating novel opportunities for promotion and sales. It explores why designers choose this new model and provides new knowledge of the curation of fashion by these gatekeepers.