Mapping China: Fashion

An overview of trends, opportunities, and challenges

Introduction

This report seeks to give an overview of the Chinese fashion industry through several interviews with critical and respected Dutch professionals in the fashion world who live, or do business, in China, and some Chinese fashion professionals who are familiar with the Dutch (Western) fashion industry.

The report aims at informing, analyzing, warning, but also stimulating entrepreneurs, companies and organizations who want to enter the Chinese fashion market. The interviews present a collective of independent, avant-garde fashion designers and their modus operandi, as well contextualizes their development within the Chinese fashion community, and the dynamic changes it has undergone in recent years.

Recent fashion and media developments have confirmed the crucial position of these designers within the emerging fashion scene in China.

Today, Chinese fashion has the ambition to grow beyond the domestic economy and culture: China, both as market, and as inspiration, is becoming a crucial player in the global fashion world, and western brands are, or wish to be, part of this challenging and interesting market.

Their presence and ambition is understandable, since - with a population of 1.4 billion and rapid economic growth - China offers the world potentially the largest consumer market for the fashion industry. China’s total GDP in 2014 increased by 7.3 percent on a yearly basis. China's total GDP in 2014 was CNY 63.6139 trillion, according to a statement posted on the National Bureau of Statistics website on September 7th, 2015.

Table of contents

- Shopping location

- Chinese taste

- Local partners

- Unique selling point

- Online-to-offline

- Taste development

- Open to western fashion

- Target groups

- Where to start?

- Keep developing

Return to index page Mapping China