ABSTRACT
Since the late 1990s, Hong Kong’s cultural and creative industries (CCI) have increasingly been perceived as the key driver of Hong Kong’s economic growth. As the CCI have steadily grown, their glamorous image has come to attract a considerable amount of aspirational young workers to enter the field. However, the actual predicament of creative workers, facing declining prestige and creative autonomy, low job security and exploitative work conditions are not reflected by this rhetoric. Going beyond the Western fashion discourse, this study has adopted an ‘ex-centric’, contextualised perspective to nuance the scope and limit of Western-centric creative labour theories when applied in different social, cultural, political-economic and geographical contexts (Alacovska and Gill, 2019). Drawing from 20 in-depth interviews with Hong Kong fashion journalists from a wide array of media organisations and levels of seniority, conducted between 2015 and 2017, we focus on how situated fashion media workers differentially view their creative and editorial autonomy, work insecurities and dissatisfactions in relation to the accelerated digitalisation of cultural production, dissemination and consumption, and how these cultural workers develop coping mechanisms and exert agency amid external and internal uncertainties.
