ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a collective portrait of Hong Kong fashion designers and their relation to the garment industry based upon an ethnographic study of thirty practitioners conducted in 1993-98. It discusses the developmentalism that provides a somewhat ambivalent context for Hong Kong fashion design. The fact that Hong Kong is a producer society has rather mixed effects on the fashion business. The chapter describes how fashion designers are treated as outsiders, even slightly suspicious figures, in an environment where others work for money. It raises some general issues about non-Western cultural intermediaries who form an important, but largely overlooked, segment of those working in global culture industries. Hong Kong fashion designers are mediators between production and consumption. At the same time, they are also cultural intermediaries in the sense of mediating between East and West, between the global and the local.
