Tommy H. L. Tse
Dr. Tommy Tse is Associate Professor in Media Studies Department, University of Amsterdam. He specialises in East Asia’s media and cultural industries, creative labour, consumer culture and sociology of fashion. His work has appeared in Information, Communication and Society (Taylor & Francis), International Journal of Fashion Studies (Intellect), Journal of Consumer Culture (Sage), Journal of Cultural Economy (Taylor & Francis), and Sociology (Sage), in addition to his co-authored book Celebrity Culture and the Entertainment Industry in Asia: Use of Celebrity and Its Influence on Society, Culture and Communication (Intellect Books).
Previously, Tse worked in various media and creative companies, including Art Map Ltd., ADO and TBWA\ (4As ad agency). Tse also worked as a project-based copywriter for various global fashion, luxury and pharmaceutical brands for over six years. Before joining UvA, Tse taught at the Department of Sociology, The University of Hong Kong; Faculty of Social Science, Chinese University of Hong Kong; School of Communication, Hong Kong Baptist University; Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London; the Culture and Media Domain, HKU SPACE; and Hong Kong Design Institute.
In 2015, Tse was the Visiting Scholar at the National Center for Radio and Television Studies, Communication University of China, Beijing, and at the Fashion Institute of Design, Donghua University, Shanghai. In 2018, he was a Visiting Scholar/Research Associate at University College London (Anthropology Department) and London College of Fashion (Social and Cultural Studies). He is an elected member of the Amsterdam Young Academy (2020 - 2022), and he also serves the Editorial Board of International Journal of Fashion Studies (2021 – 2023), Fashion, Style & Popular Culture (2021 - 2023), and Work, Employment and Society (2021 – 2024).
Previously, Tse worked in various media and creative companies, including Art Map Ltd., ADO and TBWA\ (4As ad agency). Tse also worked as a project-based copywriter for various global fashion, luxury and pharmaceutical brands for over six years. Before joining UvA, Tse taught at the Department of Sociology, The University of Hong Kong; Faculty of Social Science, Chinese University of Hong Kong; School of Communication, Hong Kong Baptist University; Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London; the Culture and Media Domain, HKU SPACE; and Hong Kong Design Institute.
In 2015, Tse was the Visiting Scholar at the National Center for Radio and Television Studies, Communication University of China, Beijing, and at the Fashion Institute of Design, Donghua University, Shanghai. In 2018, he was a Visiting Scholar/Research Associate at University College London (Anthropology Department) and London College of Fashion (Social and Cultural Studies). He is an elected member of the Amsterdam Young Academy (2020 - 2022), and he also serves the Editorial Board of International Journal of Fashion Studies (2021 – 2023), Fashion, Style & Popular Culture (2021 - 2023), and Work, Employment and Society (2021 – 2024).
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Papers by Tommy H. L. Tse
Going beyond the Western fashion discourse, an ‘ex-centric’, contextualised perspective was adopted in this study 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, this proposed chapter focuses on how situated fashion media workers differentially view their creative and editorial autonomy, work insecurities and dissatisfactions derived from the accelerated digitalisation of cultural production, dissemination and consumption, in addition to how they manage their coping mechanisms and find agency amid external and internal uncertainties.
*This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
We argue that social media only superficially open up a site of counter-narratives for celebrities to resist the identities imposed on them by the mainstream media and online audiences. The interviewed celebrities' contradictory experiences in their self–presentations in social media, offer alternative angles to understanding the incoherent and unstable celebrity identity production processes, the blurring boundaries between celebrities and ordinary people through such processes, as well as the celebrities’ capacity to reclaim control in asserting their ‘true’ selves.
Does such a metamorphosis guarantee everlasting growth in sales and further perpetuation of consumerism in our society and culture? On one hand, the emergence of online shopping, reliance on global travelers’ and tourists’ impulse (or price-conscious) consumption in global cities, have created new challenges for brands and retailers improvising strategies to sell and impress the clienteles through their physical (also virtual) shops, no matter how enthralling they be; on the other, they are striving to adapt to/experiment new modes of brand and design communication. Now our society is already saturated with brand icons and images, online and offline, and then there are simply too many options – from promotional strategies, communication channels, product variety to ways of consumption – to dazzle and distract consumers at once and in every nanosecond. Placing all these as the backdrop of branding and retailing practices, several key questions emerge: is retail design still significant like in the good old days amid the new chances and challenges? What are the alleged changes and actual practices in the contemporary retail industry and retail design as a tool of brand communication that we, whether as a researcher, practitioner or even just an ordinary consumer, have to pay attention to? What are their immediate implications and divergent effects to consumers, culture and society? More radically speaking, for instance, can the evolving virtual shopping experience and its potential synchronization with 3D printing technology (i.e., “prosume” a piece of recyclable/reprintable luxury fashion online with just a click and within a couple of minutes when one has an “omnipotent” 3D printer at home) completely substitute and eradicate the offline one in the foreseeable future (Leopold, 2015; Lindgren, 2015)? In this chapter, based on interdisciplinary theories and recent empirical research in Hong Kong and Shanghai, we attempt to address the above questions, and the discussions will focus on the retail market conditions and their social, cultural and economic significance in the two locales within the East Asian market, providing insights to a wide range of audiences who are concerned about the future of the retail industry, as well as briefly discussing the impact of evolving retail designs, dictated by market trends, on the creative liberties of the designers.
Reference:
Leopold, C., 2015. Fashion designer makes entire collection using small 3D printers. Digital Journal, [online] 27 July.
Lindgren, T., 2013. Fashion system Shanghai: The advent of a new gatekeeper. In J. L. Foltyn & R. Fisher ed., Proceedings of 5th Global Conference: Fashion – Exploring Critical Issues. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary.Net, pp.1-8.
Woodhead, L., 2007. Shopping, seduction & Mr Selfridge. London: Profile 2007.
The primary research data were collected through participant observation at a Hong Kong fashion magazine in 2011 which involved interviews with sixteen senior Asia-Pacific fashion marketers. The interview responses demonstrate the complexity of the interplay with Asian socioeconomic and cultural factors, and confirm that fashion marketing in Hong Kong today involves the appropriation and creolization of cultural meanings through negotiation between global and regional/local fashion marketers. The Hong Kong-based regional fashion marketers now negotiate more often with the brands’ European or American headquarters about how to represent the brands as luxurious and stylish, but also about a more complex creolization of western and Chinese cultures while communicating fashion meanings. This unique ethnographic research provides original insight into the differing impact of globalization across Greater China.
http://www.socsc.hku.hk/cities2050/wes/
Going beyond the Western fashion discourse, an ‘ex-centric’, contextualised perspective was adopted in this study 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, this proposed chapter focuses on how situated fashion media workers differentially view their creative and editorial autonomy, work insecurities and dissatisfactions derived from the accelerated digitalisation of cultural production, dissemination and consumption, in addition to how they manage their coping mechanisms and find agency amid external and internal uncertainties.
*This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
We argue that social media only superficially open up a site of counter-narratives for celebrities to resist the identities imposed on them by the mainstream media and online audiences. The interviewed celebrities' contradictory experiences in their self–presentations in social media, offer alternative angles to understanding the incoherent and unstable celebrity identity production processes, the blurring boundaries between celebrities and ordinary people through such processes, as well as the celebrities’ capacity to reclaim control in asserting their ‘true’ selves.
Does such a metamorphosis guarantee everlasting growth in sales and further perpetuation of consumerism in our society and culture? On one hand, the emergence of online shopping, reliance on global travelers’ and tourists’ impulse (or price-conscious) consumption in global cities, have created new challenges for brands and retailers improvising strategies to sell and impress the clienteles through their physical (also virtual) shops, no matter how enthralling they be; on the other, they are striving to adapt to/experiment new modes of brand and design communication. Now our society is already saturated with brand icons and images, online and offline, and then there are simply too many options – from promotional strategies, communication channels, product variety to ways of consumption – to dazzle and distract consumers at once and in every nanosecond. Placing all these as the backdrop of branding and retailing practices, several key questions emerge: is retail design still significant like in the good old days amid the new chances and challenges? What are the alleged changes and actual practices in the contemporary retail industry and retail design as a tool of brand communication that we, whether as a researcher, practitioner or even just an ordinary consumer, have to pay attention to? What are their immediate implications and divergent effects to consumers, culture and society? More radically speaking, for instance, can the evolving virtual shopping experience and its potential synchronization with 3D printing technology (i.e., “prosume” a piece of recyclable/reprintable luxury fashion online with just a click and within a couple of minutes when one has an “omnipotent” 3D printer at home) completely substitute and eradicate the offline one in the foreseeable future (Leopold, 2015; Lindgren, 2015)? In this chapter, based on interdisciplinary theories and recent empirical research in Hong Kong and Shanghai, we attempt to address the above questions, and the discussions will focus on the retail market conditions and their social, cultural and economic significance in the two locales within the East Asian market, providing insights to a wide range of audiences who are concerned about the future of the retail industry, as well as briefly discussing the impact of evolving retail designs, dictated by market trends, on the creative liberties of the designers.
Reference:
Leopold, C., 2015. Fashion designer makes entire collection using small 3D printers. Digital Journal, [online] 27 July.
Lindgren, T., 2013. Fashion system Shanghai: The advent of a new gatekeeper. In J. L. Foltyn & R. Fisher ed., Proceedings of 5th Global Conference: Fashion – Exploring Critical Issues. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary.Net, pp.1-8.
Woodhead, L., 2007. Shopping, seduction & Mr Selfridge. London: Profile 2007.
The primary research data were collected through participant observation at a Hong Kong fashion magazine in 2011 which involved interviews with sixteen senior Asia-Pacific fashion marketers. The interview responses demonstrate the complexity of the interplay with Asian socioeconomic and cultural factors, and confirm that fashion marketing in Hong Kong today involves the appropriation and creolization of cultural meanings through negotiation between global and regional/local fashion marketers. The Hong Kong-based regional fashion marketers now negotiate more often with the brands’ European or American headquarters about how to represent the brands as luxurious and stylish, but also about a more complex creolization of western and Chinese cultures while communicating fashion meanings. This unique ethnographic research provides original insight into the differing impact of globalization across Greater China.
http://www.socsc.hku.hk/cities2050/wes/
This special issue of fe/male bodies – bodywise, reveals the similarities between fluid and the body, emphasizing the flexibility and diversity of one’s body. bodywise also explores the ambiguity of gender, one’s identity and our bodies’ desires, covering topics such as eating disorders, self-harm, disease, death, love, sex, narcissism, concealment and exposure, in order to depict how the body symbolizes, splits, recovers, disappears, exists and distorts. This issue aims to illustrate the joy and sadness of the body, as well as its complex interrelations with intuition, speculation, and theorization.
bodywise has been structured to reflect the three states of water – solid, liquid and gas.
The solid state is represented by the literary works, which include poetry, fiction, articles, and academic essays. These writings are bilingual, are both formal and informal, and interpret various issues that appeal to a broad readership.
The liquid state is represented by the graphics and illustrations – rendered by a group of young artists／photographers from Taiwan and Hong Kong – which aim to twist our traditional perspective of bodies.
The gaseous state is represented by the typesetting and design, which highlights the relationship between text and image, in order to accentuate the theme and its resonation among readers.
Through its interpretation of the trinity of solid, liquid and gaseous states, bodywise acts as a bridge for readers, encouraging the careful observation of every movement of one’s body, while emphasizing the interaction between body, culture, and society, in order to come to a greater understanding of physical experiences that are unfamiliar, unheard of, or long forgotten.
**Available at HKU Library:
http://discovery.lib.hku.hk/primo_library/libweb/action/display.do?tabs=detailsTab&ct=display&fn=search&doc=HKU_III.b3734366x&indx=1&recIds=HKU_III.b3734366x&recIdxs=0&elementId=0&renderMode=poppedOut&displayMode=full&frbrVersion=&dscnt=0&choice=book&fromLogin=true&tab=default_tab&dstmp=1406782413287&vl(freeText0)=%E7%94%B7%E5%A5%B3%E8%83%B4%E9%AB%94&vid=HKUL&mode=Basic
If you are now flipping through these pages at high speed, and expecting to capture some visually exciting sexual stimuli in this bookazine, I am afraid that, you will soon arrive at sheer disappointment – fe/male bodies is not pornography nor is it a sex guide.
Of course, fe/male bodies has its own significance, as you will see.
In fact don’t we all complain that most men and women surrounded have never reached the perfect ethos of masculinity and femininity respectively; and aren’t we irritated by witnessing gay and lesbian couples; are disgusted by the transgendered male and female, while neglecting the fact that masculinity and femininity are nevertheless two performative masquerades; sneer at asexual gentlemen, whereas look down on all too-sexual ladies? We yell and cry and (pretend to) be horrified, persecuting their problematic behaviors. Wait, and think critically – what’s the problem? Is it due to their transgression of the dignified but rigid law of dichotomous, heterosexual and hierarchical gender/sex? Is the patriarchal and phallocentric culture too deeply ingrained in our heart? Or have we already sensed the shortcomings and suppression of binary gender/sex since the very beginning, but accepted the hegemonic gender/sex stereotypes blindly?
fe/male bodies serves as a medium, which shed your ‘queerdars’ to see the ghost of illusive ideology, of which we suddenly spot the hidden flaws and wounds.
Before hearing the violent and overwhelming outcries from those academics who mistake our bookazine as non-pedagogic and theoretically shallow, let me first elucidate the scholastic significance of fe/male bodies.
Theoretically, ‘fe/male bodies’ is a novel term, epitomizing our initiative and hypothetical spirit; it emits the destabilizing spectrum of Derridaean deconstruction , comprising the notion of ‘polymorphous genders, sexualities and bodies’, undoing the traditional cults, linguistic strata, scientific analyses on body, identity politics, psychoanalysis and even the propagandas of media that discursively fashion our gender, sexuality and body via hegemonic means. We recreate Adam and Eve apart from the sexist and patriarchal Bible, whose souls spring beyond the single and stiff male and female torsos. He and she are synchronized and juxtaposed, are neither plural nor singular; are neither male nor female; are both mental and somatic; are queer and not queer; are androgynous and hermaphroditic.
So, why can’t the campaigns and cognitions of ‘Gay Pride’ , ‘Lesbianism’ as well as ‘Queer Theory’ utterly trigger the global emancipation of body, gender and sexual politics? The paradox is that while we understand the tactics of and faults in insisting on the essentialist and intrinsic traits of homosexuality in Gay and Lesbian Studies, we are also reluctant to embrace the absolute, utopian but pessimistic denial of identity in Queer Theory. Hence, ‘fe/male bodies’ is a kaleidoscopic rainbow filled with possibilities, bridging the tension between the struggles of Gay and Lesbian Studies and Queer Theory. First, it aims to disintegrate the polarization of straightness and gayness/ lesbianness, conceiving multiple combinations of genders and personalities while rejecting the tone of essentialism. Second, it aims to challenge the endless transformation of identity and to question the eternal expansion of queer simulacrum, while giving it a break – not to condemn someone who just claims his/her straight or gay or lesbian identity as what he/she feels tentatively, simply by the far-from-earth and abstract theories which ignore the impossibility of the ‘happy-limbo of a non-identity’ in reality. Gender/sex identity, like the healthy skin, requires ‘elasticity’; it is no good to be too hard or too soft – that is exactly the central message being emphasized within the articles in our bookazine.
And trendy folks, if you subjectively conclude that fe/male bodies seeks to please the narcissism of intellectuals which only toy with unrealistic theories, again, by the slangy prose below, I articulate the material existence of ‘fe/male bodies’, of which I can tell, and you can feel, its ubiquity.
‘My brother holds his hand,
mutually gazing in delight,
in the public toilet;
my sister carries her lad,
singing like two skylarks,
in the central park;
men trim their eyebrows,
smooth the powder on their pretty faces,
women part their feminine clouds,
show the toughness on their sturdy faces;
dudes demonstrate their shaved armpits,
beauties tighten their swelling tits;
hysterical gays, aren’t they ‘menstruating’?
orgasmic dykes, aren’t they ‘ejaculating’?
Gender inversion? Bodily deformity? Cultural decadence?
Who dare to judge!
he shows a female squint, she presents a male wink;
the Hermaphroditus myth, turns into a damn real thing!
Ren and Bai, Long and Young,
be their love, long and young!
Flee their bodies, flee their hearts, flee their souls –
who dare to bind!
He is inside her, she is inside him;
fe/male bodies, deserves a flamboyant fête!’
We are in vogue, as we believe the anachronism of binary gender.
Therefore, by the establishment of fe/male bodies, we pledge to enlarge the space for local and even Asian publications that focus on the study of body, gender and sexuality. We welcome thoughtful discussion and criticism, since in doing so, ‘fe/male bodies’ will undergo delicate sculpturing, and soon reach perfection.
Lastly, special thanks to Leslie Cheung – on the stage, on the screen, in our remembrance -- he is the soul of ‘fe/male bodies’, completely, and forever. Undoubtedly, he is the origin of the idea for this bookazine that sprang into our mind.
**Available at HKU Library:
http://discovery.lib.hku.hk/primo_library/libweb/action/display.do?tabs=detailsTab&ct=display&fn=search&doc=HKU_III.b35074498&indx=2&recIds=HKU_III.b35074498&recIdxs=1&elementId=1&renderMode=poppedOut&displayMode=full&frbrVersion=&dscnt=0&choice=book&fromLogin=true&tab=default_tab&dstmp=1406781949843&vl(freeText0)=%E7%94%B7%E5%A5%B3%E8%83%B4%E9%AB%94&vid=HKUL&mode=Basic
Beneath this ideological optimism, however, the real conditions facing creative workers globally often contradict popular assumptions. Cultural industries scholars Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2010: 18) have observed that the realities of this creative sector are not so positive as large proportions of creative industry workers often struggle with the levels and quality of work. These problems appear to reside in feelings of “self-exploitation”, a blurring of work and leisure, feelings of isolation and anxiety, lack of solidarity, autonomy, job security plus a perceived lack of social recognition (Gill 2002; Ross 2003; Ngai, Chan and Yuen 2014; Chan, Krainer, Diehl, Terlutter & Huang 2015; Tse 2015).
There is a critical need to undertake a rigorous qualitative investigation into the creative industries policy discourse aiming to boost the local creative economy and to match this up with the actual experiences and working conditions of creative workers, in addition to the resulting impact on future sustainable development for the creative industries. Starting in May 2016, the study will generate in-depth, qualitative findings to complement the previous quantitative research focused on deriving economic values of the industries. An ethnographic study of the industries drawing upon subjective experiences of creative workers will identify areas that will aid in formulating policies of higher relevance and applicability. By investigating the professional and social lives of industry workers, crucial structural measures may be suggested, such as those that mitigate the exploitative nature of work conditions to retain a substantial and capable pool of creative labor.
This project is expected to inform the direction of the rapidly evolving creative business environment, and signal the most appropriate government policy response to ensure equitable creative labor management. By focusing on three selected industries – public relations and advertising, television and print media, qualitative research methodology including interviews will elicit ethnographic narratives of work experiences, to generate research data for analysis resulting in future policy recommendations.
While fashion consumers in Korea were heavily influenced by social norms and their choices were motivated by aligning themselves to current trends, those in China deemed it important to create individual identities by pluralizing mainstream fashion and showed a more active form of produsage. Both groups were aware of the pervasion of the Western fashion discourse through media and technology, and were unable to define fashion strictly within their local contexts. The study concluded that although produsage was not explicitly established, the recognition of interactions between fashion producers and social agents, and of the role of the media in manipulating consumer choices highlighted the increasing degree and pervasiveness of produsage in both countries.
By fathoming out the impact of the Hollywood culture and global creative industries to East Asia as well as the indigenous socioeconomic, historical, political, technological and cultural transformations, this paper presents findings from the researchers’ hard-to-come-by in-depth interviews with Chinese celebrities and entertainment industry workers respectively conducted in late 2014 and early 2015, and examines how these stars divergently construct and negotiate for multiple identities, particularly through the social media platforms, as a form of resistance towards the oppression of the local media system and commercial institutions on their subjectivity (Lind 2013; Marwick and boyd 2011).
To rigorously assess the comparative capacities of fashion industries in Korea and China, this paper explores the interrelationship between the development of fashion, media and entertainment industries and fashion communication. Key research questions include: how and why has the growth of creative capacity of Korean fashion firms been more pronounced than that of the firms in greater China? How are such differences discursively constructed as meaningful within the fashion world and among consumers across East Asian cities? How have the processes of meaning creation and consumption within the different locales contributed to the rise of fashion discourse and a reconceptualization of fashion within each region? Overall, the investigation of the micro-dynamics of emergent discursive frameworks of fashion communication and a macro-comparative study at the industry level provide original theoretical and empirical contributions to the study of Asian fashion ecosystems in the post-industrial, informationalized and networked age.
Methodologically, individual and focus group interviews are used to collect data among fashion industry professionals and consumers within the two regions. A set of interdisciplinary perspectives derived from anthropology, marketing, media and cultural studies, political economy and sociology are adopted to examine how the divergently formed fashion production sectors led to differential developments of the Korean and Chinese fashion industries, and demonstrate how cultural meanings tied to fashion are co-created and “prodused” in and through East Asia.
How did Korean fashion achieve this region-wide popularity in the absence of global designers, and to some extent even noteworthy Korean fashion brands? How does the contrast to other developing fashion systems, mainly the Chinese case? Drawing on market share data, interviews with Korean and Chinese fashion industry workers, and business and industry records, this paper traces the segmented development of the Korean fashion system, dominated by the chaebol on one-hand and traditional market actors on the other. We argue that these bifurcated developments reflect the legacy of the country’s larger industrial organization, particularly, the concentrated and segmented industrial system and chaebol-dominance, which developed alongside early garment and apparel manufacturing. The subsequent developments in Korean fashion continue to be shaped by this system now in the forms of domineering fashion empires that operate in opposition to the predominant model presented by global creative systems. We illustrate how Korea defies expectations of conventional theories of fashion hierarchies and discuss the possibilities and limits this exception pose to Korea’s further rise into a fashion capital.
The participant observations and responses excerpted from interviews and conversations are presented. Those data portray partly conflicting, partly consistent notions of fashion among those working in the fashion media. They will be discussed with reference to the diverse notions of fashion. The focus of the observations was: What shapes one’s current understanding of fashion? What fashion messages do fashion media intend to communicate? The responses surprisingly demonstrate the contradictory rules guiding how media people determine what is fashionable. Real cases happened tend to echo the critical perspectives, however, the encoding process also involved aesthetic and creative judgment and validated the pluralistic perspectives. In general the media personnel were not very powerful in encoding fashionability, yet it does not mean they could not influence the fashion meanings at all.
By revisiting the literature and case studies on various sociohistorical, economic and cultural influences on Chinese fashion industry, a fuller picture of the social dynamics of the mainland Chinese and Hong Kong fashion media is first exhibited. The self-perceptions and career aspirations of industry participants are then discussed and analyzed. Hong Kong fashion journalists take a pessimistic view of their career prospects and the industry in Hong Kong. Mainland fashion media personnel, by contrast, take an optimistic view of the industry’s potential in mainland China.
The interview data suggest that such contradictory visions may arise from differing political changes and cultural biases. It is argued that the fashion media industry has never reached a cultural renaissance in either Hong Kong or China proper, despite the economic boom both economies have experienced over the past two decades. Behind China’s rapidly rising economic splendor in the world, a less-heard story of fashion in China through her ideological transitions is narrated: fashion was a taboo, a sign of bourgeoisie taste, and considered as morally inferior in the Communist ideology. Against this backdrop, the colonial Hong Kong, where the media representation of East-meet-west fashion was much related to the ideas of being a modern Chinese, did not share this ideological change. With the arrival of 1997, the situation had experienced changes under the fast growing Chinese economy and information flow. The shifting fashion media industries and cultural politics in the two regions also illustrate new relations between the post-socialist country and her post-colonial city.
In chapter one, the definitions of narcissism as illustrated in Sigmund Freud's On Narcissism (1915) will be introduced and compared with other works of literature and art expressing a similar motif, such as Ovid's Metamorphosis William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Salvador Dali's Metamorphosis of Narcissus, Eric Stenbock Stanislaus's Narcissus as well as other sources from western psychoanalytic discourses. Without providing a concrete redefinition, this chapter will first open up a space for discussing and problematizing Freudian narcissism.
In chapter two, the author will dissect the notion of self-love/autoeroticism in Chinese culture apart from the early 19th century European discursive construction of narcissism, through scrutinizing the relationship between self-hatred, self-love, autoeroticism and identification. The postulation and analysis of a 'narcissistic' desire which differs from its Freudian conception in the main male characters in Lan Yu by Beijing Tongzhi and Nie Zi by Bai Xian-yong will be analyzed. The author will argue beyond simplistically categorizing the two stories as 'homosexual' novels, destabilizing the 'homosexual' relationship between the male protagonists, to problematize the dichotomy of hetero/homosexuality.
In chapter three, the popular American short story and film Brokeback Mountain will be examined. The author suggests that the representations of homosexuality between the male protagonists are in fact not genuinely homosexual, but a complicated and manifold narcissistic desire, which allows the story to attract and arouse a varied reader and audience identification.
In chapter four, the author will summarize the genealogy and evolution of narcissism since its discursive construction in the 19th century through contemporary postmodern culture. From Freudian narcissism to metrosexuality to übersexuality, the author will evaluate the liberating and restrictive elements of these categories in representing male sexuality in our culture. The resonation and discrepancy between the hypothesized 'narcissistic' desire and the term 'queer' as conceptualized by Judith Butler will conclude this thesis.
*The full text is available at HKU Scholar Hub:
http://hub.hku.hk/handle/10722/53132
The presentation will be in three parts. First, the literature on interdisciplinary fashion theories, the fashion business and case studies will be reviewed to explain the delicate and unobserved process of fashion communication. An empirical study of fashion marketers’ and media personnel’s perceptions, and their creation and negotiation of fashion meanings will be presented. This involved participant observation and in-depth interviews in two different but highly connected fields: as a fashion reporter in the editorial team of a Hong Kong fashion magazine; and as a marketing assistant in the PR and marketing team of a British luxury accessory brand. The rapport built through the fieldwork facilitated thirty-six in-depth interviews with Hong Kong and mainland Chinese fashion media personnel, including the editors, copywriters, advertising sales managers, graphic designers and photographers of twelve publications; Asian fashion bloggers, marketing personnel from global fashion conglomerates, fashion distributors and consultants from across the Asia-Pacific region. The results demonstrate the complex construction and negotiation of fashion culture(s) in Hong Kong and mainland China (in relation to the West) on the personal, organizational, industry and national levels. Whether and how far Western fashion theories can be applied to Asia’s fashion industry and media business is discussed.
The results of this interdisciplinary study elucidate the evolution of the fashion media and fashion meanings in Hong Kong and mainland China since the 1980s, unveiling the unique and little-understood apparatus of Asia’s fashion industry in the global context. The “four myths of fashion” theorized by the researcher explain the conflicting imaginaries and hybridized patterns of fashion—It is at once mainstream and niche; is manifested officially and personally; is preset yet negotiable; is at once commercial and creative; comprises both Western and Asian elements; is communicated both top-down and bottom-up; is uprising or decaying at the same time; goes premium and mass in chorus. They also lead readers to look through the simultaneously constraining and enabling nature of fashion—the fashion simulacra—in the postmodern capitalist world in realistic social setting.
**The full text is available at HKU Scholar Hub:
http://hub.hku.hk/handle/10722/206434