Fashion in Altermodern China

Fashion in Altermodern China examines key features and particularities of women's fashion within the cultural and political context of contemporary China. While demonstrating that global brands and styles heavily influence Chinese consumer trends, it is equally the case that the Chinese fashion 'system' is formed of its own internal logics and emergent trends. Adopting the theoretical term 'altermodern', China is positioned in terms of its rapid modernization, which presents its own rhythms and meanings that cannot be wholly understood in terms of a Western discourse of modernity, postmodernity and the global.

The book expands our understanding of the fashion 'system', taking on board new trends in global trade, new technologies, and the hybridity of designs and consumption of fashion. Its underlying interest is a certain 'neutrality' of fashion, as developed through critical readings of Roland Barthes' on the 'neutral' and Fran ois Jullien on 'blandness'. Both authors are directly influenced by Asian philosophies, which provide a bridge with a new critical Chinese perspective. While arguments for how global-local contexts lead to identifiably postmodern and hybrid aesthetics, the specific reading offered is how, for women in contemporary China, the flux and mix of available fashions is experienced in a more open neutral manner than is typically described in current scholarship. Crucially, then, rather than position trends in China only in terms of 'hybridity' (which betrays a Western bias and a binary logic of host-recipient), there are more fluid ways in which we need to understand how women engage in fashion in China today.