“From Karl Marx to Karl Lagerfeld”: A longitudinal study of how Vogue China navigated and reflected local and global cultural flows between 2005 and 2015

Vogue China is a transnational fashion magazine, a regional edition of one of the world’s most prestigious titles, and a symbol of the globalisation of the contemporary fashion industry. When Vogue launched in China in September 2005 its slogan ‘Vogue, Ultimate Fashion in China’ denoted the magazine’s self-positioning and construction as the country’s leading style arbiter and fashion authority. As a Chinese magazine operating under an American brand name, localised in a Chinese context for Chinese language readers, Vogue China is now one of the most significant fashion magazines both domestically, as one of the most widely-read fashion magazines with a print circulation of 3.4 million and 2.5 million monthly unique digital visitors in 2020 (McHugh, 2020), and internationally, as a platform and communicator of Chinese design to a global audience.
This research represents the first longitudinal analysis of Vogue China’s content and production. It contributes to the field of Media Studies and Cultural Historical Studies, filling a gap in the academic literature on the site of transnational fashion media production. This has been undertaken through a longitudinal study of editorial content published in Vogue China during its first decade (2005–2015). The methodology has enabled an interrogation of how modern Chinese female social identities have been constructed in Vogue China’s content and through its production processes, to understand the complex interplay of cultural and global flows in transnational production. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to decode editorial imagery and texts, to interrogate how local and global cultures have converged and to understand the forces at play in the production process. Semi-structured interviews with key industry insider informants enabled triangulation of the findings.

The research adopted Said’s post-colonial theory of Orientalism (1978) and the post-colonial framing of cultural flows to examine the transnational ideoscape of Vogue China. In so doing it adds to the academic debate surrounding transnational media flows (Appadurai, 1990). The research demonstrates how Chinese and non-Chinese producers interact to construct ideoscapes of Chinese femininities and ultimately define Chinese female social identities.

The research analysed what it means to be a fashionable Chinese woman represented in Vogue China during 2005-15. It revealed how practices of Orientalism, Othering and cultural appropriation are employed by both Chinese and non-Chinese producers to define modern Chinese female identities and construct gender roles that predominantly align with the state’s position throughout a decade in print. It uncovered changes in content and production in the period under study that demonstrate local producers at Vogue China increasingly embraced modern depictions of Chinese culture and promotion of Chinese creatives, challenging the hegemonic Western-centric global fashion narrative and power dynamic.

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