Conceptualising Luxury Fashion in China: A Postmodern Interpretation
A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Master of Philosophy in the Faculty of Science and Engineering
2019
Tiantian Ye School of Materials
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Chapter One: Introduction ...... 8
1.1 Research context ...... 8
1.1.1 Market context ...... 8
1.1.2 Philosophical context ...... 10
1.2 Research gap ...... 12
1.3 Research aim ...... 12
1.4 Research objectives ...... 12
Chapter Two: Literature review...... 12
2.1 The rationale for a literature review ...... 13
2.2 Conceptualising luxury fashion ...... 14
2.2.1 The evolutionary manifesto of Western luxury ...... 14
2.2.2 A Chinese perspective of conceptualising luxury ...... 15
2.2.3 Luxury fashion ...... 17
2.2.4 The advent of luxury’s accessibility— luxury’s ‘democratisation’ ...... 20
2.2.5 Contextualising luxury fashion consumption in China ...... 23
2.3 Chinese consumers changing value perceptions of luxury fashion ...... 26
2.3.1 Approaching the value formation of luxury fashion ...... 26
2.3.2 Financial value perception ...... 28
2.3.3 Conspicuous value perception ...... 30
2.3.4 Functional value perception ...... 33
2.3.5 Hedonistic value perception...... 36
2.4 Literature review summary ...... 39
Chapter Three: Research Methodology ...... 41
3.1 Research philosophy ...... 41
3.1.1 Ontological assumptions ...... 41
3.1.2 Epistemological assumptions ...... 44
3.1.3 Methodological assumptions...... 45
3.2 Research design ...... 48
3.2.1 Inductive research ...... 48
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3.2.2 The qualitative approach ...... 49
3.2.3 Sampling criteria ...... 51
3.2.4 Individual interviews ...... 54
3.3 Quality and evaluation in interpretivist research ...... 58
3.3.1 Diverse validity criteria in different research paradigm ...... 58
3.3.2 Validity in interpretivist research ...... 59
3.3.3 Towards a cross-paradigm trustworthiness ...... 61
3.4 Data analysis ...... 63
3.5 Research Ethics ...... 64
3.6 Summary ...... 66
Chapter Four: Findings and Discussion ...... 67
4.1 Thematic templates ...... 67
4.2 Participants’ experiences of luxury fashion consumption ...... 69
4.3 Research Findings ...... 74
4.3.1 Financial value ...... 74
4.3.2 Functional Value...... 77
4.3.3 Hedonistic value ...... 80
4.3.4 Conspicuous value ...... 82
4.3.5 A symbol of the West ...... 89
4.3.6 Luxury fashion as art ...... 91
4.4 Discussions and reflections ...... 94
4.4.1 The double-edged effects of luxury’s democratisation in China ...... 94
4.4.2 The reviving Chinese traditional luxury value ...... 96
4.4.3 Framework of luxury fashion consumer value ...... 101
4.5 Theoretical contributions ...... 103
4.6 Managerial contributions ...... 105
4.7 Limitations and further research suggestions ...... 106
References ...... 107
Appendix ...... 117
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Interview Transcripts ...... 117
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ABSTRACT
The overall purpose of this research is to take a new perspective to understand how contemporary Chinese consumers conceptualise luxury fashion consumption, as an imported phenomenon, from their own experiences. The research aims to develop a new framework to guide studies into consumer value in cross-cultural contexts.
By adopting the qualitative interpretivist method, this study utilised Bevan’s (2014) phenomenological interview technique to conduct private interviews with ten Chinese consumers who were willing to share their personal experiences of luxury consumption and their perceptions of the importance of luxury fashion. The results of the research reveal that Chinese consumers not only characterise luxury four- dimensionally (Shukla and Purani, 2012; Shukla et al., 2015)—in financial, hedonistic, conspicuity and functionality terms—but also imbue luxury fashion with a unique contextual value that impacts the socio-cultural realm of their worlds. Chinese luxury consumers see luxury fashion as a ‘symbol of the West’ and the ‘art of life’ that they should aspire to.
This research has filled the knowledge gap by reviewing the evolution and consequences of the spread of luxury fashion beyond the Chinese elite and into the middle-class market. This study indicates that the growing accessibility of luxury fashion has allowed less affluent consumers to partake of the luxury goods boom, but has caused elite consumers a degree of disorientation and alienation. Moreover, this research has expanded the field of behavioural studies on postmodernist thinking (e.g., Goulding, 2003; Firat and Venkatesh, 1995), and produced a framework that includes an instrumental value and aspirational value realm as an anatomy of the fragmented consumer experience.
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Chapter One: Introduction
1.1 Research context
1.1.1 Market context
Throughout the history of modern China, the consumption of luxury fashion and haute couture, even in the comparably developed urban areas, was a niche phenomenon. Prior to China’s joining of the WTO in 2000, there were a number of economic and political barriers confronting foreign luxury retailers seeking to enter the Chinese market, and only selected brands had a local presence, primarily in shopping arcades within luxury hotels that targeted affluent tourists. However, with the rapid growth of the nation’s economy, around 68 percent of the Chinese population had joined the middle classes by 2012, compared to only 4 percent in 2000 (KPMG, 2014). This development created a significant market for luxury goods, especially given the low cost of living in China that gives Chinese consumers a spending power three times larger than that of their Western peers with similar incomes (McKinsey, 2009). Furthermore, Chinese culture encourages consumers to engage in certain buying patterns, making them more likely to over-consume luxury goods as a way to become part of elite society. Meanwhile, although the one-party system, with its highly-controlled political ideology, is still a key feature in China, society has moved on from communist-era thriftiness and has embraced the culture of consumerism (Lavin, 2016). This social transformation was spurred on by a new strategy of focusing on domestic consumption instead of the traditional export and infrastructure investment driven model (SCMP, 2016). People’s growing confidence in the wake of the successful hosting of the Olympic Games in 2008 has also played a role. For most Chinese, that historic event made them feel connected to the outside world more than ever before, and this new sense of self-confidence has manifested itself in a desire to own luxury items of all sorts (Dong and Tian, 2009).
The evolution of Chinese consumers over the last decade has been nothing short of dramatic, with the digitisation of retailing and marketing communications creating a
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new consumption landscape in the country, especially in the exclusive goods sector (Liu et al., 2015). Luxury consumption today involves a deep immersion in social media, particularly online fashion magazines, which are full of marketing and branding messages delivered by celebrities and fashion bloggers. Chinese consumers’ active engagement with top-selling fashion labels has also developed a strong awareness and knowledge of brands. Apart from well-known European brands, such as Hermès, Louis Vuitton and Chanel, other niche brands, in particular trendy Japanese labels like Issey Miyake, have emerged as desirable alternatives for sophisticated consumers looking for an individual look. At the same time, a number of home-grown Chinese brands have entered the luxury fashion market, promoting new concepts of Asian luxury, and combining Shang Xia’s approach to reviving Chinese craftsmanship with ICICLE’s philosophy of living in harmony with nature.
Highly diverse and fragmented tastes and preferences in China indicate that consumer pluralism is a key theme in the luxury goods landscape (Liu et al., 2015), one that is constantly made more acute by the evolution of the concept of luxury itself. Today, the unique aura of luxury has been diluted, especially within fashion categories such as ready-to-wear, shoes and handbags. Many foreign brands in China, including Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Fendi, have opened WeChat online shops that allow anybody to purchase and associate with their brands, making luxury widely accessible. However, consumer pluralism in the luxury goods market in China has also created numerous challenges for retailers. Italian luxury retailer 10 Corso Como recently closed its Beijing boutique, while Bottega Veneta, which used to be a top choice for Chinese elites, is struggling to connect with affluent clients (He, 2018). Moreover, the strategy that is often used to ‘localise’ a foreign luxury brand—hiring Chinese celebrities to promote their labels—sometimes ends up producing negative results. For example, Dior was deluged by online critics after it appointed Angelababy, China’s equivalent for Kim Kardashian, as its brand ambassador in China (Pan, 2017).
Many luxury brands are therefore adjusting their strategies to adapt to a rapidly changing landscape. To that end, they are examining the issues of product standardisation and localisation, and paying particular attention to the newly empowered Chinese consumer’s preferences. However, the key to understanding luxury consumption in China lies in the very origin of this consumer pluralism —
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what luxury means to the Chinese consumer today. Therefore, this research aims to conceptualise luxury fashion as a cultural phenomenon by looking at the perspectives of the consumers who are determining the market dynamics of contemporary China.
1.1.2 Philosophical context
For many years, Chinese luxury consumers were portrayed simply as big spenders on big brands (McKinsey & Co., 2009). This generalised portrait is still to an extent valid today, in the sense that Chinese consumers continue to aim for the conspicuous. However, the way to understand the phenomenon of luxury consumption in China is to see it in a uniquely Chinese context, without sweeping generalisations based on cultural stereotypes. There is no doubt that ‘collectivism’ has deep roots in Chinese culture, and the idea of the collective group drives many consumers to follow certain patterns in their purchasing and fashion habits. However, this cultural relic is not the only factor playing on the luxury fashion market in China today. Globalisation itself has encouraged a huge interest in Western consumer trends, and this has led to a move away from an ethnocentric view of research and towards consumer pluralism. The hyperreality that has been created by extreme marketing is indicative of the postmodernist nature of the consumer revolution (Brown, 1995).
There are a number of philosophical nuances that differentiate postmodernist consumer research from its modernist peers. Firstly, researchers subscribe to postmodernism in order to avoid the modernist tendency to “reduce the world into simple dichotomous categories” (Firat and Benkatesh, 1995, p. 240), which leads to a research perspective that sees consumers as still, passive and rational figures. Postmodernist researchers subscribe to a more dynamic view of today’s consumers, as individuals who display social, complex, irrational and unpredictable patterns of behaviour (Venkatesh, 1992). This view of the consumer’s role in the value-creation chain holds that consumers are, on the one hand, becoming more vulnerable to manipulation from intense brand advertising (Goulding, 2003), but are also functioning as value creators who are resisting and re-interpreting marketing messages, on the other (Cova, 2002). Secondly, the divergent perceptions of the role of consumers leads to a different focus in terms of academic research on consumer
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behaviour: modernists investigate the various aspects of purchasing behaviour, whereas postmodernists define value in terms of the experience it generates beyond the immediate service, which comes from a broader context through the immersion in consumption (Helkkula et al., 2012, p. 59). In other words, consumers’ perception of received value, socio-cultural contexts and their own individual experiences of a luxury purchase can all affect the total value generated. Therefore, postmodernist researchers tend to give equal attention to both the experiential and the meaningful aspects underpinning buying.
Although some researchers have subscribed to the interpretivist paradigm in examining the complex realm of luxury consumption in China (e.g., Lu, 2011; Chen and Lamberti, 2015), most have adopted the philosophical notion of objectivity and distance (e.g. Sun et al., 2016; Wang et al., 2010; Zhang and Kim, 2013), and followed the modernist tradition. The modernist dichotomous worldview, which categorises the cultural divide as East/West, leads to a conceptual framework of consumer values that is assembled from the current knowledge of the target research field. To some degree, theoretical framing, as opposed to experiential analysis, is the leading driver of all consumer research, as a result of which the true research context may not be properly presented and the findings may be philosophically biased.
This research investigates luxury fashion consumption from a postmodernist perspective in order to shed light on the consumer pluralism that exists in today’s China and the nature of the consumer’s “being” (Grene, 1983). As a study of Chinese consumer values in the luxury fashion category, this research questions the predominant assumption that Chinese consumers are passive adopters of values that are attached to the imported Western luxury consumption experience. Instead, the researcher illustrates the complexity that is inherent in the Chinese consumer experience, and highlights both the consumer’s potential as a proactive value creator and the manipulative power of brand advertising. In order to understand Chinese consumer values in today’s postmodernist context, it is necessary to clarify the essential structure and components of the lived consumer experience. As the consumer is the central constructor of the consumption experience, this inquiry engages in reflexive reasoning and reflects on the origins of such experiences (Holstein and Gubrium, 1994).
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1.2 Research gap The available literature on the evolution of luxury fashion mainly focuses on new marketing and branding strategies that have been adopted in the West as a result of luxury fashion’s growing accessibility to larger strata of consumers and its ‘abundant rarity’ (Brun and Castelli, 2013; Kapferer, 2012). However, the impact of these phenomena on the Chinese marketplace has remained largely unexplored. Luxury fashion, as a major component of the luxury goods industry, is a relatively under- studied area, especially in the research context of non-Western markets. Moreover, in the realm of Chinese consumer studies, the existing research tends to involve hypothesis-testing using Western-oriented models (e.g. Sun et al., 2016; Zhang and He, 2012). In many cases, researchers’ ontological assumptions neglect socio-cultural interferences in the contextual value formation. Therefore, there is a clear research gap that necessitates adopting a research perspective without the danger of theory borrowing to study how value emerges in the Chinese consumer world.
1.3 Research aim Adopting the qualitative research approach of phenomenological interviewing, this research aims to elucidate Chinese consumers’ conceptualisation of luxury fashion consumption within the context of luxury fashion’s growing accessibility to social strata beyond the elite, from a socio-cultural analytic perspective.
1.4 Research objectives
➢ Critically review the literature on the ‘democratisation’ of luxury fashion; ➢ Investigate the conceptualisation of luxury fashion in China from the consumer- centric perspective using a qualitative research approach; ➢ Explore the phenomenological interpretation of consumer value in the luxury fashion sector; ➢ Investigate the impact that the growing accessibility of luxury fashion in China has had on the country’s consumer market; ➢ Examine the sociocultural significance of consumer value formation in the luxury fashion sector; ➢ Develop a conceptual framework for consumers’ perception of luxury fashion in China.
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Chapter Two: Literature review
2.1 The rationale for a literature review
Holbrook (2005, p. 46) defined consumer value as the consumer’s “interactive, relativistic preference and experience in consumption.” Therefore, understanding consumer value requires an exploration of the lived experiences of consumers in their multi-faceted engagement with the consumption phenomenon. The experiences of Chinese consumers in relation to luxury fashion consumption revolve around their conceptualisation of luxury fashion, along with marketplace idiosyncrasies in the specific socio-cultural context of China. Literature reviews function as a vital part of the process to understand consumers and their behaviour. Researchers attempt to garner consumers’ lived experience by “understanding the common-knowledge and practical reasoning used by the group under study (Goulding, 2003, p. 864).” In this research, the literature review has produced an intimate ‘knowledge mapping’ and an immersion into the world of the consumer that has facilitated introspection on the part of the researcher (Brucks, 1993), which is in contrast to a position of distance from consumers that can result in take-it-for-granted assumptions being made in the research.
Firstly, this literature review aims to deconstruct the often metaphorical and all- encompassing luxury fashion concept into its basic elements, which can then be used contextually or partially by consumers as building blocks to re-form their own interpretation of the consumption phenomenon. In order to understand marketplace idiosyncrasies, other researchers have noted that socio-cultural influences on consumers may go beyond the immediate service context, and that past experiences and perceptions of future ones can also impact the dynamics of today’s consumer value formation (Helkkula et al., 2012, p. 59). Consequently, the exploration of the socio-cultural background of Chinese luxury goods consumption in this paper has been set in a broader context. The researcher of this study has utilised the literature on luxury value perception to understand consumers’ experiences by investigating their conceptualisation process in a more deconstructed way. This literature has provided critical experience immersion and has helped minimise any biases that may have been
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created by previous events and memories. It should be noted that in treating the literature review as a process of gaining knowledge, a certain framework has been formed, which the researcher intents to use as a reference that can be tapped into, rather than as a set of assumptions leading the inquiry. This rationale is in the spirit of the reflective tradition in phenomenological interpretation (Bevan, 2014). Considering the literature review a part of the totality of an investigation, the researcher of this study views the inspection of the literature a primary tool to enable an understanding of the luxury consumption phenomenon (Morse, 1994).
2.2 Conceptualising luxury fashion
2.2.1 The evolutionary manifesto of Western luxury
In the past twenty years, the volume of academic research on the theme of luxury has seen an exponential growth (Miller and Mills, 2012a), whereas the actual definition of ‘luxury’ is still an on-going process. Linguistically, the term comes from the Latin word “luxuria,” which meant excess, lasciviousness or negative self-indulgence (Dubois et al., 2005). The classic definition of luxury is based on the necessity– ordinary–luxury scale, which refers to luxury as a non-necessity and a superfluity (Heine, 2011). Luxury is typically associated with wealth and exclusivity, and demonstrates the user’s financial and social status (Brun and Castelli, 2013), but the classic definition of luxury is product-oriented. Excellence of craftsmanship, which endorses products with performance longevity, has been recognised as one of the primary traits of luxury goods (Miller and Mills, 2012b; Chandon et al., 2016). Nowadays, luxury inclines to be experience-oriented (Atwal and Williams, 2009). A good example is luxury hospitality, an industry in which the intangible and the experiential are valued equally (Atwal and Williams, 2017; Walls et al., 2011).
Although there are numerous voices expressing concern about consumerism and the excessive commercialisation of culture in the modern world (Zhao and Belk, 2008), luxury has to be recognised as major by-products of modern urbanisation. Driven by consumerism, the global luxury goods and services industry generated over one trillion euros in sales in 2015 (Bain & Co, 2015). As a result, the luxury industry, with its promising commercial value and unique product traits, has attracted more and 14 / 167
more interest from academics from a variety of disciplines, ranging from sociology to business management. This has led to diverse definitions of luxury, depending on the author’s background and perspectives (e.g., Christodoulides et al., 2009; Wiedmann et al., 2009; Hennings et al., 2015).
Luxury is inherently a consumption-based phenomenon. Yeoman and McMahon- Beattie (2006, p. 320) stated that “the concept of luxury is incredibly fluid, and changes dramatically across time and culture.” As consumption is highly symbolic and diversified in different cultural settings (Holbrook and O’Shaughnessy, 1988; Belk et al., 1989), people in disparate global marketplaces define luxury differently (Wiedmann et al., 2007). For instance, luxury is often defined by its premium price. However, Kapferer and Laurent (2016) examined luxury fashion consumption in developed countries and found that in the same product category, the perceived minimum price of luxury can have an over 40 percent difference across countries. This finding illustrates the geographic differences in luxury perception in terms of price, which may further suggest diversity in conceptualising luxury. As the definition of luxury is highly subjective, it can vary from individual to individual, and even from one life stage to another. For instance, a youngster may consider a Louis Vuitton wallet a lavish treat, but may see it as fairly ordinary later on in life, when his or her financial status is stronger. Therefore, in short, the process of conceptualising luxury is influenced by an individual’s life experiences and by the social context he or she finds themselves in, but the underlying consequence of its consumption is the sense of enjoyment and indulgence of an expensive yet non-essential item (Lu, 2008).
2.2.2 A Chinese perspective of conceptualising luxury In the Chinese language, the most widely accepted translation of the word ‘luxury’ is ‘She Chi,’ in which ‘she’ means ‘extravagant’ and ‘chi’ means ‘arrogant and wasteful’ (Lu, 2008). The pejorative overtones have been mostly neutralised by the widespread usage of the term, and because the literal meaning only partially delivers the full sense of Western luxury, it regularly creates confusion in terms of the luxury consumption phenomenon in China.
The first historic usage of the term ‘She Chi’ was during the Qing dynasty (1644– 1911), and was applied by European Catholic missionaries and Chinese bureaucrats to describe the extravagance of the very wealthy (Lu, 2008). In modern Chinese, the
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word ‘She Chi Pin,’ which means luxury goods, was adopted by Western luxury brands when they first entered the Chinese market in the 1990s, and helped them position themselves as providers of a service for the affluent. The concept of “She Chi” is to a large extent a Western creation, and its adoption by Western luxury brands was designed to influence Chinese customers through marketing and advertising. From this perspective, the development of the Western-oriented luxury concept in China is a process of cultural authentication that includes four steps: (1) selection, (2) characterisation, (3) incorporation, and (4) transformation (Eicher and Erekosima, 1995; Miller-Spillman et al., 2012). In the case of luxury fashion, the concept of ‘luxury’ was selected and characterised in a symbolic form within the reference-frame of the receiving society, where the pursuit of enjoyment and the prestige of financial success were the chosen characteristics. Eicher and Erokosima (1995, p. 140) suggested that the characterisation process “occurs when the innovation occupies some functional role within the receiving cultural system by being incorporated towards meeting some adaptation need in the society, at either individual or collective levels, and often at both.” This shows that even the modern concept of luxury in China was initiated as a foreign invention, which went through a contextualisation process to allow for its further development within the cultural confines of the host. The contextualisation process was an opportunity for consumers to endow it with a more China-centric view on luxury culture, drawing on historical and cultural traditions.
There are two parallel representations of luxury in China. First is the luxury associated with the former imperial rulers of the country, as well as the royal families of Europe, who would commission expert craftsmen to produce fine goods using exclusive materials, such as jade and lacquer. Luxury products often came with the inscription ‘Bao Yong,’ which means ‘precious use,’ and indicated that they belonged to the royal collection and were not for a utilitarian purpose. The power of luxury of this kind to signify social status was enforced by complex laws governing the precise amounts and styles of luxury items a royal individual could use (Harrison- Hall, 2017). More importantly, these laws created a rigid framework designed to forbid ordinary people from owning or copying this type of luxury, so that it would remain exclusively in royal courts. The impact of such laws naturally diminished when the imperial order collapsed. 16 / 167
The other kind of luxury in China was guarded by a unique social class—the scholar– bureaucrats—who as high achievers in the national examination system ‘Ke Ju’ enjoyed a prestigious social status that was only just below the aristocracy (Lu, 2008). Scholar–bureaucrats in China held top educational and cultural posts, and benefited from the perks and power that accompanied them. This unique social and cultural capital generated a distinct type and style of luxury that was adopted by and associated with them. Wen Zaiheng’s book Treatise on Superfluous Things described the unique concept of ‘elegance’ attached to the manner of possessing high-status goods by Chinese scholar–bureaucrats, and argued that consuming luxury was a way to guide the elite class to achieve elegant living. This type of luxury mirrored and embodied the social status of scholar–bureaucrats (Clunas, 2004). Lu (2008) characterised the uniqueness of the lifestyles adopted by China’s old elites as “l’Art de Vivre.” Moreover, since scholar–bureaucrats were typically followers of Confucianism, which advocates moderation and humility, their choice of luxury items tended towards the exclusive yet inconspicuous, in contrast to the power display that royal/imperial luxury aimed at. The fact that the scholar–bureaucrat class was neither hereditary nor exclusionary (Lu, 2008) meant that their lifestyle, including their preferences with regards to luxury, were highly venerable and influential in Chinese society. Nowadays, the higher education exam system called ‘Gao Kao’ has replaced the imperial-era ‘Ke Ju,’ and around 10 million students annually sit for the exams, encouraged by the Chinese government (Chen, 2018). This shows that aspiring to join the elite, and thus wallow in luxurious living, through the attainment of high educational qualifications, is still a prevailing force in modern society.
2.2.3 Luxury fashion The broadening of the concept of luxury to include new categories of products and services, such as luxury cars, luxury hospitality and exclusive fashion, has led to contemporary research referring to it in indistinct terms. Personal luxury goods, including fashion items, account for over 25 percent of the total luxury goods market, second only to luxury automobiles (Bain & Co, 2016). Current academic research has not explicitly investigated the meaningful differences between fashion and non- fashion luxury consumption (So et al., 2013). However, the distinctive nature of luxury fashion consumption, as a pursuit of novelty for its own sake and as a
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culturally endorsed style of aesthetic expression (Sproles, 1974). has created a separate avenue of study into luxury consumption.
Vigneron and Johnson (2004) defined luxury fashion as a sub-category of luxury that is consumed publicly and used to display wealth. In contrast, Kapferer and Bastien (2009, p. 313) stated that “luxury and fashion represent two very different worlds, and they overlap only marginally.” They argued that luxury aims to construct an intrinsic stratification of social class, whereas the novelty of fashion makes social differentiation more fluid. However, their observation was based on a very narrow definition of luxury, which they termed “hard luxury” and defined as fine jewellery and watches, and in their opinion the only significant overlap between luxury and luxury fashion was haute couture. In today’s context, as Kapferer and Bastien stated, most luxury fashion, as mass-produced ready-to-wear and accessories that are inspired by the aesthetic classics of haute couture, is positioned in an intermediate and relatively accessible level of the luxury hierarchy scale proposed by Vickers and Renand (2003). Even in the case of very prestigious brands, such as Hermès, the retail price level of their ready-to-wear is less than a couturier’s individual production.
In its current stage of evolution, luxury fashion operates on the notion of abundant rarity, with highly effective marketing and branding strategies consolidating the perception of artificial exclusivity. The boundless power of commerce has accelerated through the process of merging luxury with fashion, whereby luxury consumption has penetrated the fashion system. The fashion ‘system’ was defined by Reilly (2012, p. 47) as “a globally based set of business establishments, small entrepreneurs, industry and government institutions, trade unions and other agencies that have an impact on what products the consumer has to choose from in the market place.” This statement indicates that fashion is not just a selection of products chosen by consumers, but a system of products fashioned by economic interests, in which consumer choices are limited by the industry itself based on which kind of products it wants to sell. Kean (1997) argued the fashion system is guarded by various gatekeepers, who make choices on behalf of consumers, such as designers and wholesalers offering forecasts of the industry’s trends, or marketers and merchandisers contextualising product offerings to final consumers. The profit-driven decision-making that underpins the novelty and glamour of luxury fashion is the reason why the concept of luxury fashion
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is relatively fluid, since the industry’s gatekeepers continue to reinvent the idea of luxury fashion to suit their financial interests.
From the consumer’s point of view, luxury fashion is the very essence of fine design, quality and status (Juggessur and Cohen, 2009). Fashion is a semiotic system, a language of signs (Barthes, 1983), that can be used to illustrate the lifestyle and values of its users (Potts, 2007). Traditionally, scholars believed that fashion evolution was based on social class emulation, and that the upper classes would introduce new styles which the lower classes would subsequently aspire to adopt (Veblen, 1912). However, Blumer (1969) challenged this idea by arguing that fashion can be guided and developed by any group that succeeds in capturing the zeitgeist. This train of thought implies that fashion represents the attitudes and desires of the time, and therefore can mirror the socio-cultural character of an era better than other elements of consumption. These days, consumers are exposed through fashion to diverse social and cultural symbols, which impose their own interpretation and meaning to fashion objects (Solomon, 1985; Thompson and Haytko, 1997). At a macro-level, fashion consumers make collective choices that reflect the zeitgeist of their societies, with consumers of luxury fashion making decisions that reflect their experiences and perceptions of society’s elite. Meanwhile, at a micro-level, fashion can be seen as a tool to construct an individual’s social identity, to either align with or distance themselves from specific categories of people (Tajfel and Turner, 1986). However, a consumer’s usage of this tool can vary depending on the context and circumstances of their lives (Fernie et al., 2010). From a more radical postmodernist perspective, Belk (1988, p. 160) argued that “we are what we have,” and proposed that individual possessions are not only a tool for constructing social identity, but also an extension of the existence of the self. He further propounded that self-extension through the choice of objects can even operate on a collective level, including in relation to national identities. In both theories, the socio-cultural context is a key determinant of what fashion represents, as it is the canvas in which the meaning of fashion is incorporated (McCracken, 2005). In this research, the investigation into the concept of luxury fashion requires further attention to the significance of contextual socio-cultural factors.
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2.2.4 The advent of luxury’s accessibility— luxury’s ‘democratisation’ As outlined earlier, luxury consumption, at least in its Western context, projects an individual’s financial ability to signify an elite social status (Castarede, 2008; Savage, 2015). However, at present, elitism is being adopted as a marketing term without its original connotations (Thomas, 2008). In an analysis of the luxury industry, Bain & Co (2016) found that only 25 percent of brands in the luxury sector can be classified as absolutely ‘old-luxe.’ This percentage for luxury fashion is even less, since haute couture is a niche segment of the overall luxury fashion landscape. Meanwhile, certain brands have sought to penetrate the middle-class market, and have compromised on quality, uniqueness and aesthetics in order to be more competitive (Heine, 2012; Keller, 2009). This move has resulted in “the emergence of new categories of consumers and new conceptualisations of luxury products” (Brun and Castelli, 2013, p. 828). Kapferer (2012) concluded that the overriding aim behind this ‘democratisation’ of luxury is to increase the volume of sales by adopting ‘abundant rarity’ as a strategy and expanding product portfolios (Kapferer and Bastien, 2009; Kapferer and Laurent, 2015).
Indicative of this new approach are the relatively accessible step-down diffusion lines targeting younger and less affluent consumer segments, including T by Alexander Wang (Alexander Wang), Play (Comme des Gacons), Pierre Balmain (Balmain) and McQ (Alexander McQueen). However, some of the more exclusive brands have also started to cater to middle-class consumers, offering cheaper ‘entry-level’ items in addition to their main flagship products. Chanel’s eyewear, for example, is typically priced at under £400, while its leather handbags usually sell for more than £3,500 each. In a sense, the strategy behind abundant rarity deconstructs the well-established hierarchy of luxury segmentation (Figure 1). Chanel eyewear is within the affordable luxury price range, whereas its handbags and haute couture lines are exclusively for the intermediate and higher income brackets. Clearly, in today’s luxury fashion world, a brand can be both accessible and inaccessible.
Another common strategy that is used to differentiate a brand from the ‘affordable luxury’ category and reinforce the quintessential image of exclusivity is that of ‘artification.’ This approach can bring luxury “a much needed moral and aesthetic endorsement,” and consolidate the brand’s elements of tradition, culture, creativity and timelessness (Kapferer, 2014, p. 375). By stressing culture and taste, brands can 20 / 167
regain the aura exclusivity that may have been undermined by large-scale production (Kapferer and Bastien, 2009). As an example, by ‘artifying’ its founder Gabrielle Chanel as a feminist legend, the brand managed to represent itself as an advanced cultural agent and zeitgeist at the forefront of fashion innovation. Collaborating with modern artists can also be an effective way to associate a brand with a more relevant contemporary image and construct a highbrow cultural identity. When Burberry adopted the ‘see–now–buy–now’ strategy, it concurrently curated a number of art exhibitions featuring British artists which echoed each season’s design theme, and it even commissioned out its younger-looking visual images to British music legend Peter Saville (Dawood, 2018). Loewe, meanwhile, launched a Craft Prize to modernise the brand’s old image through contemporary designs. Moreover, today’s luxury brands actively use experiential marketing tools to enhance the luxury experience, which has gone far beyond merely replicating the brand’s heritage inside boutiques (Brun and Castelli, 2013). Celine, the luxury womenswear brand within the LVMH group, has adopted boutique designs that aim to convey modern minimalism and give a holistic experience resonating the brand’s aesthetics. Dover Street Market, a multi-brand retailer, transformed its retail spaces into vibrant social venues by producing in-store pop-up events and modern art installations (Allwood, 2016). In summary, today’s luxury brands can apply various promotional and marketing strategies to enhance or refresh their image, without relying solely on heritage and history.
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Figure.1 The Hierarchy of Luxury Goods (Source: Alleres, 1990, in Vickers and Renand, 2003)
Figure 1 illustrates the categories of positioning and targeting between luxury brands. A similar classification was used by Bain & Co (2016), where the terminology was “accessible luxury,” “aspirational luxury,” and “absolute luxury.” In the more mature luxury markets of Europe and North America, the lifespan of an individual’s consumption has been expanded, with consumers making their first purchases of entry-level items early on, and them moving up to the more expensive product categories when they are financially more established. In the emerging markets of Asia, middle-class consumers are similarly being encouraged to consume luxury by starting with accessible purchases (Vickers and Renand, 2003). Yeoman and McMahon-Beattie (2006) analysed this new development and called it the “luxurification of society,” a term that refers to the consuming of affordable luxury products that meet aspirational needs. A more recent strategy adopted by some luxury brands is the launching of ‘capsule collections’ together with other brands that may not be high-end. An example of such collaboration was the one between Louis Vuitton and Supreme, which represented the fusion of a highbrow elite culture and a streetwear brand, and created a new dimension of luxury democratisation. Luxury brands today not only acknowledge the purchasing power of the new generation, they also pay tribute to youth culture. Luxury is sacrificing its cultural privilege to embrace this highly promising consumer group.
Thanks to the democratisation of luxury and a challenging market environment, levels of exclusivity and premium pricing have been visibly downgraded. There is no denying that luxury brands in the past would always select locations extremely carefully in order to maintain the aura of exclusivity, even when targeting mid-ranged consumers (Miller and Mills, 2012a), but the current reality is that consumers can purchase luxury goods easily through alternative means, such as online retailers or discount outlets. Luxury brands operate in a market environment in which rigid controls over retailing, marketing and communication are becoming increasingly harder to maintain. As a result, Kapferer and Bastien (2009) suggested that luxury should move to the domain of culture and taste, because when a product’s supply is abundant, the only type of exclusivity that can be offered to consumers is of the
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intangible image sort. However, as the global marketplace continues to be vitalised by cultural diversity, identifying what is a superior cultural taste can be problematic. The aristocratic association of luxury brands may be aspirational for European consumers but not for Asian ones, due to different cultural heritages. Therefore, in the age of abundant rarity, understanding the context of a certain marketplace and its culture is vital for luxury brands.
2.2.5 Contextualising luxury fashion consumption in China
2.2.5.1 Radical socio-cultural transformation
In a seminal piece of research on cross-cultural consumption traits, Ilmonen (1985, p. 415) argued that “consumption does not take place in an economic and social vacuum.” Today, it is a widely held belief that consumption is inherently a cultural activity, with the influencing factors being cultural values and ideology, tradition versus change, the media, the arts, the economy and politics (Hamilton, 1997). Although research on non-Western consumption traits still lags behind that which has a Western focus, collaboration between Western and eastern researchers has shed light on how diverse historical, socio-cultural, economic, ideological and political factors that can affect consumers have generated different consumption patterns and trends (Jafari et al., 2012).
In this study, the researcher sets a research context of how Chinese consumers process and generate perceptions of luxury consumption through their experiences of China’s unique socio-cultural characteristics. Socio-cultural factors play an important role in knowledge gathering. The current imbalance between West-based and East-based research, in terms of scope and depth, can be accounted by social and economic development gaps. Even though there is a universal acknowledgement of the dramatic progress in technology and applied sciences in the East, the fact remains that social sciences are still the domain of Western researchers (UNESCO, 2010). However, globalisation has blurred the socio-cultural borders between the East and the West. For instance, affluent ‘Generation Y’ consumers in China have on average 1.5 years’ living experience in the West (Hurun, 2017). These people are still recognised as Chinese, but have a ‘new Chinese’ identity that is a mélange of the East and the West. 23 / 167
If it is accepted that consumption is culture-oriented and is an activity related to identity construction, then research on non-Western consumption traits should avoid making generalisations by simply borrowing Western concepts and testing them in the East. Arnould et al. (2006) stated that seeking a more contextual understanding should be the new focus of consumer studies.
Acknowledging the fact that consumers and the world of fashion are connected by radical socio-cultural transformations that affect both (Hui, 2014), research on consumer behaviour in China’s luxury fashion industry should revolve around a contextual understanding of socio-cultural influences. With the accelerated globalisation process that is taking place in mainland China, cultural homogenisation has gradually impacted China’s luxury landscape by blurring the consumption-based boundaries (Eckhardt et al., 2015). However, for a more holistic understanding of socio-cultural influences, the impact of traditional Chinese culture must be considered (Gupta, 2012). Zhang and Kim (2013) found that Chinese consumers nowadays are influenced both by tradition and the fast pace of modernisation, and therefore critically reviewing these cultural tensions can contribute to understanding the on- going dynamics of the evolution of Chinese luxury consumers. Social factors must also be examined, as haphazard social changes have interrupted the development of fashion culture in China and led to distinct consumer behaviour (Han et al., 2010; Hughes et al., 2015).
Focusing on a social system rather than ego-integrative morals (Early, 1989), China is an example of a collectivism culture, and this culture has resulted in consumption patterns that are different from individualism-oriented ones. Thus far, the impact of the socio-cultural tensions existing between the traditional and the modern China has been studied by scholars of organisational research (e.g., Liu et al., 2016; Seo and Gao, 2014) and consumer culture research (e.g., Eckhardt et al., 2015; Eckhardt, 2015). However, the perspectives of Chinese consumers on luxury consumption have not yet been fully researched.
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2.2.5.2 The increasing impact of social simulation
In studying Chinese consumers’ perceptions of luxury in the age of its democratisation, the impact of branding and marketing is of primary importance.
Today’s Chinese consumers are highly digital savvy. Even though online luxury purchases only account for 5 to 10 percent of the overall luxury market, the annual group has reached 28 percent, which demonstrates the high market potential (KPMG, 2015). Daigou and Haitao (Purchasing goods from the overseas market via a third party), a market size estimated 70 billion Yuan to 100 billion Yuan (≈7.9 billion to 11.3 billion GBP) (Bof, 2015; Feng, 2015). Despite the fact that certain global social media platforms are banned in China, Chinese luxury consumers are intensively immersed in domestic digital platforms for purchasing, browsing and researching, no less than their Western peers.
Meanwhile, actively engaging in multi-channel media platforms has also meant that Chinese consumers are highly exposed to the marketing activities of luxury brands, which aim to reproduce and manipulate the meaning of luxury. As mentioned earlier, a branding strategy that Chanel adopted was to present its brand founder as a cultural icon and feminist pioneer, rather than just an elegant dressmaker. And Burberry, through its active multi-channel marketing campaigns, successfully reconstructed an image that was associated with ‘chav’ culture in the 1990s into a new trendy British identity that has high appeal for Chinese consumers (Gadfly, 2017). As the commercial goal of ‘democratising’ luxury was to encourage middle-class consumers to purchase high value-added products under the name of luxury, the use of powerful marketing and advertising tools, defined as social simulation by consumer researcher Vattimo (1992), can have extremely powerful impacts on consumer behaviour, not only in terms of their decision-making process, but also in terms of their perception of luxury. Social simulation is initially embedded with artificial information produced to serve luxury’s branding and marketing purposes. However, as a tool for consumers to construct and express identity (Goulding, 2003), that artificial and fragmented information can be a guide to the formation of consumers’ worldviews. As consumption researcher Schor (2002) stated, “luxury” is the new standard of “comfort.” Research by Zhao and Belk (2008) found that consumers in Asia create an urbanized identity even with Western-made luxury goods. To put it briefly, in today’s 25 / 167
media-dominated society (Venkatesh, 1992), advertising and marketing campaigns promoting luxury cannot have just short-term effects, as they also affect consumers’ long-term value perceptions.
2.3 Chinese consumers changing value perceptions of luxury fashion
This section starts with a critical review of the current literature on luxury value perception, and continues with a knowledge framing of Chinese consumers’ conceptualisation of luxury fashion. The researcher has identified the four most important aspects of consumers’ value perception of luxury fashion from the current body of literature. It should be noted that although this research is consumer-oriented, reflecting on the current knowledge as presented in the literature helps access the ‘general knowledge’ that is experienced by Chinese consumers in luxury consumption. The researcher has paid special attention to the origins of these experiences, from which the structure of Chinese consumers’ conceptualisation of luxury fashion is constructed.
2.3.1 Approaching the value formation of luxury fashion
In the literature on luxury consumption, the major stimulus influencing the willingness of consumers to make a purchase is the consumer’s assessment of how a brand represents prestige, lavishness, and opulence (Miller and Mills, 2012a; 2012b). Scholars have attempted to decode the all-encompassed luxury concept using different lenses. In 2004, Vigneron and Johnson proposed the Brand Luxury Index framework, consisting of five dimensions of a luxury brand. These are perceived conspicuousness, uniqueness, quality, hedonism, and extended-self, and are categorised into two groups—non-personal perceptions and personal perceptions—which echoes research by Brun and Castelli (2013) that luxury is a combination of the tangible aspect, such as product-related excellence, and the intangible aspect, such as the emotional appeal establishing the reputation of the brand. Luxury value’s duality principle is also acknowledged by other consumer researchers (Table 1).
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Table.1 Summary of key literature on consumer value perceptions of luxury products
Dubois et Vigneron and Bethon et al., Tynan et al., Shukla and al., 2001 Johnson, 2004 2009 2009 Purani, 2012
Non- Expressive personal- Uniqueness Material Functional Distinction Sacrifice oriented Quality embodiment Cost/sacrifice Utilitarian perceptions
Self-directed symbolic Individual Personal- Conspicuous Other- Elitism subjective Hedonistic oriented Hedonistic directed Hedonism Social Relational perceptions Extended self symbolic collective Hedonistic
In other contextual research on luxury consumption in emerging markets, such as China, South Korea, India and other south-Asian countries (e.g. Park et al., 2008; Eng and Bogaert, 2008), researchers have identified another duality of perceived luxury value — its social signifier function and its personal and hedonistic component, which can be presented respectively as ‘luxury for others’ and ‘luxury for oneself’ (Kapferer and Bastiem, 2009). The theoretical progression is relevant to the acknowledgement of the role of culture. Similarly, the framework by Berthon et al. (2009) emphasises the compatibility between the three realms of material embodiment, individual subjective value and the social collective. Researchers have also suggested two aspects for further investigation — “the value of luxury brand signalling to others,” and “the value of that signalling to the signaller” (Berthon et al., 2009, p. 48). This framework was recongised by Shukla and Purani (2012) in a study of luxury value perception in a cross-cultural context. Addressing the significant tensions between individualism and collectivism that exist in Western and Asian culture, and which affect consumers’ preferences, needs and rights (Hofstede, 1991), Shukla and Purani (2012) have proposed a “self-directed” and “other-directed” research rationale with empirical investigations.
These various research perspectives emphasise two aspects of luxury — the comparatively subjective utilitarian use of luxury, and the more objective psychological benefits. Also, as luxury brands were originally associated with the aura of exclusivity and rarity, prestige prices have become one of the most important
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indicators (Shukla and Purani, 2012). The perspective of investigating both the subjective and the objective aspects of luxury indicates that luxury is understood as inherently a cultural phenomenon. Traindis (1994, p. 22) defined culture as “a set of human-made objective and subjective elements.... shared among those who could communicate with each other.” Therefore, investigating consumer pluralism in the luxury fashion sector in China requires a decoding of the cultural complexities in luxury fashion ( Miller-Spillman et al., 2012), and this researcher subscribes to this perspective set by (Shukla and Purani, 2012). For the sake of clarity, this study adopts the more commonly used term “financial value” (Wiedmann et al., 2009) instead of Shukla and Purani’s (2012) term “cost/sacrifice,” and has includeed Shukla and Purani’s “self-directed symbolic value” and “other-directed symbolic value” into the “conspicuous value” category, which has been emphasised by many researchers in their studies on Chinese luxury consumption (e.g., Chen and Lamberti, 2015; Eckhardt et al., 2015; Sun and et al., 2016).
2.3.2 Financial value perception The financial dimensions of luxury’s consumer value revolve around their direct monetary aspect (Hennigs et al., 2013; 2016). Researchers have claimed that there is a direct link between the financial value perception and the quality perception, since the relationship between price and perceived quality is theoretically positive (Parguel et al., 2016). However, Okonkwo (2016) stated that the effect of this positive relationship can be affected by the prior information held by consumers, and that consumers with limited knowledge and experience about a product or brand may have a stronger tendency to use price to assess its quality. When a luxury product sells at a discounted price, the consumer can perceive it as a quality downgrade (Aaker, 1997; Dacin and Smith, 1994).
Chinese luxury consumers today are widely recognised as amongst the world’s top spenders, even though historically China has been a nation of savers (Wang and Lin, 2009; Horton, 2016). The huge contradiction between today’s spending patterns and the stereotypical perception of the Chinese as prudent points to the tensions between traditional values being perceived and the less-known dynamic socio-economic
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environment. Table 2 shows the major socio-cultural factors that may contribute to Chinese consumers’ saving-oriented behaviour patterns.
Table.2 Socio-cultural factors underlying Chinese consumers’ saving-oriented consumption attitudes
Social factors Precautionary saving motives Increased income and expenditure uncertainties due to large-scale corporate restructuring and downsizing Incomplete social welfare system Demographic changes A sharp decline in Chinese youth dependency rate The expected rapid ageing of the population Official media and ideological Being thrift becomes the mainstream indoctrination activates ideological value Cultural Confucianism value The traditional values of believing in factors destiny and being vulnerable in front of nature Collectivist culture The long-term orientation and inter- generational family connection featured in collectivism society make consumers incline to save for the future Source: Ma and Yi, 2010; Wang and Lin, 2009
Influenced by the Confucian philosophical principle that “He who will not economise will have to agonise,” the Chinese rank ‘thriftiness’ as a major element in their traditional culture, and it even forms part of mainstream ideology, with the Chinese Communist Party preaching it officially (Wang and Lin, 2009; Thompson, 2011). In terms of luxury consumption, Chinese thriftiness may be due to the gap between their relatively low incomes, compared to their Western peers, and their desire for luxury purchases. This ‘thrifty’ value proposition can also be seen in the increasing resourcefulness that Chinese consumers are displaying. For example, consumers nowadays are actively using the overseas third-party personal shopping service daigou to purchase luxury products, thereby avoiding the tariffs on such goods that can be up to 60 percent in some cases (Fortune, 2016). This grey market trade, which is valued at 55 to 75 billion RMB, has forced luxury retailers to adjust their pricing policies and reduce the price differential between the Chinese mainland and overseas markets (BoF, 2016).
However, recent research by Chen and Lamberti (2015) that explored Chinese upper- class value perceptions showed a significant leap from people’s general 29 / 167
preconceptions regarding their understanding of luxury’s financial value. Their study revealed that elite shoppers recognise that premium prices are a tool used to position luxury in the market, and are willing to pay these higher prices in order to maintain the exclusivity of their purchases. With a higher purchasing power and stronger brand awareness, the perception of the financial value of luxury fashion would be transformed from a search for bargains to a balance between exclusivity and value- for-money.
2.3.3 Conspicuous value perception From Holt’s (2004) point of view, one of the critical values in luxury is its ability to visibly signal and convey its associations and elements, including social and financial privilege. Historically, conspicuousness in luxury consumption was described by Veblen (1973) as “the purchase of expensive goods to wastefully display wealth rather than to attempt to satisfy more utilitarian needs of the consumer, for the sole objective of gaining or maintaining higher social status” (Eckhardt et al., 2015, p. 807). The race for class and status has been recognised as the main engine of luxury consumption. In the realm of luxury consumption research, the relationship between the nature of luxury and the conspicuousness embodied in its consumption has contributed to a wide range of studies across different cultural contexts (e.g., Comeo and Jeanne, 1997; Mason, 1984; Nancy and Arron, 1998; O’cass and Forst, 2002). With the new business paradigm of luxury’s democratisation, the luxury market is more heterogeneous than status-driven, since the concept of luxury has been “normalised” (Kastanakis and Balabanis, 2014). Consequently, research on conspicuous consumption by contemporary luxury consumers requires a more in- depth examination of contextual characteristics (Wilcox, Kim and Sen, 2009).
2.3.3.1 The cultural significance of face
Chinese consumers’ conspicuous value perception of luxury consumption is highly related to the concept of face (Wang and Lin, 2009). Defined as the recognition by others of an individual’s social standing and position (Lockett, 1988), face reflects an individual’s personal efforts to acquire wealth, position and power. As Chinese culture is set in a collectivist mould, which values interpersonal relationships, gaining face enables followers to move higher up the status ladder (King and Myers, 1977) by achieving validation from other in-group members. Face also represents the image of 30 / 167
prestige and the social status that people want to display (Wong and Ahuvia, 1998), which makes it a tool for the construction of a preferred social identity (Tajfel and Turner, 1986). In recent studies, a state of conspicuousness was found to be achieved by a consumer when the individual’s wealth display was validated by the audience (Manson, 2001).
For many years, affluent Chinese were known for their preferences for ‘loud’ and highly conspicuous product designs, which enabled them to display their wealth noticeably (Eckhardt et al., 2015; Zhang and He, 2012). In the early stages of the luxury revolution in China, lovers of luxury would rush to buy prestige brands that displayed their logos prominently (Pinheiro-Machado, 2010), because the logo was the most visible code that consumers could rely on to get their peers’ recognition and therefore gain face (Blanchard, 2016). This tendency is still in evidence today, despite the fact that consumers’ brand literacy and knowledge of fashion have increased significantly. But even though Chinese consumers who have moved away from entry- level items still feel attracted to the signature products of the big luxury brands, they are also gravitating towards items that have refined and subtle elements and are well- known to the public by their premium prices (Wu, 2014). For example, super-rich Chinese consumers see Hermes’ Birkin bag as one of most desirable luxury fashion items, even though no logo is displayed in the design (Waldmier, 2017).
2.3.3.2 Social tensions as stimuli for conspicuous consumption
In order to decode Chinese consumers’ craving of conspicuous fashion goods, a critical review of the social background should be carried out. China was a closed society from the inception of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1978, during which time bourgeois lifestyles were prohibited and all members of society were a part of the proletariat (Hughes et al., 2015). This historical period was subsequently condemned, and when Deng Xiaoping came to power, the country was opened up to the outside world and the economic system was reformed from a planned economy to a socialist free-market one. Modern China has been further transformed into a “consumption-focused economy” (Goldman Sachs, 2016), and is on its way to becoming a fully-fledged consumer society. Zhao and Belk (2008)
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pointed out that “never in the course of human history have a larger number of people gained more wealth in such a short time” (p. 231).
The heterogeneousness of the booming wealth of Chinese citizens, and the pervasive memory of past poverty, form the stimuli for the stronger conspicuousness traits in Chinese luxury consumption. Under Deng, achieving financial success was encouraged and by the post-Mao Communist Party. Therefore, possessing visible luxuries became a way for Chinese consumers to compensate for their previous state of extreme thriftiness (Rucker and Galinsky, 2008). Moreover, the globalisation of culture has also contributed to conspicuous patterns of consumption. Western consumerism and materialistic urban lifestyles are considered elements of advanced living (Eckhardt et al., 2015). This perception has been recorded in different cultural contexts as well, for example by Charles et al. (2007), who found that African and Hispanic Americans spent a larger proportion of their incomes on conspicuous fashion items than White Caucasians. Overcoming negative racial stereotypes may be one key driver of such consumption patterns, and Chinese consumers may be driven by similar motivations.
2.3.3.3 The rise of inconspicuous consumption in China
In the literature on luxury branding, the concepts of status consumption and conspicuous consumption are generally interchangeable (Vigneron and Johnson, 2004). However, as part of the landscape of democratised luxury consumption, there is evidence of a growing disassociation between the two within China’s luxury consumer culture. As traditional conspicuous luxury goods trickle down to lower classes, the elite has been forced to select even more exclusive inconspicuous items (Han et al., 2010) to maintain its status. Inconspicuous alternatives can benefit sophisticated customers by limiting or preventing imitation by lower social groups (Hebdige, 1999), and can allow their acquirers to show off their superior tastes and distinguish themselves from lower status consumers (Eckhardt et al., 2015).
There is no denying that luxury customers’ knowledge and tastes have evolved significantly over the past decade. Nevertheless, whether the market has matured enough for a general leap from conspicuous consumption to subtle inconspicuous consumption cannot yet to be judged. According to Eckhardt et al. (2015), when
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many people have owned conspicuous luxury brands, it is fairly natural for there to be a shift away from loud, visible brand signals to niche, highbrow choices, as the goal is to stand out from the crowds. As Han et al. (2010) pointed out, the two-tier society (the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’) in Veblen’s arguments has been transformed into a highly complex consumer world. Conspicuous still exists, but it is signified by diverse signals in different consumer groups or sub-cultures. The following table summarises the major socio-cultural factors that form the context for Chinese consumers’ conspicuous perceptions of luxury consumption:
Table.3 Socio-cultural factors underlying Chinese consumers’ conspicuous perceptions of luxury fashion
Social factors Self-compensation Possessing visible luxuries is the way to compensate for people’s previous powerless state of living in thrift (Rucker and Galinsky, 2008)
Enhance personal self By demonstrating their financial capability, Chinese people try to prove to their global peers that they no longer belong to a financially disadvantaged group
The urban anonymous are willing to sacrifice daily necessities and spend more time on pre-purchase searching (Belk, 1999)
Income equality Elite consumers tend to use “inconspicuous luxury” to avoid envy (Belk, 2011)
Cultural Face Consumers can receive favourable factors social image and status by displaying their wealth (Mason, 1998)
Collectivist culture Members of collectivist cultures emphasise inter-generational rather than individual interest, and are likely to maintain a longer time horizon with respect to individual consumption
Source: The author
2.3.4 Functional value perception
Defined by Voss et al. (2003), functional value refers to the utilitarian dimension of products. In other words, functional value represents the consumer’s rational side of
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motivation in consumption. In the field of luxury consumption, since the price–quality perception is a dominant aspect (Shukla and Purani, 2012), consumers expect better quality and performance from luxury brands in order to justify the premium price. Shukla (2012) argued that functional excellence, combined with premium prices, are inherent traits of luxury brands.
For a luxury item, a very elemental aspect of functionality comes from its quality value, including delicacy and craftsmanship, along with the uniqueness value in terms of product rarity and exclusivity (Chen and Lamberti, 2015). Zhou et al. (2008) posited that quality value perception includes a high-quality image, a high-level of reliability and durability, and an association with state-of-the-art technology. The uniqueness value is also an important aspect of luxury’s functionality, as it endorses the “rarity principle” of luxury products (Phau and Prendergast, 2000). Unique products are usually novel, scarce and utilised by a limited number of consumers (Tian et al., 2001). Watson and Yan (2013) also suggested that consumers often treat their unique purchases as an investment. In the luxury fashion sector, unique products can include items using exotic materials, involving atelier craftsmanship, runway pieces with limited production, and limited-editions or tailor-made goods. Consumers are driven by their motivation to disassociate themselves from the crowds, and purchasing unique products is one solution. From this viewpoint, functional perception has a certain level of co-relation with perceived conspicuousness.
Although most fashion houses still offer unique products to their most privileged clients, these only account for a very small percentage of overall production and sales. Since rarity and exclusivity have been gradually dissociated from luxury, luxury brands have been adopting alternative strategies to maintain the desired luxury value for the consumer (Kapferer, 2012). In response to these new circumstances, Chen and Lamberti (2015) proposed a further dimension—usability value–which includes innovativeness, aesthetics and durability. This new dimension reflects an emerging trend whereby luxury branding seeks to create a certain level of emotional attachment with consumers, instead of merely focusing on promoting their products’ exclusivity.
As for Chinese luxury consumers’ functional value perception, both quantitative (Wang et al., 2010) and qualitative approaches (Chen and Lamberti, 2015) demonstrate that Chinese people do emphasise the quality performance of luxury.
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Meanwhile, cross-cultural research by Shukla et al. (2015) illustrates that the Chinese value the functional perspective more than other Asians. Out of all the elements of functional value perception, the importance of superior product material has been highlighted. Chinese consumers also point out the recognisability of classic designs, which is linked to the usability value proposed by Chen and Lamberti (2015). In research by Zhang and He (2010), it was found that the perception of uniqueness is related to consumers’ knowledge of fashion, and that the more knowledge consumers had, the higher the level of uniqueness they looked for. This relationship was also confirmed by Chen and Lamberti (2015), who found that experienced luxury consumers only sought what they perceived as highly unique brands. Their research also discovered that the need for uniqueness is linked to individualism, which is not an inherited trait in Chinese people.
Even though media censorship hinders Chinese consumers from being fully engaged with global consumer communication platforms, the fashion media has survived under the new economy guidelines, which aim to “rebalance away from an investment-led and export-driven economy towards a consumption-focused economy” (Goldman Sachs, 2016, p. 7). Meanwhile, widely used domestic social media, along with technological advances in communication platforms, provide the opportunity for the digitalisation of fashion marketing communications in China (Kapferer, 2015; Liu et al., 2016). WeChat has become the leading online platform for luxury brands to connect with Chinese consumers, provide brand and product information, and encourage followers to share online posts. Through such platforms, fashion knowledge has been accelerating amongst Chinese consumers, and access to them is generally liberal.
Reflecting Rogers’ (2010) ‘Diffusion of Innovation’ theory, Chinese consumers are now moving from imitation to differentiation in their fashion consumption behaviour, since adequate product and brand knowledge has already been acquired. Initially, luxury consumption concentrated on big brands and loud signals, but nowadays modern Chinese consumers are demonstrating highly diversified tastes and shopping preferences that are not only different from Western peers’, but also from last generation’s. Furthermore, the Chinese luxury market has been vitalised by younger and digitally savvy consumers (Liu et al., 2016), who are more likely to be fashion
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innovators and less likely to be restrained by traditional cultural values and social norms (Muzinich et al., 2003). Zhang and Kim (2013) upheld the essential role of the highly educated, youthful and brand-conscious fashion innovators of China’s luxury goods market. There is a clear trend towards luxury consumers possessing stronger capabilities to evaluate the functional value of luxury and becoming more individual- oriented.
2.3.5 Hedonistic value perception Although enjoyment and pleasure have been at the heart of consumption throughout the ages, these motivations only began to receive serious empirical attention in the 1980s, when Hirschman and Holbrook (1982) officially introduced to the research domain the concept of hedonistic consumption. They defined hedonistic consumption as “those facets of consumer behaviour that relate to the multisensory, fantasy and emotive aspects of the product usage experience (Hirschman and Holbrook, 1982, p. 92).”
In the luxury goods field, the hedonistic value of consumption has been well documented, and the case made that “a vast majority subscribes to the hedonic motive… One buys luxury goods primarily for one’s pleasure” (Dubois and Laurent, 1996, p. 472). Vigneron and Johnson (2004) argued that the hedonistic dimension reflects the sensory gratification and sensory pleasure expected from luxury consumption. Researchers have also highlighted the unique features of consumers with strong hedonistic values — their consumption behaviour is characterised by the pursuit of instant gratification and recreation, symbolic spending, and minimal susceptibility to interpersonal influences (Wang et al., 2000; Vigneron and Johnson, 2004). With increasing research interest in China’s luxury consumption patterns, investigations into hedonistic consumption in China have found that hedonistic recreation can have both individualistic and inter-personal aspects.
According to Hofstede’s (1980) intercultural communication theory, China is a typical representative of collectivist culture, where interdependence, emotional control and moderation discourage individuals’ hedonistic consumption motivations (Yu and Bastin, 2010). However, hedonistic traits have gradually been acknowledged by consumer research on modern China. Researchers first noticed the phenomenon in the early 1990s, when people who had been through a long period of deprivation
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began consuming for primarily hedonistic reasons (Chu and Ju, 1993). In the early 2000s, there were societal tensions between those promoting Western hedonism and those upholding classical virtues, with the traditional Confucian principle of self- discipline acting as a strong restraint (Wang and Lin, 2009). Recent research has indicated that urban citizens tend to demonstrate explicit hedonistic traits in luxury consumption, and that consumers enjoy such consumption in the recreational sense of self-indulgence and as a novelty-seeking exercise (Chen and Lamberti, 2015).
A major factor facilitating the transmission of hedonistic values to China is media communications — the print media, commercials, Western films and the internet, with the frequent appearance of foreign brands as indicators of hedonistic values. These multifaceted media communications mostly target urban professionals and the younger generation (Thompson, 2011). Another factor that stimulates hedonistic consumption in China is the widely adopted practice of experiential marketing in the luxury retailing sector. Experiential marketing, defined by Atwal and Williams (2009, p. 341), refers to “marketing initiatives that give consumers in-depth, tangible experience in order to provide them with”. Luxury brands aim to embed value in personalised experiences created through active consumer participation. In effect, they use multiple stimuli to activate consumer participation and connection by incorporating aesthetic, entertainment, educational and escapism elements that foster personal-oriented hedonistic consumption (Atwal and Williams, 2009). Due to the relatively low brand awareness and loyalty of Chinese consumers, luxury brands have utilised multiple marketing strategies to increase the level of brand recognition, including direct-managed regional flagship stores where consumers can get engaged with a holistic sensational luxury experience and be driven to the hedonistic-led consumption (Liu et al., 2015). Burberry, for example, spent £70 million in 2010 to buy out its Chinese franchise partner as part of its restructuring plan for a unified global image (Wood, 2010). In 2014, it opened a flagship store in Shanghai to reinvent the shopping experience of its global flagship store on Regent Street in London and create a unique high-tech luxury shopping experience (Burberry, 2014).
In the unique social environment of China, consumers may achieve an extra degree of hedonism thanks to their pre-purchase research and evaluation. According to research by Wilson and Klaaren (1992), consumers’ affective reactions to stimuli are formed
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based on their expectations of those stimuli. In other words, the more consumers expect a luxury experience, the more they enjoy it once they experience it (Alba and Williams, 2013). Chinese consumers are less likely to make impulsive consumption decisions than their Western counterparts. On the contrary, they follow sensible shopping patterns that involve extensive time on recreational research on social media to ensure right purchase decisions. During this process, the level of expectation is raised. Research also illustrates that the waiting process to experience desired events can be seen as a prospective savouring, and the emotional experience of anticipating can intensify the hedonistic emotion at the end, regardless of its cause (Van Boven and Ashworth, 2007). Table 4 below summarises how hedonistic consumption is amplified by luxury branding and marketing, and how Chinese traditional culture cultivates the unique Chinese hedonistic shopping behaviour.
Table.4. The socio-cultural tensions affecting Chinese consumers’ hedonistic perceptions of luxury fashion
Social Active media communications The frequent appearances of foreign simulations brands in media work as indicators of hedonistic values, which target urban professionals and the younger generation in China (Thompson, 2011).
Experiential marketing practices Luxury brands use multi-stimuli to activate consumer participation and connection by incorporating aesthetic, entertainment, educational and escapism elements that foster personal- oriented hedonistic consumption (Atwal and Williams, 2009).
Historical History of long-term deprivation After long-term deprivation and factors ideological control on consumption, Chinese consumers adopt consumption as a form of self-compensation (Chu and Ju, 1993).
Cultural factors Traditional lifestyle of living in thrift Traditional Chinese cultural values contribute to consumers’ programmatic consumption patterns, which enables consumers to achieve an extra degree of hedonism thanks to the pre-purchase research and evaluation (Wilson and Klaaren, 1992).
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Source: The author
2.4 Literature review summary
The literature review explored the knowledge on the worlds of consumers in which the conceptualisation of luxury fashion takes place. Through a process of investigating consumers’ knowledge on the concept of luxury fashion, the researcher identified two themes of knowledge in relation to this conceptualisation — the democratisation of luxury, which has created a ‘new’ luxury concept for Chinese consumers to adopt; and the context of consumers’ experiences, as the socio-cultural environment in which Chinese consumers are immersed.
In the ‘old-luxe’ age, marketing and advertising campaigns targeted only an exclusive consumer group, and the advertisers and the luxury consumers shared similar values. However, the ‘new’ concept of luxury represents a diluted exclusivity being compensated by an abundant rarity and by marketing and branding activities creating emotional connections with luxury consumers. Through the process of authenticating the imported phenomenon of luxury fashion consumption, Chinese consumers are incorporating socio-cultural references into their understanding.
Acknowledging the intertwined effects of socio-cultural influences and the social simulations brought about by luxury’s democratisation not only represent a lived environment where digital-savvy and globalized Chinese consumers situate, but also it philosophically responds to a postmodern society which is formed by consumption, media and fragmented experiences (Connor, 1995; Firat and Venkatesh, 1995; Venkatsh, 1992).
By adopting the “self-directed vs. other-directed” perspective of Shukla and Purani (2012), the researcher acquired an understanding of how China’s socio-cultural environment influences consumers in their perception of the four value perspectives of luxury fashion consumption. These collectivist socio-cultural effects on Chinese consumers’ value perceptions emanate not only from the current economic context of a socialist free-market economy with Chinese characteristics, but are also due to historical memories of extreme thrift and Confucian ideals, with a unique definition of elitism, as well as consumers’ aspirations to be ‘modern’ and ‘Western.’ 39 / 167
Figure 2 shows the conceptual framework that represents the process of consumers’ conceptualisation of luxury fashion in China. It also illustrates a perspective for conducting research field work and analysing data. The researcher aims to investigate how socio-cultural tensions and luxury’s democratisation influence the four value dimension of luxury fashion, and thus generate a concept of how luxury is being transformed by Chinese consumers.
Figure.2 The prior framework of Chinese consumers’ luxury fashion conceptualisation
Source: author
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Chapter Three: Research Methodology
3.1 Research philosophy
As explained by Arnould and Thompson (2005), consumer research is an investigation to decode market-driven commodities and desire-inducing marketing symbols. In other words, consumer research has dual identities — on the one hand, consumer research has a practical, commercial orientation, whereby insights from consumer research can develop a more comprehensive view of certain marketplaces, which is critical for effective decision-making (Wilson, 2012); on the other, consumer research can be more theoretically-bound, whereby research aims to examine the underlying meanings in consumption from sociological, anthropological and general cultural lenses. In today’s consumer research realm, two themes can be identified — scholars who subscribe to objectivism assumptions, and therefore their research is inclined to be carried out in a deductive and quantitative fashion; scholars who recognise the subjective nature of an inquiry, and whose studies utilise inductive, qualitative research to generate knowledge of the consumer world. The former contributes knowledge within rigid bounds, and researchers who value the subjectivity in consumer research can explore unknown domains. Although there is a growing trend towards the non-positivist school of thought, there is no philosophical or methodological superiority in carrying out consumer research. Nevertheless, considerations regarding research philosophy and methodology have to remain consistent during a research process, as the objective in choosing the methodology is to truthfully represent consumers’ ‘lived’ worlds and help to achieve the research aims without tapping into the void of over-generalisations. In this chapter, the researcher will discuss the philosophical and methodological approaches in the current consumer research, by comparing positivism traditions and current interpretivist trend. The research strategy in this specific research context will also be explained.
3.1.1 Ontological assumption
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As the cornerstone in constructing research methodology (Holden and Lynch, 2004), ontological issues relate to the nature of reality and its characteristics (Creswell, 2007), and question “whether the reality is external to the individual… or the product of individual consciousness” (Burrell and Morgan, 1979, p. 1). A discussion of ontology reflects how a researcher assumes what the world is. In today’s social research domain, the debate is still centred on the positivist paradigm and the non-positivist paradigm. Conventional researchers are inclined to subscribe to positivist approach, whereby they perceive the social world as a real, concrete and unchanging structure (Hudson and Ozanne, 1998). Therefore, a laboratory-like research setting that imposes controls on variables is recognised as scientific to find the ’truth.’ In consumer research practices, positivist researchers value the utility of direct questions in their research processes (Tadajewski, 2006). Until the early 2000s, this single- reality assumption had been the predominant force in consumer research (Shankar and Patterson, 2001), under which culture is considered to be a homogenous system of collectively shared meanings and unifying values shared by a member of society (Tadajewski, 2006). As consumption is inherently a cultural activity, this assumption can generate a tendency to generalise, which may undermine the integrity of consumer research in a cross-cultural setting by neglecting the dynamic notions of cultural complexity. In the last decade, research that subscribed to the positivist paradigm has been challenged by new consumer research, especially by scholars who have contributed to the consumer culture theory (CCT) (e.g., Arnould and Thompson, 2005; Belk, 1995; Szmigin and Foxall, 2000), as CCT scholars believe that the unpredictable and irrational nature of consumer behaviour cannot be authentically represented with a traditional scientific approach. Moreover, as globalisation and cultural diversity have brought their impacts on consumer culture, more and more scholars are becoming more mindful of its dynamics and are making judgements in a dichotomous fashion (Firat and Venkatesh, 1995). As a result, researchers are gradually acknowledging the so-called multi-reality assumption.
One difference between the positivist single-reality assumption and the non-positivists who recognise reality as having multiple aspects lies in how they perceive consumers’ role in consumption. For many positivists, human behaviour is determined by outside influences (Ozanne and Hudson, 1989), and therefore consumers are passive receivers of socio-historical impacts. Other approaches in consumer research, including Cova 42 / 167
and Cova’s (2012) ‘Prosumer’ theory, have looked at consumers playing in a proactive and voluntaristic model. In terms of the impact on the ontological debates, each consumer is constructing his or her own reality, and therefore each reality is ‘un- unified,’ where truth is individually defined.
Another force that encourages consumer research to depart from the single-reality assumption is the fragmentation and juxtaposition of marketplace culture. Firstly, digitalisation has greatly impacted on how consumers construct their reality. Consumers today actively engage with social media, multi-channel browsing and online shopping, where reality is constructed through information-carrying fragmented beliefs, values and ideologies (Grounding, 2003). Secondly, commercially-oriented activities on branding, marketing and culture have become a strong force to manipulate or juxtapose the originality of social simulation that consumers interact with (Leay, 1968). It echoes to some of the current marketing and branding strategies under luxury’s abundant rarity paradigm, including artification. For example, the image of Coco Chanel is highly artificated now, and consumers may not be aware that what they receive from Chanel is an ‘editorial’ reality and that the original truth has been juxtaposed.
Consequently, this research subscribes to an ontological assumption where reality is multiple and the social being in the reality is inherently voluntaristic and proactive. The social world, as illustrated by Dichter (1979, p. 107), is an “embodied emergent, historically and temporally stable property with certain behaviour dating back tens of thousands of years.” This assumption reflects the central idea of current consumer studies on cultural complexity that each cultural unit must be examined contextually and historically. Also, as Firat and Venkatesh (1995) stated, recognition of multi- reality does not imply the abandonment of ‘scientific’ procedures. Under the multi- reality assumption, scientific knowledge is not seen as something universal. Seeking knowledge must be contextual, and the process of knowing must opt for multiple theories and the known must only be arrived at in a specific context. In other words, the acknowledgement of multi-reality reminds researchers to avoid over- generalisations.
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3.1.2 Epistemological assumptions
Epistemology considers questions to do with the theory of knowledge (Henn et al., 2009), or alternatively it is the “truth game” (Scheurich and Young, 1997). Henn et al. (2012) suggested there is a rational procedure for moving from the ontological assumption to the epistemological assumption, which a researcher can adopt for a project. The ontological assumption of multi-reality, where socio-simulations emerge without a unified meaning or centre (Firat and Venkatesh, 1995), does not conform with a positivist linear route of what we know and what we see of the ultimate truth. At the other extreme to positivism, postmodernist poststructuralists hold the principle that there is no transcendental ground for truth outside the text. In other words, they reject the legitimation of scientific knowledge or the meaning of knowing. This attitude attracts criticism for being anarchic, nihilistic or fatalistic (Goulding, 1999). More importantly, the epistemological void can be considered to have been a major obstacle to the process that transfers postmodernism ontological thought into field practices.
Heron and Reason (1997, p. 282) proposed extending epistemology by critically analysing the process of knowing:
“Critical subjectivity…means that we do not suppress our primary subjective experience but accept that it is our experiential articulation of being in a world, and as such is the ground of all our knowing. At the same time, we accept that, naively exercised, it is open to all the distortions of those defensive processes by which people collude to limit their understanding. So we attend to it with a critical consciousness, seeking to bring it into aware relation with the other three ways of knowing so that they clarify and refine and elevate it at the same time as being more adequately grounded in it.”
Critical subjectivity reflects self-reflexive attentions during the research process. In the positivist epistemological aim, only scientific rigour is valued, which guides researchers to achieve a bias-free standpoint in research (Guba and Lincolin, 2005). However, as demonstrated by Heron and Reason (1997), the congruence of four aspects of knowing evidences the argument by Eisner (1988) that a value-neutral approach is not possible to achieve. Meanwhile, the complexity of subjectivity
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requires a mindful attitude towards critical consciousness of dialogue, experience and the exchanges of power and control. Critical subjectivity shares the thoughts of postmodernism that the truth or meaning is not in vain. Instead, they are relative to a boundless, infinitely extendable context (Culler, 1982). This statement is consistent with the multi-reality ontological assumption. The ultimate truth is philosophically unachievable, while a partial truth can be investigated from a contextualised consumer world.
3.1.3 Methodological assumptions
According to Henn et al., (2006), the methodology must be decided upon after the ontology and epistemology have been arrived at, and the methodological statement must remain philosophically consistent with the assumptions in the ontology and epistemology. The practicality of the methodology must also be taken into account. In this research, the multi-reality and partial truth assumptions lead the methodology towards interpretivism. Interpretivism, as a research paradigm belonging to the postmodernist school of thought, is widely adopted, while inexplicitly discussed methodology adopted by consumer researchers (e.g., Belk et al., 1989; O’Sahaughnessy and Holbrook; Lu, 2006).
In 1995, Belk outlined the “alternative perspective movement” in consumer research since the 1980s to challenge the conventional, positivism paradigm used from the late 1950s. In this movement, researchers had started looking for a new paradigm in order to avoid the problem of over-generalisation caused by the positivism research philosophy. Another force was the increasing awareness of the complexity of culture. As Arnould and Thompson (2005, p. 869) explained, interpretivism is the tool to explore “the heterogeneous distribution of meanings and multiplicity of overlapping cultural groupings that exist within the broader socio-historical frame of globalisation and market capitalism.” The term “interpretivism” is recognised interchangeably as “naturalistic” or “humanistic” (Szmigin and Foxall, 2000). Today, many research methods, including thematic analysis, grounded theory and phenomenology, come from the interpretivist paradigm.
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However, interpretivism can also guide general inductive qualitative researchers to re- investigate areas that have not yet been studied in-depth using conventional qualitative research approaches. The essence of the interpretivist paradigm, as defined by (Tadajewski, 2006, p. 430), is “an emphasis on the analysis of the subjective accounts that are generated by researcher immersion in the consumption history of the individuals sampled, with importance placed on letting the emergent nature of the phenomena reveal its characteristics to the researcher.” In Table 3.1, a comparison between interpretivism and other paradigms highlights the significance of interpretivism. In brief, interpretivism is a paradigm for guiding researchers to generate ‘lived’ experiences rather than empirically tested hypotheses or theories. This makes interpretative research inherently inductive. Table 5 below shows comparisons between some of the mainstream research methodologies used in current consumer research. From the information below, interpretivism stands out due to its attention to the nature of subjectivity in the consumer world and its acknowledgement of a contextualised research strategy.
Table.5 Comparisons between mainstream qualitative research paradigms
Positivism Critical theory interpretivism Ontology Objective; tangible; “Force-field” Socially constructed; The worldviews ahistorical; between subject and self-evolved; and assumptions in fragmentable; object; dynamic; multiple; holistic; which researchers divisible; historical totality; contextual; operate in their search for new knowledge (Schwandt, 2008, p190)
What is the nature of reality (Creswell, 2007) Nature of social Deterministic; Suspend judgement; Voluntaristic; being reactive; emphasise human proactive; potential; Epistemology Nomothetic; time- Forward looking; Time-bound; The process of free; context- imaginative; context-dependent; thinking. The independent; value- practical; value-laden; relationship free; between what we know and what we see. The “truth” we seek and believe as researchers
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(Bernal, 2002; Guba and Lincoln, 2005; Lynham and Webb-Johnson, 2008; Pallas, 2001) Research Dualism; separation; Continuing dialogue; Interactive; co- relationship detached observer; liberator; operative; translator; metaphor (Tadajewski, 2006) Source: The author
In summary, what today’s consumer research aims to achieve is an understanding of the marketplace ideology that frames consumer behaviour, including sense-making interpretations and their values. Even though ultimate truth is philosophically unachievable, a partial truth in a certain contextualised reality that reflects the lived world should be aimed for. In the field of consumer research, consumer reality is constantly changing, thanks to consumers’ voluntary actions in a social world occupied by fragmented and juxtaposed social simulations. And the reality is further influenced by external social and cultural factors. An interpretivist in consumer studies aims to capture the interactions between the ideology of consumer culture and “a slice of consumer reality,” where consumption experience, or using Cova’s (2000) term “prosumption,” happens (see figure 3). A researcher must decode from the lived experience and analyses the subconscious thoughts.
Figure.3 The interpretivist methodological assumption in consumer studies
Source: The author
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3.2 Research design
This research’s design aims to construct a platform to allow the emergence of knowledge from consumers’ experiences of the research area, in which awareness is raised on the socio-cultural significance. The researcher has applied the qualitative approach for data collection and analysis, guided by the interpretivist paradigm, in order to maximise the wealth of insights. One-to-one consumer interviews were the chosen data collection method. All the participants were recruited using a purposeful sampling technique, and the researcher conducted the interviews either face-to-face or online. The researcher used a semi-structured interview strategy with open-ended questions to encourage the participants to reflect on their experiences as luxury fashion shoppers and to construct a ‘lived’ scene from which insights could be captured. As a work of research using the interpretative paradigm, a new set of research validation frameworks (Angen, 2000; Morrow, 2005) were adopted to ensure the trustworthiness of the inquiry.
3.2.1 Inductive research
As the first step in the research design, the researcher chooses a form of reasoning to lead the research approach and generate knowledge through the research process. Inductive reasoning can simply be defined as deriving a conclusion from specific observations, reflecting the empiricist idea that knowledge is gained by sensory experience. In contrast, deductive reasoning follows the route from a statement (hypothesis) through logical argument to a specific conclusion (Walliam, 2016). These two logics guide two different research strategies. The inductive research strategy aims to “establish limited generalisation about the distribution of, and patterns of association amongst, observed or measured characteristics of individuals and social phenomena,” whereas deductive research serves to find explanations for an association between two known concepts (Blaikie, 2007; p. 83).
Both strategies have provided useful outcomes in the process of exploring human knowledge. Nevertheless, both the inductive and the deductive strategy have shortcomings — inductive research is challenged by sampling-related issues, while deductive study is theory- or hypothesis-bound, and therefore its performance in 48 / 167
exploring new knowledge areas can be undermined (Walliam, 2016). There is no theoretical superiority between the two approaches. As argued by Bryman (2016), the choice between inductive and deductive research strategies depends on how researchers perceive the role of theory. The researcher of this study aims to choose a potent research strategy based on the research agenda, which includes philosophical assumptions and the nature of the research area.
In this research, which is guided by the interpretivist paradigm, the philosophical assumption revolves around consumer experiences rather than testing hypotheses or theories. Regarding the research field of luxury consumption in China, although current literature has formed a general knowledge in this arena, a number of important areas remain unexplored or require further investigation from an alternative perspective. For example, it is not clear which Chinese socio-cultural factors can affect Chinese luxury consumption, what the impact of the democratisation of luxury is. Therefore, it is the researcher’s view that an inductive research strategy fits the unique nature of this study.
3.2.2 The qualitative approach
The on-going debate in ontology and epistemology has stressed the significance of methodological pluralism in multiple research realms. However, to date, qualitative methods are still not predominant, either in social sciences or in business research (Berg, 2009; de Ruyter and Scholl, 1998). Defined as “an unstructured, primarily exploratory design based on small scales, intended to provide insight and understanding” (Malhotra and Birks, 2007), the qualitative approach can offer the richness of a wide-open under-defined field but not the comfort zone of quantitative research’s well-accepted but theories-borrowing features (Doz, 2011). As a robust method, qualitative research is also credited by Patton (2001) for its abilities to set a study in a “real world setting.” In contrast to quantitative researchers, qualitative researchers seek illumination, understanding and explanation of phenomena of interest (Hoepfl, 1997), which is the agenda of this work of research. Currently, criticism of the qualitative research approach in consumer studies revolves around its lack of rigidness in data collection and analysis. In fact, the criticism is deeply rooted in ontological and epistemological conflicts surrounding the differences between the quantitative approach (with positivism paradigms) and the qualitative approach (with 49 / 167
interpretivist or other post-modernism paradigms). Today, with more and more research being conducted in the interpretivist manner, researchers have raised configurations of research validity to evaluate interpretivist research (Angen, 2000; leitch et al., 2010). In summary, qualitative research uses a distinct strategy to contribute to knowledge generation. It gathers data that is rich and in-depth, and illustrates the research area with intensity (Patton, 2002). Quantitative research more or less functions to expand the width of our knowledge pool, while qualitative research not only contributes to broadening the boundaries of our knowledge, but also explores the understanding of well-perceived phenomena.
The qualitative research method is more suitable for the specific research context of investigating consumer value in China’s luxury fashion marketplace, for a number of reasons. First of all, as a consumer research study using psychological and sociological lenses, qualitative research may be essential to investigate the social, cultural and historical factors underlying luxury fashion consumption behaviour. Secondly, in qualitative research, the perspective of research objectives, rather than investigators, is the insight producer (Bryman, 2015), which is suitable for this research’s ontological and epistemological assumptions. Thirdly, as a work of research that is revisiting the existing research domain of Chinese luxury consumption by posing an exploratory research paradigm, choosing the qualitative approach can enrich the current insight into Chinese consumption patterns in greater depth. Driven by the Chinese luxury market’s unique features of a large consumer base and less- developed consumer understanding, consumer researchers thus far have been inclined to use the quantitative strategy to reinforce earlier discoveries (e.g. Sun et al., 2016; Wang and Tong, 2017), even though qualitative research can produce more and better insights. For instance, Chen and Lamberti (2015) discovered the emerging impacts of luxury brands’ service and intangible equity on consumers’ value perceptions. And the qualitative research conducted by Hughes et al. (2015) explored how China’s unique social history influenced consumers’ diversified consumption attitudes in a different age group. The intrinsic nature of qualitative research suggests that it is more robust in revealing new market dynamics, which appreciably enhances our understanding of underlying consumer motivation that may be restrained by stereotypical presumptions (e.g., Chen and Lamberti, 2015; Liu et al., 2016).
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3.2.3 Sampling criteria
Even though a number of researchers have examined the research area of Chinese luxury consumers (e.g. Chen and Lamberti, 2015; Lu, 2008; Wang and Tong, 2017), the particular group of luxury consumers in China is difficult to clearly identify, especially with consumption becoming highly fragmented in today’s postmodernist consumer society (Goulding, 2003). For example, less affluent Chinese consumers may occasionally purchase luxury fashion items, but are much less immersed in this particular consumption habit, and so few insights can be gained. Affluent consumers, meanwhile, may limit their luxury consumption to non-fashion goods. Moreover, despite the fact that tier-1 cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, are well- known for their luxury retail offering, the ‘real’ consumers may come from less- developed cities or areas. So far, there is no widely-recognised and rigid luxury consumer profile that can be used as a sampling criterion. In this case, the researcher has decided to utilise a purposive sampling technique for the data collection.
Purposive sampling (or judgemental sampling) is defined as “a non-random way of ensuring that particular categories of cases within a sampling universe are represented in the final sample of a project” (Robinson, 2014). Blaikie (2009) posited that purposive sampling is suitable for situations where it is difficult to identify a particular segment of the population, such as in China. Such segments can include consumer groups that have achieved financial success in non-manufacturing businesses, like the art market, or the financial markets. These consumers can have different lifestyles and consumption experiences from the previous generation of rich Chinese, whose money may have come from property development or the energy business (GoldmanSachs, 2015). Therefore, researchers can either gather a number of participants from a variety of contexts, or select samples of a particular type.
In luxury consumer studies, Western researchers tend to select participants from upper-class residential areas to ensure richness of consumer insights (Roper et al., 2013). Chinese researchers typically expand the sample data to include the middle class, whose monthly personal income is between RMB 4,000–10,000 (Sun et al., 2017). In general, there is a strong correlation between income level and willingness
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to purchase luxury goods in China’s marketplace, and wealthy Chinese, whose household incomes are over RMB 300,000, represent half of all luxury shoppers in China (Bu et al., 2007). This latter sampling technique has been used extensively and proven its efficacy in providing richness of data (Chen and Lamberti, 2015). In this research, the participants’ annual household income is over RMB 515,000, which is above average in terms of the national standard.
Another major criterion of the sample set was that the participants were self- recognised luxury consumers and were willing to share their experiences. The participants’ self-validation in consumption activities suggested that they were deeply immersed in the research context, and so their experiences could be insightful. Additionally, the participants had to be permanent Chinese residents, even though their purchases could be either domestic or overseas, since Chinese consumers are renowned for buying luxury goods in foreign countries (Bain & Co, 2015).
Therefore, the sampling criteria were:
- Household incomes over RMB 515,000 (≈£58,400 ) - Permanent Chinese residency - Self-identified as luxury fashion consumers - Willing to share their consumption experiences The researcher recruited participants firstly by using personal networking (see table 5 for participant recruitment details), and then by snowballing participants’ references. Most of the participants were living in tier-1 cities (Beijing, Chengdu and Shanghai) and economically developed regions such as Hubei and Zhejiang. In order to respond to this research’s goal of investigating luxury consumption in lower-tier cities too, affluent participants from tier-3 cities were also invited to join the research. However, as part of the purposive sampling process, the research also drew special attention to some of the most dynamic emerging consumer groups in China’s luxury consumption landscape, including the younger generation who typically have overseas living experience, along with the emerging urban middle class, especially female consumers. Their contributions to luxury consumption have been identified in numerous commercial market reports (e.g., McKinsey, 2017; Bloomberg, 2017). In this research, their unique contextual experience was collected and analysed systematically to unveil new dynamics of consumer value of luxury consumption in China. 52 / 167
Regarding sample size, methodological researchers have made diverse suggestions. Adler and Adler (2012) suggested that a range between 12 and 60 is appropriate for most qualitative research, and Warren (2002) suggested a range between 20 and 30. However, Bryman (2016) pointed out when interviews are comprehensive and deep, a small sample size can also produce insightful results. Morrow (2007, p. 255) made his conclusion on sample sizes by stating “what is far more important than sample size is sampling procedures: quality, length, and depth of interview data.” For interpretivist research, scholars usually select smaller sample sizes (around 12), with variations in each sample tapping the intensive experience (Morrow, 2007), but practices in such research vary significantly. For example, in Frith and Gleeson’s (2004) interpretivist research on male consumers’ body image, the data pool was constructed using fifty questionnaires with five open-end questions. Research by Hughes et al. (2015) on China’s fashion evolution produced useful results using a sample size of fourteen. Lu’s (2008) research of luxury consumer behaviour in China was based on a sample size of twenty. The purpose of variation is not intended to test any theory or framework’s performance on these variables. The aim of bringing variables is in response to the dynamics of current Chinese luxury consumers and their diverse consumer culture. Philosophically, sample diversification represents the dynamic nature of ’reality’ in Chinese luxury consumption (Goulding, 2003).
For this study, the researcher selected participants with varying incomes, occupations, family backgrounds and life experiences, so that they could provide unique perspectives on the research phenomenon (Mason, 2002). In actuality, the researcher initially pitched 13 candidates, but three were left out for a number of reasons. In the following table, a participant summary is presented, with reasons for ruling out certain candidates.
Table. 5 The participants’ profiles
Final research participants Occupation Residential area Annual household income (RMB) Participant C Senior manager Shanghai 2,000,000 Participant E Student Hubei 1,200,000 Participant I Entrepreneur Beijing 750,000 Participant J Student Zhejiang 1,000,000 Participant M Student Beijing 550,000 Participant N Senior editor Beijing 1,500,000 53 / 167
Participant O Teacher Guangdong 1,000,000 Participant S Student Sichuan 2,000,000 Participant Y Writer Beijing 700,000 Participant Z Student Zhejiang 1,500,000 Excluded research participants Participant L Participant L was included for consideration due to her luxury fashion consumption experience over 25 years. The reason for her rejection was her cultural background. The participant had been working and living abroad for nearly 20 years, which could have led to bias in analysing the socio-cultural influences on individual consumption perception. Participant R Participant R has extensive knowledge of luxury fashion and is a good example of a well-educated Chinese millennial. However, he is not self-defined as a luxury fashion consumer, as his fashion purchases are mainly of independent brands within a lower price range. Although his opinions could be potentially valuable, his experiences of luxury fashion consumption are limited. Participant H Participant H has a high-income financial job working in Shanghai and uses luxury fashion products. However, he expressed unwillingness to be interviewed, saying “I don’t really know about these brands or fashion” and “those luxury purchases are mainly made by my fiancée.” An interview with his fiancée was not possible due to her lack of availability. Table. 5 The participants’ profiles
3.2.4 Individual interviews In order to achieve richness of research data, the researcher conducted one-to-one in- depth interviews with the respondents, who provided their contextual experiences from a consumer perspective. This interview protocol has been successfully utilised in the luxury fashion research discipline (e.g., Dion and Arnauld, 2011; Tynan et al., 2010; Liu et al., 2016) and with the interpretivist paradigm (e.g., Lu, 2008; Leitch et al., 2010; Bevan, 2014). One-to-one interviews enable the researcher to reach participants who often have busy schedules, and provides privacy (Hill et al., 1999). The researcher also took cultural factors into consideration for the data collection. With an interview topic on luxury consumption, the one-to-one interviewing manner ruled out the effects of envy, which could play on emotions in a group discussion, and which in the case of Chinese consumers especially, could cause interviewees to lose face (Mian Zi). In the actual fieldwork, the researcher carried out the one-to-one interviews using voice calls on WeChat, the most widely used and stable mobile app in mainland China. This online interviewing strategy was chosen to maximise flexibility for the convenience of the participants. It also allowed the researcher to
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recruit participants from different residential areas to enhance the diversity of the research’s sample pool. The researcher set up a voice call with a participant at the agreed time, and recorded the conversation with the consent of the interviewee using a recording device. The average interview time was an hour, with some interview times extending to an hour and a half, with a further follow-up communication by email.
The recorded (Chinese) conversations were transcribed and translated into English to form the data pool for analysis. Due to the unique linguistic features of the Chinese language, where certain phrases can be metaphoric and often have differing metaphorical meanings, the researcher employed the contexual translation strategy by giving the literal meaning with its extra contextual interpretation.. As an example, the word ‘Yi’ means ‘lightness,’ but it is also a metaphor for the status of escapism in literature. Parallel with this, Chinese people have started adopting certain imported phrases to express themselves. For instance, ‘Ren She’ is an imported phrase from Japan, whose literal meaning is ‘charter setting’ in the Japanese comic culture, but in Chinese it often stands for ‘identity.’
Table 6 summaries the interview structure used in this study. Interviews were conducted in a semi-structured manner with open-ended questions. The inquiry strategy can empower participants with abundant opportunities to express their viewpoints (Giorgi, 1997). The researcher chose Chinese as the language for the interviews, and all the questions were asked using simple language, instead of in academic terms. A natural setting can help researchers gain rich insights from consumers without information being encumbered in tedious communications (Turner, 2010).
Table. 6 The interview structure
Researcher approach Interview structure Example questions Acceptance of Contextualisation “Would you like to share the story natural attitude of about your latest purchase of luxury participants. Reflexive critical fashion goods? ” dialogue between “What does luxury mean to you? ” participants and the interviewee. Generating variational “Tell me why buying luxury fashion Researcher’s active listening questions makes you feel good? ” (Bevan, 2014).
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Examples of probes
“Why do you buy luxury fashion?” “What is your favourite brand/shop? Tell me about it and why you like it.” “What makes a brand ‘luxury’?” “What do you spend money on — luxury fashion or luxury food and travel?” “Tell me about how you make the decision to buy luxury fashion products? ” “You just mentioned that wearing luxury designer clothes helps you fit into your social group. Tell me more about it.” “What exactly should luxury quality be like?” “Have you purchased accessible luxury brands before? What do you think of them?”
As the goal of reconstructing a consumption experience during an interview responds to the nature of the interpretivist approach, it requires a mindful mindset that consumers are the experience constructors and the researcher merely invites the participants to a journey of self-expression. The interview started with a question inviting participants to share their luxury consumption experiences (e.g., “Would you like to share the story about your latest purchase of luxury fashion goods?”). Such contextualising questioning elicits consumers’ real life attitudes, based on the notion that all information derived from consumers is deeply rooted in lived experiences (Bevan, 2014). If it was necessary, the research then asked further questions, such as “why did you decide to buy the products from that online retailer?,” or very general questions about the research topic itself (e.g., “what does luxury mean to you?”, “how do you feel about shopping in luxury boutiques?”. To encourage the interviewees to continuously reconstruct their experiences of luxury consumption, the researcher kept reflecting on his role as a facilitator for the emergence of the consumer experience, rather than on the experience itself. For instance, when one of the research participants presented less confidence talking her usage of luxury fashion, researcher invited her to talk about her social life and early life experience and later understood in the interview process for the reason was worried about the envy for her workplace colleagues. After identifying this issue, researcher encouraged her to share her luxury consumption experience emerged in her personal social life to encourage the flow of the investigation. In all, the deeper a respondent immerses in the consumption experience, the richer the meaning of the experiences the researcher can decode (Morrow, 2005).
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For the second stage, researcher concentrated on aspects of luxury fashion consumption by generating variational questions. This is an active process for both the interviewer and the respondents (Bevan, 2014). By asking follow-up questions and probes, the researcher invited the participants to clarify and develop their responses that had emerged in the first stage. At the same time, the researcher strived not to project his own judgments or understanding into the process. Before entering the field, a researcher could gather a topic guide from the literature. However, the topic guide only serves as a guideline that ensures the researcher maintains a reflective focus on the topic at hand (Easterby-Smith et al., 1991). Probing, meanwhile, is considered to be a means of stimulating the flow of discussion, rather than a way of leading the respondent (Bevan, 2014).
By validating interviewees’ consumption experience (interviewer sometimes probed with some neutral agreements with participants. E.g. “Yes, I have shopped in that shopping centre.” Or “I have heard lots of my friend talking about that brand as well.”), a sense of trust is constructed between interviewees and the researcher. Later, in a comfort conversational environment, researcher would ask the variational questions were based on the interview itself. For instance, if a participant mentioned “shopping luxury fashion makes me feel good”, the researcher probed the same theme to gain further insights into the reasons why that hedonistic experience existed, instead of leading the respondent to answer other aspects of the luxury experience. This process can activate consumers’ self-reflective role to bring in-depth insights to the surface.
In the third stage, after the participants had reflected on their personal luxury fashion consumption experience extensively, the researcher sought to reach more conceptual, in-depth answers. The researcher asked questions such as “what does luxury fashion mean to you?” or “what are major changes have happened in your luxury fashion shopping?”. The researcher kept interacting with the participants to gain further insights.
The interview topic guide followed the key research questions in order to generate relevant consumer experiences to achieve the research’s aims:
- What is the meaning of luxury fashion for Chinese consumers?
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- What are the effects of luxury’s democratisation on Chinese consumers’ perceptions of luxury fashion? - How do socio-cultural experience and social simulation influence Chinese luxury fashion consumers’ evolution?
3.3 Quality and evaluation in interpretivist research
3.3.1 Diverse validity criteria in different research paradigm As qualitative research can subscribe to different research philosophies, standards for assessing the quality of a piece of qualitative research can be named variously as validity, credibility, rigour, trustworthiness or goodness (Morrow, 2005; Morrow and Smith, 2000). Terminological differences emerge from paradigmatic underpinnings of each work of research. The following table summarises a selection of different quality criteria in some of the mainstream qualitative research paradigms.
Table.7 Quality evaluation across different research paradigms
Research paradigm Criteria of research quality Author Postpositivism Parallel criteria Lincoln and Guba, 2000 - Credibility - Transferability - Dependability - Confirmability Constructivism Fairness Guba and Lincoln, 1994 Authenticities Patton, 2002 - Ontological - Educative - Catalytic - Tactical Dependability Triangulation Interpretivism Ethical validation Angen, 2000 Substantive validation Research quality Critical theory Fairness Lather, 1994 Authenticities Patton, 2002 - Ontological - Educative - Catalytic - Tactical Dependability Triangulation Consequential Transgressive
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One of the many reasons that have led qualitative researchers to adopt / invent different sets of criteria comes from their concerns related to epistemological and ontological significance (Rolfe, 2004). Methodological researchers who are inclined to embrace the “interpretivist turn” have explicitly claimed that qualitative research should reject context-free generalisations (e.g., Guba and Lincolin, Denzin, 1983). In this case, the criteria for evaluating a piece of research emerged from the research’s philosophical and practical context. Rolfe (2004, p. 305) supported this idea by stating that “there is no unified body of theory, methodology or method that can be collectively described as qualitative research,” and so the intention of generalisation to raise a universal evaluation scheme for all qualitative research must be rejected. Meanwhile, Blaikie (2007) explained that the unique social situations in each qualitative research are insufficiently similar, so as to unique characteristics of the researcher and the researched. In some authors’ view, replication across different research contexts is theoretically unreachable. Accordingly, a universal criterion to examine research cannot be achieved. Baker et al. (1992) criticised the attempt to borrow realist / positivist validity paradigms in interpretivist research as “method slurring,” which would undermine the credibility of the research method. Schofield (1993, p. 202) claimed that the gold standard of a piece of qualitative research is to “produce a coherent and illuminating description of and perspective on a situation that is based on and consistent with detailed study of the situation.”
3.3.2 Validity in interpretivist research From interpretive research perspective, researchers have noted that interpretive research requires a set of reformulated understandings towards the system of rationality, objectivity and validity (Unger, 1992). In 2000, researcher Angen introduced a framework of validity for interpretive research that has been adopted by researchers in different research areas, including business research on entrepreneurship and supply chains (Towers and Chen, 2008; Leitch et al., 2010). As an exploratory study regarding its methodological assumption, this research has adopted Angen’s (2000) framework, which comprises three aspects of validation — ethical validation, substantive validation and researcher quality. The author has replaced the term ‘validity’ with ‘validation’ to emphasise that the judgement of the soundness of a piece of research is an on-going process, and validators should be a community of researchers, rather than single-research, or a research team’s self-
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endorsement (Angen, 2000). Table 8 demonstrates the framework of validation of interpretivist research.
Table.8 Validations in interpretivist inquiry
Research design Analysis Interpretation and data collection Ethical validation - Moral stance - Give voice to - Generative - Stimulating participants potential dialogue - Choice of - Transforms - Diverse voices method actions
Substantive - Inter- - Record own - Record own validation subjectivity transformation transformation - Self-reflexivity - Present - Self-reflexivity - Popular & disconfirming - Conceptual personal cases development understandings - Conceptual - Dynamics - Researcher’s development research paradigm & pre- transparency process understandings - Transparency Researcher - Characteristics - Personal - Craft work quality & attributes involvement Source: Angen, 2000
Ethical validation has been adopted as one of the criteria used to evaluate the soundness of a research. This process requires the researcher in human sciences to examine its moral value during the research process, since the researcher cannot fully discharge his or her ideology in the fieldwork. Although this research is in the consumption area, where radical ethical issues rarely appear, the researcher was conscious of the need not to impose negativity or moral judgements on the participants’ consumption patterns, their values or any other background information.
Research ethics also refer to the soundness of piece of research. Ethical research can expand our knowledge and further to improve the general goodness of society. Secondly, the substance of an interpretivist inquiry is another focus of research validation. Substantive validation, according to Van Manen (1990), can show how researchers have done justice of the chosen topic by bringing inter-subjective understanding to it. Angen (2000) stated that self-reflection research attitudes provide a major contribution to substantive validation. Also, research should entail an understanding of the research topic from multiple sources. The sources can be the researcher’s own life experiences or second-hand knowledge. Here, in the case of a
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work of interpretivist research, an extensive literature review can function as a knowledge ground for a research inquiry. The third element in validation is researcher quality. Since an interpretivist inquiry is based on reconstructing lived experiences, the researcher is the key instrument of data collection (Creswell, 1998). This fact requires the researcher to have good people skills to empower participants and make them feel comfortable, and to bring creativity and flexibility to the process of inquiry.
3.3.3 Towards a cross-paradigm trustworthiness
Recently, methodological researchers have approached the issue regarding qualitative research quality from a different perspective. Thomas (2006) suggested that qualitative researchers should adopt Lincolin and Guba’s (2000) trustworthiness framework, including credibility, transferability, dependability and confirmability as a general guideline to evaluate their research. The authors emphasised that peer debriefings and stakeholder checks are the most applicable strategy to evaluate and improve research quality. By doing so, research data can be re-analysed by a second coder, and participants can be given a chance to check related documents, such as interview transcriptions and summaries, as ‘parallel criteria.’ However, researchers can be hindered in this by time and human resources constraints. Furthermore, as more than one individual could be able to access the research data, ethical concerns should be taken into account concerning confidentiality. Besides, as the trustworthiness framework is grounded in post-positivism paradigms, this logical inconsistency should trouble researchers who adopt their research philosophy outside the post-positivist frame (Morrow, 2005).
Morrow’s answer to trustworthiness across research paradigms and designs is the “transcendent criteria” as “a number of particular concerns that emerged from the qualitative endeavour itself” (2005, p. 253, see table 9).
Table.9 Transcendent trustworthiness criteria of qualitative research (Source: adapted from Morrow, 2005)
Criteria of research Measurements References quality Social validity - The social (Wolf, 1978) significance of research goals - The social appropriateness of the
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procedures - The social importance of the effects Subjectivity and reflexivity - Awareness of (Morrow, 2005) subjective nature of inquiry - Representing participant viewpoints equitably and avoiding lopsided interpretations representing the biases of the researcher Adequacy of data - Adequate amounts of (Erickson, 1986) evidence - Adequate variety in kinds of evidence - Interpretive status of evidence - Adequate disconfirming evidence - Adequate discrepant case analysis Adequacy of - Immersion in the data (Morrow, 2005) interpretation - Systematic research design and analysis - Balanced presentation of findings between investigator’s interpretations and supporting participants’ quotations Morrow’s framework focuses on the subjective nature of qualitative research’s approach, and shares similar measurements with Aegen’s (2000) interpretivist validation framework, where “social validity” echoes “ethical validation” and “subjectivity and reflexivity,” and adequacy of interpretation echoes substantive validation. Regarding “adequacy of data,” Morrow supported Patton’s claim that the information-richness of data and the analytical capabilities of the research are more critical than sample size. The author also recommended a selection of research strategies, including snowball sampling, open-end interview strategies, and using multiple data sources to enhance the quality of the qualitative research. In this study, the researcher has utilised both Aegen’s (2000) framework to examine the logical consistency of its interpretivist approach and Morrow’s (2005) transcendent criteria to validate its quality as a qualitative inquiry.
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3.4 Data analysis In this research, template analysis within the realm of general inductive analysis strategies was used to deal with the data from the individual interviews. The inductive analysis approach is consistent with the general inductive research strategy positioned in this whole research. For inductive analyses, as Strauss and Corbin (1998, p. 12) noted, “the researcher begins with an area of study and allows the theory to emerge from data,” and this also benefits the research, minimising researcher bias, which may come from his own experiences. Scriven (1991) described this approach as “goal-free.” In this case, the researcher has been self-reflectively aware of potential biases from the existing literature or from his own past experiences.
Template analysis is a sub-category of thematic analysis. It stresses the use of hierarchical coding while sharing flexibility with another thematic analysis (Brooks et al., 2015). In the analysis process, identifying an appropriate theme that can capture, in Braun and Clarke’s (2006) words “something important about the data in relation to the research question and represents some level of patterned response or meaning within the data set” is essential. The authors stressed that the “size” and “keyness” of the theme are not necessarily dependent on quantifiable measures regarding its frequency in the whole data pool, nor on the most prevalent ones. In fact, for an interpretivist researcher, the theme cannot only be generated from the explicit level, but also from a latent level (Boyatzis, 1998). In order to do so, the research has identified the underlying conceptualisation, ideology or idea that shape or inform the semantic contexts of the data.
The building blocks, or the basic elements, in constructing templates are codes. A good code is one that captures the richness of the phenomenon (Boyatzis, 1998). In this process, the generation of codes comes from two sources. First, the researcher generates theory-driven codes to form a priori template. This set of codebooks serves as references for coding in regards to the level of intensity of the significance that each code carries. When a researcher investigates interview data, a different principle of coding is adapted by following a more inductive principle. A researcher scans through the interview text and sets the data-driven codebook. In the traditions of Schutz’s (1967) social phenomenology, the author suggested that codes can be formed with six broad categories — motives, social relationships, the meaning of social
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action, the system of relevance, ideal types, and “common sense.” Subsequently, the coding goes beyond description and aims to reveal the essential structure under the sociocultural fabric.
In carrying out the data analysis, the researcher synthesised two guidelines, from King’s (2012) template analysis and from Braun and Clarke’s (2006) suggestions on general thematic analysis. Table 10 below demonstrates how the analysis was carried out with enhanced clarity.
Table. 10 Data analysis processes (integrated from Braun and Clarke, 2006 and King, 2012)
Phase Description of the process 1. Immersing within data Transcribing data; reading and re-reading the data; noting down initial ideas and codes; 2. Generating priori template Generating priori tentative priori template from literature; 3. Creating rich thematic description of Writing up a detailed description of each each interviews participant’s experiences on luxury consumption; getting a sense of the predominant themes; 4. Generating emerging themes Coding data in a systematic fashion; collating codes into meaning cluster; generating potential emerging themes; 5. Reviewing themes and templates Applying emerging themes within priori template; examining its logics and modifying; 6. Defining and naming themes On-going analysis to refine the specifics of each theme; generating clear definitions and names for theme; 7. Producing the report Selecting vivid, compelling extract examples; final analysis of selected extracts; producing report;
3.5 Research Ethics
Concerns over research ethics revolve around which role of values researchers should follow in their research practices. In 1978, Diener and Crandall laid the foundations for today’s discussions on research ethics by breaking down the issue into four main areas:
- Whether there is harm to participants; - Whether there is lack of informed consent;
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- Whether there is an invasion of privacy; - Whether deception is involved. Based on this principle, different research associations have provided various ethical codes of practice, including the British Sociological Association (BSA), the Social Research Association (SRA) and the British Psychological Society (BPS). The detailed principles may be varied, but they mainly highlight the common rule that “researchers should respect the rights and dignity of participants in their research and the legitimate interests of stakeholders, such as funders, institutions, sponsors and society at large” (BPS, 2010).
As a researcher in the business management discipline, the researcher was obliged to follow the ethics guideline by Bell and Bryman (2007), to explain the ethical issues during the data collection and data analysis, while the following tenets were highlighted:
- Confidentiality of information and reducing the risk to participants During the whole process of data collection and data analysis, all sensitive personal information, including interviewees’ names, was processed anonymously, while other unnecessary personal information was not gathered. Any confidential business information involved in the data collection was under strict protection against unwanted leaking. In order to prevent a misinterpretation of given answers, the participants could ask to view selected transcripts to confirm the information’s authenticity.
- Voluntary participation and informed consent All the interviews were conducted on a fully voluntary bases. The participants were notified of the research’s aims and objectives. By doing so, the researcher could explain the purpose of the research and the format of the research interview. The research requested their consent to record the interviews before the actual data collection. If required, the researcher provided relevant documentation to the participants to confirm the research project and the ethics policy.
- Data protection All the research data was kept securely and anonymously. The research data was kept virtually on the researcher’s own devices with password protection. After the research
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project is complemented, all data, including audio records and written documents, will be destroyed.
3.6 Summary
The literature review on luxury consumption and Chinese consumers showed that both research subjects are experiencing a dynamic evolution. This led the researcher to pursue an alternative perspective to conduct the research into the inter-subjective social world. Although there are some existing inquiries that have been conducted into the same research domain, using either a quantitative or a qualitative approach, (e.g., Chen and Lamberti, 2015; Hughes et al., 2015; Wang et al., 2011; Zhang and He, 2012), only a relatively small body of literature raises the extensive discussion of their research philosophy. In most of the Chinese luxury consumption research, the inquiries are unconsciously grounded in a dichotomous world view, where the Chinese luxury consumer is generalised with predominant assumptions as a non- Western, passive adopter of Western luxury concepts. However, in this study, the researcher has credited consumers’ proactive role and acknowledged that they may be able to reinvent the luxury value from their experience. In order to overcome the trap of generalisations in consumer research, this study has aimed to capture lived, contextual consumer experiences to enable a more authentic research outcome, by subscribing to the interpretivist paradigm. This exploratory research method can be seen using sociological lenses to investigate a commercial activity. Or from another perspective, it may be regarded as an answer to business research in an era of blurred genres (Cuba and Lincoln, 2008). Consumption is a commercial activity, but it’s also a cultural and social activity. Utilising this new research paradigm, the researcher expects to discover unknown insights that may have been neglected in previous sense- making-oriented research into Chinese luxury consumption.
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Chapter Four: Findings and Discussion Although Western luxury has been available in China for over two decades, Chinese consumers’ engagement with luxury fashion consumption is not as extensive as Western researchers might think. From what has been garnered from the participants, it appears that their luxury fashion consumption only truly began after the year 2000. The younger participants had opportunities to explore luxury fashion after graduation from high school, but their luxury consumption experience was generally less than ten years old. They also play the ‘influencer’ role in their family social circle, by promoting luxury consumption to the older generation.
Therefore, Chinese luxury consumers are relative newcomers, compared to their Western peers who grew up in social environments where the idea of luxury was securely established. Luxury fashion was perceived as a Western concept after years of experiencing a rationing economy in communist China. However, as can be seen from the research, today’s consumers are actively though unconsciously exploring the meaning of luxury fashion consumption. In one way, they embody what they have been influenced from Chinese sociocultural onto Western-oriented luxury value. The inherited collective culture gives luxury fashion in China a much more complex and social character. Purchasing and using luxury fashion items have become a mainstream way to demonstrate users’ social class, even though the concept of social class had to a large extent been deconstructed by Communist Party ideology. Meanwhile, the pioneers of Chinese luxury fashion consumption have rediscovered the consumption activity with a more philosophical, metaphysical and intellectual meaning that resonates with Confucian philosophy. Luxury fashion consumption, as a concept imported from the West, has for some become a tool for the cultural renaissance of Chinese fine living.
4.1 Thematic templates Guided by the interpretivist data analysis principle, the researcher gathered three main themes from the data (see table 11 and table 12). Compared to the priori template from the literature review, a few modifications have been performed based on the level of significance of the data insights. The sub-theme of luxury fashion has moved to a higher position as the main theme, which indicates how Chinese consumers
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approach the concept of luxury fashion. Four-dimensional luxury value perceptions have been grouped under a new theme names “instrumental realm” of luxury value, as the direct value that the consumer can perceive or achieve in luxury consumption which has been disclosed in our current knowledge (e.g. Hennigs et al., 2013, Holt, 2004, Voss et al., 2003, Vigeron and Johnson, 2004). It should be noticed that the content in the ‘instrumental realm’ is a set of characterised values under joint influences of luxury’s democratisation and socio-cultural context in China. The ‘aspirational realm’ is the new data that emerged in the data analysis extending beyond framworks purposed in current Western literature, including Berthon et al. (2009) Shukla and Purani (2012). Aspirational indicates the indirect value that consumers can achieve. These values come from a philosophical realm where consumers’ self-reflections emerge during their lived experience interacting with luxury fashion, and further embed with consumers’ socio-cultural backgrounds. The researcher recognises that this new realm of value represents the cultural complexities of modern luxury consumption (Miller-Spillman et al., 2012) and echoes the socio- cultural dynamics listed in prior theoretical frameworks (figure 2).
Main theme Sub theme 1. Conceptualisation 1.1meanings of luxury 1.1.1exclusivity as essence of luxury fashion 1.1.2 financial capital signifier 1.1.3 time and culture-bound 1.2 democratisation of luxury 1.2.1 deconstruction of luxury hierarchy 1.2.2 luxury for everyone 1.3 luxury fashion 1.3.1 abundant rarity 1.3.2 pursuit of novelty 1.32.3 representation of user’s identity 2. Luxury fashion 2.1 financial value 2.1.1 indication of product quality value for Chinese 2.1.2 thriftiness emerged in cultural and political contexts 2.2 conspicuous value 2.2.1 wealth display for higher social status 2.2.2 imitation and innovation 2.3 hedonic value 2.3.1 self-compensation 2.3.2 media and marketing endorsement 2.3.3 rational shopping 2.4 functional 2.4.1 craftsmanship 2.4.2 material Table. 10 Priori template 68 / 167
Main theme Sub theme 1. Luxury fashion 1.1 anti-trend 1.2 fashion as art 1.3 confusion of democratisation 2. Aspirational realm 2.1 a Western symbol 2.2 art of life 2.2.1 luxury fashion as art 2.2.2 reviving Chinese traditional luxury value 3. Instrumental realm 3.1 financial 3.1.1 accessories as priority 3.1.2 knowledge-bound 3.1.3 wearing for price 3.2 conspicuous 3.2.1 financial privilege 3.2.2 cultural privilege 3.2.3 social identity 3.3 hedonic 3.3.1 joy from others 3.3.2 joy from self 3.4 functional 3.4.1 craftsmanship 3.4.2 material 3.4.3 usability Table. 11 Final research findings template
4.2 Participants’ experiences of luxury fashion consumption
The researcher gave each participant a chuck description of their luxury fashion consumption experience after initial coding. This interpretivist data analysis technique can clarify the essential meanings by removing any bias that may have emerged from the participants’ personal experiences (the participants’ brief demographic information can be found in table 5). For example, participant O in this research demonstrated high level of thriftiness in consumption, and her consumption was driven to achieve a sense of security. Nevertheless, her value mainly derived from her life experience of being brought up in a single-parent family. This research process gives a holistic view of each participant’s experience of luxury fashion consumption. The researcher was able to conduct the interpretation within a clear defined context to avoid under-interpretation and over-generalisation.
Participant C holds a senior management position and is in his mid-thirties. He has lived and worked abroad and currently lives in Shanghai. The participant has engaged in extensive luxury fashion consumption thanks to his wealthy family and his own financial achievements. The participant started his consumption experience in the uppermost category of luxury brands, and he described it as an obsession. However, he later moved away from the well-known brands due to lower-cultural-class
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imitations. He has now re-embraced some of those big brands thanks to his rediscovery of brand value and to the brands’ design innovations. The participant described the value of luxury as being in its ability to construct his professional image, to satisfy his vanity, and to provide psychological benefits in terms of making him feel confident. He also stated that there is an interplay between users and luxury fashion, and that true luxury fashion elites do not just “represent luxury value” but also “create value for the luxury fashion they are wearing.” As a consumer who witnessed the entry of Western luxury into China, he stated that conspicuous, formative luxury consumption behaviour comes from a lack of aesthetics and luxury education in China.
Participant I is a 35-year-old entrepreneur who used to hold a senior management position in the luxury industry. He is from the generation who witnesse how luxury fashion emerged from niche to mainstream. The participant concluded that his luxury fashion consumption consisted of three stages. In the first stage, his choice of consumption focused on a limited selection of Da Pai (famous luxury brands), that he learned about from the fashion magazines he read. For him, luxury fashion served as a self-validation and self-reward. With the increased visibility and diversity of luxury brands in China, along with the participant’s expanding fashion knowledge, which he acquired through social media, the participant moved to the second stage, where he made more choices from less-known designer brands. However, he was driven by the need to fit in the social scenes and to follow the dress code of his social circle. The participant also started to build his own personal style. In the third stage, mainly influenced by one of his friends who has an “in-depth understanding of fashion” and is a “rule-breaker,” the participant’s luxury fashion is now driven by the beauty of product design, as well as the idea of ‘quality of life.’ He tends to purchase niche brands and less-known designer pieces. The participant also stated that the spirit of luxury fashion has changed his life values and made him more individualistic.
Participant E is a 25-year-old student from a wealthy but conservative family in a tier- 2 city. Her early experiences of luxury fashion consumption were mainly influenced by her peers and by social media, which she recognised today as aimless. The participant has a clear understanding of luxury brand hierarchy based on the price level and reputation. Today, individuals can be perceived to be big brand lovers if
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theyr purchase prestige luxury brand accessories and designer brand ready-to-wear. She avoids purchases from widely owned / popular luxury items and accessible luxury brands, in order to keep a distance from the trend-chasing crowds. She prefers a laid- back timeless and classic look, partly as a result of the influence of her conservative family, which perceives luxury as wasteful and superficial. In contrast, her preference of established brands comes from the fact their price level is largely perceived. For this participant, buying and using luxury fashion is both a recreational self-indulgence and a path to achieving Sheng Huo Pin Wei (Savoir Vivre).
Participant J has a relatively limited experience of consuming luxury, but has acquired a deep knowledge of fashion and luxury by researching and evaluating. Welcoming shopping environments and open online retailers have broken luxury’s distant image, but this particpant still perceives luxury as inherently aristocratic, and believes that time and history play an important role in making luxury products desirable. The motivation for this individual’s luxury fashion consumption is mainly social-driven, since she purchases luxury in order to have her lifestyle displayed on social media and have her image in social groups enhanced. Despite a comparatively limited budget for luxury, she actively conducts research, online and offline, to find the social and financial value that she is looking for from luxury fashion, and to make sure her luxury goods last. However, this passive luxury adapter has discovered the hedonistic side of luxury fashion consumption, and develops new values and skills to appreciate luxury products and ensure she gets her money’s worth. Also, her consistent online researching amplifies the effect of online simulation on her purchase decisions.
Participant M is a 28-year-old student from a middle-class family in Beijing. Before going back to university, she worked in the fashion industry in China for three years. Her understanding of luxury fashion is mainly constructed around her own learning and working experience, rather than around family or peer influences. This individual holds the materialistic attitude that utilising expensive luxury is a means to achieve social recognition, and this recognition can bring her hedonistic rewards. Meanwhile, she is intrigued by luxury’s artificated story-telling marketing and branding activities. The participant perceives that luxury should be high-price, exclusive and endorsed by word-of-month and the media. As a well-trained designer herself, she tends to buy unique, novel design pieces from luxury brands. However, luxury products she has
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purchased have mainly been for important social events and have let her fit in the social scene. In other instances, she has adapted her choices of luxury fashion goods based on her peers’ dressing code.
Participant N is a young professional holding a senior job in China’s creative industry. She has overseas study experience in America and is newly married. Interaction between the participant and luxury fashion started from reading international fashion magazines during her student years, when the concept of luxury and fashion was still a niche, and the way she explored the concept, by reading printed luxury fashion magazines, may unconsciously underpin her belief that luxury and fashion are elitism. When the participant started her career, her professional and social circle, which she describes as the “creative class,” helped construct her knowledge of luxury and fashion. Her education and working experience enabled her to evaluate this knowledge and form her own opinions. The participant has a very philosophical outlook on luxury and fashion. She defines luxury as “the praise to the beauty of Wu Yong (uselessness), which is grounded in the Asian life philosophy of Tian Ren He Yi (man is an integral part of nature), and believes that objects, including luxury, are valued by elites for their escapism. The participant’s luxury fashion consumption is more like buying art. She stated that buying luxury fashion is a way to validate the beauty of craftsmanship, creativity and the personal charisma of the designers. In real life, the participant utilises luxury fashion items as a tool to construct her Ren She (social identity). Her elitism and artistic understanding of luxury fashion make her less interested in the idea of pop-cultural luxury. Meanwhile, she is equally driven by experiential consumption, which leads her to spend time and money on travelling.
Participant O is a school teacher from a tier-3 city in southern China. Currently, she has a decent income from her job, and the profit from her family business gives her ample financial support. The participant has purchased her own property and car, but is still not deeply involved in luxury consumption. She does not have a large luxury- using social group, and her main source of fashion knowledge are the fragmented pieces of information she can access on WeChat and Weibo, which contribute to her unsystematic luxury fashion knowledge. She tends to ask for advice before purchasing luxury fashion items, because she wants her purchases to be well-recognised and good value-for-money. Her life experience, being brought up in a single-child family, has
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contributed to her preference to consume for security (as property and car) rather than vanity (luxury fashion). Meanwhile, her thrifty consumption attitude is also affected by her traditional family background. However, the participant likes to spend, and most of her leisure expense goes to travel. She enjoys the joys of escapism and the conspicuousness of posting her travels on social media.
Participant S is a 25-year-old from Chengdu, a southwest tier-2 city in China. Thanks to the financial support from her family, she could afford luxury fashion when she was in high school. This participant started as a fashion conformist. She preferred Western brands, influenced by mainstream thoughts that imported products were better than local ones. Her tastes in the early stage of her experience were influenced by Wang Hong (internet celebrities). With improved fashion knowledge, her luxury fashion purchases moved from accessible brands to prestigious alternatives as well as niche designer brands. She developed a more independent style, and values the originality and creativity of luxury fashion design. This participant shares both hedonistic and thrifty consumption values of luxury fashion. She stated that when she finds bargains of luxury fashion, she feels that the more she buys, the more she saves. This young participant believes luxury fashion is an approach to achieving Sheng Huo Ge Diao (taste of life). Wearing luxury fashion also helps project her achievements in terms of fine living. Her personal tastes are a way to present her individuality.
Participant Y is a writer in her mid-sixties. She is self-recognised as a success in her career and she enjoys a decent social circle. This participant gave this research good insights into how luxury and fashion concepts arrived in China, along with their dramatic impact on the older generation. The participant has enjoyed fashion throughout her life. She enjoyed exclusivity even before she started purchasing luxury fashion. She considers that luxury fashion goods represent the ideal Western lifestyle, which only showed in the literary works she read in her youth. Luxury fashion first brought her social recognition when she bought well-known brands. She now values the novelty and originality of niche luxury brands and enjoys the mystic aura they create in the social scene. She believes luxury fashion is a social class signifier, and people buying different brands from her belong to a different social class. In her view, the intellectual class is more privileged than the financially successful one, and therefore niche luxury is more valuable than mainstream luxury.
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Participant Z is a 25-year-old postgraduate student who has been studying in the UK for just over one year. Her wealthy family background enables her to engage in luxury fashion consumption. Her first luxury aspirations came from one of her family members, who was a regular luxury fashion shopper. During her university year, she was encouraged to do more luxury shopping, mainly very conspicuous fashion items, in order to fit in with her peer group. The participant has gradually accumulated sufficient fashion and brand knowledge, and owns a clear self-defined luxury hierarchy where accessible luxury is excluded. Her knowledge has also allowed her to develop her own criteria of luxury fashion and judge their quality and aesthetic value, and this has enabled her to construct an individualistic style to differentiate herself. The originality of brand image and product design are important to the participant. She tends to form a strong emotional connection with brands, which represent her elitism aspirations, for instance the urban minimalist lifestyle or Coco Chanel’s life legend. On the other side, the participant still follows pragmatic shopping patterns and looks for value-for-money in the luxury category. Also, the participant adapts to social contexts and changes her behaviour with luxury fashion by using low-key products to prevent envy, although her value towards luxury fashion consumption still remains individualism-driven.
4.3 Research Findings
4.3.1 Financial value According to the current literature, Chinese consumers’ perceptions of luxury’s financial value are influenced by their saving-oriented attitudes derived from Confucian beliefs, their limited income levels, and pressures from the underdeveloped social welfare system (Ma and Yi, 2010; Wang and Lin, 2009; Thompson, 2011). This research’s findings are aligned with the current literature on the fact that Chinese luxury consumers today still are sensitive to price. In this study, although the participants were either earning competitive salaries or were being supported by their wealthy parents, they still kept their shopping within a budget, and were not likely to purchase luxury products impulsively. One participant shared her story about buying a Givenchy bag when it was on offer:
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“…As for the price, it was only a few hundred pounds! And I had been told there was a bit extra discount. See, I had to get it. Be honest, I had browsed the bag once when it was on full price. I was struggling whether I should buy the bag at that time. I mean it was only a mini cross-body bag. However, the second time I got there, it was on sale. Price is still important for me.”
---Participant J
This consumer would like to invest more time on revisiting shops and doing research to get luxury fashion items at the best price. In this research, the fact that consumers put their investments mainly in handbags and shoes can be used as evidence that Chinese consumers are strongly aware of pricing in luxury. Although the participants told the researcher that they have generous budgets for luxury shopping (e.g.. “A Louis Vuitton bag for 10,000 RMB is good value” by Participant E), they still want their money to be well spent. In luxury fashion consumption, Chinese consumers can be better described as looking for value-for-money, rather than being as being “bargain hunters.”
However, as consumers conceptualise the idea of luxury in a highly subjective manner, their perceptions regarding the monetary perspective of buying luxury vary from one to another. In this research, the participating consumers revealed that the luxuriousness of a brand often comes with a higher, premium price level, and that most of the time consumers rank more expensive brands at the top of the luxury hierarchy. For example, different pricing creates a class system within the concept of luxury, where two tiers of luxury fashion exist — Zhong She (accessible luxury) and Ding She (top luxury). Participant E described her luxury fashion brand hierarchy:
“I categorise brands like Hermes as Ding She, followed by some big brands like Chanel or Louis Vuitton as She Chi Pin (luxury). Michael Kors, Coach and Kate Spades are under them. They are ranked by their price level.”
---Participant E
The same idea was shared by another participant, who is younger and has less experience in luxury fashion consumption. They both tend to construct their understanding of the luxury fashion brand hierarchy based on the brands’ price range.
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Participant J, who is in her 20s, questioned the rebellious and quirky brand images of certain emerging luxury fashion brands, like Vetements or Off-white, but she still believed they belong to the luxury fashion group because “they are seriously expensive.” Participant O felt much less confident to share information about her fashion purchases of brands like Coach, Kate Spade or Tory Brunch, and asked the interviewer whether “they count as luxury,” because for her only products over 10,000 RMB in price could be considered luxury.
Another finding of this research expands our understanding by exploring the intertwined effects between financial value and conspicuous value. Chinese consumers prefer brands whose price is well-perceived, so that they can achieve rewards from the conspicuity perspective. Conversely, heavy discounts on luxury fashion can contaminate their prestigious image in consumers’ perception, as Participant J further explained:
“Those luxury fashion brands that always end up in sale, I don’t recognise them as true luxury.”
---Participant J
Participant J used the phrase “people wear the price” to summarise the impact of luxury’s financial value on its conspicuousness. The better a price level is being perceived, the higher the conspicuousness they can achieve. A similar idea was shared by participant C. He explained why he moved away from Prada, because Prada’s less expensive category contaminated the overall exclusive and elite image:
“I fell in love with Prada before, but it didn’t last. Prada’s product range is too wide. Anyone can afford a Prada product. It put me off. For me luxury means that not everyone can afford it.”
---participant C
Interestingly, price-related luxury perception was questioned by the consumers who had been through a deeper immersion in luxury fashion shopping. For them, the beauty of luxury has been overshadowed by “the showing-off of people’s fortunes.” Participant Y talked about her concern regarding Hermes in China:
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“So why not make luxury cheaper? Say if a Hermes Birkin bag only sold for 50,000 RMB, it would no longer serve as a symbol of money...... there would be catastrophic impact on a luxury fashion brand and its design if the idea of luxury was only about its price.”
---Participant Y
This statement raises the question whether there might be a possible u-turn in terms of how much the financial value can contribute to the total luxury value for consumers, and whether if the financial value becomes overweight to some extent, consumers will perceive less overall value consumer. Participants C, N, J and Y described people who over-consume and over-display luxury fashion items as Tu Hao (rich but vulgar). Meanwhile, since luxury consumption has been expanded from buying tangible products to being more experience-focused, consumers today in China may spend more on luxury travel (Participant N) and fine home-ware and design objects (Participant O).
4.3.2 Functional Value Regarding the functional value of luxury fashion, the research’s findings support previous research that luxury consumers value craftsmanship and excellent material in luxury fashion products. Participant Y stated that what really impressed her about luxury was the “perfection.” The participants said they would examine the product material and the product finish, including stitches (Participant J), as well as the texture and quality of the leather (Participant S and Participant E). They also stated that if a luxury brand’s quality did not meet their expectations, they would not be considered in their shopping options (Participant O and Participant J). At same time, the consumers tended to remain loyal to brands that have high-quality product offerings:
“I started to re-embrace Louis Vuitton. Maybe it’s because of my age. In my 30s, I want to dress young. Last year I bought three Louis Vuitton bags from the fashion show collection. They put animal motif on the bags which are quite young and unique.”
---Participant C
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“(after buying from niche designer brands), I bought a Vuitton bag recently because I just needed a functional bag. Regarding mainstream brands, only functionality attracts me……I use my Louis Vuitton bags on a daily basis, no matter whether I’m going to the health club or doing shopping.”
---Participant Y
These two statements are from participants who have moved their purchase focus away from mainstream luxury brands to niche alternatives. However, from the statements we can see that functional performance, which is powered by a product’s quality, is the luxury image’s bottom-line for consumers. This research illustrates that luxury functional value creates a stronger connection with quality-seeking Chinese luxury shoppers. Even consumers who shift to other brands temporarily to get a sense of novelty will re-connect with brands that have a superior quality guarantee, especially when products are purchased for a utilitarian purpose. Conversely, an unsatisfactory experience with quality can de-motivate consumers. As participant O shared her story:
“I bought a Coach handbag. You know it’s a famous brand, but the stitches on its handles were not solid, so the leather handles started falling apart. I tried to find a place to fix the problem, but was told it would cost more than 2,000 RMB. See, if I put a bit more on top of that I could have a brand new handbag, but definitely not Coach again. I am not buying anything from Coach anymore.”
---Participant O
When consumers come across quality issues, it not only downgrades the overall image of the brand involved, but also may deconstruct the positive correlation between luxury fashion’s functional performance and its price in consumers’ perceptions. When the researcher inquired whether Participant O would believe that the more expensive a product is, the better its quality, she said no and gave her opinion:
“Well, since the quality problem happened on my Coach bag I am really confused now. My cheaper bags never have similar issues. So I don’t think those prestige
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brands which are more expensive than Coach or Kate Spade would have better quality. I have the idea that being expensive doesn’t mean good quality. They only put the price tag there.”
---Participant O
This perception also applies to consumers who tend to buy higher-end luxury fashion. Participant J stated that she valued quality and chose more expensive products because “I don’t believe cheap products can be good.” For her, she experienced a “quality Waterloo” with the brand Chloé:
“I bought two Chloé bags but I found the stitching was not that well executed so I put this brand off my shopping list. Well, a couple of days ago I was shopping for a new wallet and I checked Chloé’s. Again, not well-made! ”
---Participant J
For Participant J or other luxury fashion consumers who are immersed in the world of luxury, one of their coping strategies in regard to unsatisfactory quality is to trade up to more expensive brands. Participant J stated that Dior and Celine were on her shopping list now, because “they are expensive and there must be a reason.” A key finding of this research, therefore, is that quality determines whether consumers make a second purchase, whereas motivation for an initial purchase can be complex.
Another significant trait that emerged in the research data is the increasing awareness of luxury fashion products’ usability value, which was firstly identified by Chen and Lamberti (2015) as products’ innovativeness, aesthetics and durability. The research findings agree with Chen and Lamberti’s (2015) study. During the interviews, the participants explained their interest by stating:
“For me, what makes luxury luxury is the originality in design, as they can push the boundaries of fashion design’s vocabulary.”
---Participant Z
“Thom Browne is a new brand. But they are really innovative regarding the way they use fabric and their cuttings. And as for Vetments, their deconstructivist concept is famous.”
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---Participant J
“I am not keen on big brands’ design and cutting. Again, I only like designer brands with simple styles but elaborative cutting, rather than ones with loud prints or colour.”
---Participant S
Three participants identified three key words that exist in the realm of usability value — originality, innovativeness and uniqueness. Here, the usability value is different from the concept of novelty in design. Novelty is driven by newness, whereas originality, innovativeness and uniqueness are driven by a holistic appreciation of aesthetic superiority in luxury fashion design, and serve to “show personality” (Participant C), “social image” (Participant N) or “personal style” (Participant S). Chinese consumers’ increased knowledge has made them more critical and demanding in terms of product offerings. Therefore, consumers’ needs of more intangible non-material-oriented aesthetic innovation also create the force to redefine the meaning of functionality in luxury fashion. Functionality in luxury fashion has moved beyond the measure of good quality. It now has a much more hybrid meaning, which encompasses the excellence of both the material and non-material sides of luxury.
4.3.3 Hedonistic value In this research, expressions of Chinese luxury consumers’ hedonistic value have been explored and identified in two fashions — “joy with others” and “joy from self.” In Vigneron and Johnson’s (2004) research, the authors posited that hedonistic-driven consumers are less susceptible to interpersonal influences and are more role-relaxed. In other words, hedonistic consumption happens when individualistic thoughts emerge in consumers’ mentality. Findings from this research support Vigneron and Johnson’s claims. Participant S is a young but affluent consumer who has had overseas living experience. When she was describing her luxury consumption story, she mentioned that when she was living overseas and luxury goods prices were cheaper than in China, she “ended up buying loads because they are cheap” because she felt that “the more I bought, the more I saved.” The participant tried to justify her recreational, impulsive luxury consumption in terms of money-saving. However, her
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excessive consumption was inherently hedonistic-driven. Participant S later made a statement in the interview regarding her personal style:
“I just choose whatever I like. The other day, my friends asked me how many black clothes I have. They commented to me that my life must be so dull because I don’t wear any colours. But I answered that black is different from one garment to other. Black presents different styles on different fabrics or different cuttings. Also, there are so many different shades of black. Still, they said I looked the same in photos.”
--Participant S
The behaviour that this participant displayed to her peers, by stating her different opinions rather than following their recommendations to create in-group harmony, shows her strong individualistic traits, which can encourage hedonistic consumption. In a further investigation of the origin of her individualistic value, it could be that her experiences of living in an individualistic country (the United Kingdom) is one reason. However, participant Y, who has only ever lived on the Chinese mainland, also shows both hedonistic and individualistic-oriented traits in luxury fashion consumption:
“It comes from inner joy. The joy comes from me using the bag. So the charm of luxury comes from the self-satisfaction, rather than from recognition from others. Let me tell you an example. Say, I wear a Sacai dress to go to work, but who knows the brand of Sacai? You probably couldn’t find one person from a hundred Chinese who know that brand. You know, no one recognises those niche luxury fashion brand. So the joy comes from within yourself.”
--Participant Y
Participant Y’s outlook indicates that the hedonistic reward is from herself, rather than from other-oriented conspicuousness. We might raise an assumption that hedonistic traits and individualistic values are naturally bound, or alternatively that individualistic mentalities can be seen as other “imported” ideologies and have been adopted by modern Chinese through their consumption.
In this study, the researcher also captured the interesting dynamics of cross- pollination of hedonistic consumption and a collectivist cultural background, which has been called by the researcher “joy with others.” Participant I told the researcher:
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“After my friend Q left Beijing, I found it hard to find a shopping mate who shared the same ideas about fashion and luxury. Today my friends are either not keen on luxury or are just being aimless buyers… when Givenchy was on its hi-day two years ago, they were those who rushed to the shop. You ask about social group or Quan Zi (community). Yes, I feel pretty lonely. For example, I spot one piece I really like. Not necessarily something I want to buy but it might be a piece whose design I do appreciate. I recommend it to my friends but they don’t really get my intention. It makes me quite upset. You know, there is no more friend who can share the joy of sharing, or the discovery of a new beautiful design.”
--Participant I
Participant I’s description indicates that an extra recreation can be generated when he shops with similar-minded friends by sharing their experiences and thoughts. This finding expands our understanding of how collectivist consumers interact within a social group. The attention to in-group harmony (Hofstede et al., 1980) not only produces potential peer pressure but also creates opportunities for extra peer validation, which contributes to achieving hedonistic rewards.
4.3.4 Conspicuous value - Financial capital and conspicuous value Chinese consumers’ luxury consumption is still motivated by the conspicuous value that luxury fashion may bring. Its effects are heavier on users who are on the lower- to-middle social or career ladder. Once individuals achieve a higher social status, they feel less needy of the conspicuous value of the luxury fashion goods they use. As one participant stated:
“for people like me, who has already achieved success in my professional area, I don’t need any validation from others.”
---Participant Y
However, when the researcher invited this participant to reflect on her luxury fashion shopping preferences when she was younger, she made an honest claim:
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“Well I was quite keen on Da Lu (well-known) luxury brands because they can bring social recognition, along with the self-satisfaction. I don’t deny there was a feeling of showing off. I wanted people to know exactly what I was wearing or using. However, the more I know about what the story behind each luxury good is, and the more luxury products I have, the less interest I have in well-known brands, like Louis Vuitton. Well, I still buy that brand but it lost the factors which would surprise me, or I lost my the vanity.”
---Participant Y
Based on the responses from participant Y, it appears that she has moved to less- known luxury fashion brands in her journey through niche luxury shopping. Research by Eckhardt et al. (2015) showed that emerging inconspicuous luxury consumer groups are purchasing less-known brands with subtle signs in the design. Participant Y is one of those inconspicuous luxury consumers today, but she has evolved from a conspicuous consumer. The same pattern can also be seen in Participant I, who is into buying radical-design luxury fashion now (he kept referring to brands such as Maison Margiela during the interview) after being a fan of Gucci, Versace, Louis Vuitton and Armani. He explained that one of the motivations in his early stage buying of conspicuous luxury was to display his financial achievements (the participant described the emotion as “Yah, I’ve made money now, and I ccan afford luxury bags!”).
The widely held belief that Chinese consumers favour mainstream luxury brands, such as Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, comes from the conspicuous fashion’s function as a display of financial capital. China’s political ideology today is encouraging its citizens to pursue personal financial achievement (Mueller et al., 2016). Scanning the social environment in China, economic development today is still the priority for China’s social development, and the Chinese Communist Party is willing to promote materialistic ideologies, including luxury consumption, to enlarge the domestic market and help tackle the challenges that China is facing in international trade.
For most consumers in China, using luxury means that they have achieved a superior financial status, which is now seen as a virtue in modern Chinese society. Participant C, who is a high achiever, clearly stated that “luxury satisfies my need of vanity,
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because not everyone can afford a luxury.” However, the overt display of financial wealth can also create problems for luxury consumers in China, where social inequality is still a major issue. For example, Participant O stated that “super big brands (such as the Louis Vuitton she bought for her mum as a gift)” didn’t suit her age because she didn’t have the ‘ideal’ income to use them (although her personal income is three times the national average). She spoke explicitly about her worry that less well-off people around her might question her using a fake product if she did so.
When using luxury fashion has become the social norm for a prestige class, any newcomer to the group may adopt the same social norm to ‘fit in’ with their community. This tendency is also reinforced by China’s collectivism cultural heritage, where conformity is a way to maintain communal harmony. This feature can be used to understand the phenomenon of using luxury at work, as two participants told the researcher how wearing luxury fashion had become an important tool for them to construct a professional image at work:
“I was in a management position taking care of the wholesale business of the northeast area of China. So there were some social events where I came across some people who were not those you may see on the streets... they were so well-dressed and wearing mink and sable. So I was influenced by my experience of having been to those social occasions and meeting those people.”
---Participant I
“My job was socialising with people. And what you wear and how you look, your tastes directly affect how people perceive your professionalism… You need the right things to enhance your image. For example, when I worked for the P group, I had to wear suits at work, so there is a solid need. But most of big brands’ tailoring couldn’t satisfy my needs. So I ended up purchasing suits from Dior. They are skinny and flatter my body shape. So from 2013 to 2015 I bought all my suits from Dior.”
---Participant C
Another reason, which is described by one of the participants as Yan Zhi She Hui (society being judgemental towards people’s look), is an emerging factor
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strengthening conspicuity consumption. This participant shared his own reflection on this issue:
“People may use luxury to fit in with some social group. You know, people are really judgemental about what you are wearing. People say China is a Yan Zhi society, so people will judge your social status by your look. Yan Zhi is not just about how good- looking you are. It’s about the whole look, which means what you wear is important… What I worry about is the social trend that people are buying luxury too young too early. Some young people from quite humble family backgrounds are buying luxury.”
---Participant I
Participant I illustrated the new social phenomenon of Yan Zhi society, where people are judged by their looks, and those who have an advantage in terms of appearances can gain competitive advantages in society. China’s digitisation revolution not only paves the way for the luxury business, it also creates a new industry where good looking internet celebrities (e.g., Wang Hong) can have annual incomes up to £35 million (Tsoi, 2016). For most luxury users, looking good means they are rich. Nonetheless, in today’s China, looking good can also make you rich. An individual’s appearance, including what he or she wears, has been seen as a competitive factor to achieve financial success. This social phenomenon, or marketplace ideology, can be interpreted as social simulation in Vattimo’s (1992) theory and can impact consumers’ decision making. For young Chinese consumers, even when they were not dreaming of becoming the next Wang Hong (internet celebrities), immersing in a virtual social scene where luxury fashion goods and success have a strong correlation amplifies the conspicuous value of luxury.
There is no denying that the booming social media in China nourish conspicuous shopping in luxury by creating a platform for people to show off their expensive spending habits. However, envy created by conspicuous exhibits can also discourage conspicuous purchases of luxury fashion. Participant O explained why she was not inclined to show off her shopping on WeChat:
“Sometimes you can’t get what you want by showing-off handbags or whatever luxury goods you have bought on WeChat. Say, you put a Tory Burch on it, but for people who use Celine they would think I’m shallow and naive. And if I put my Louis Vuitton
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online, it would make some of my friends jealous and they might think it’s a fake, or they may ask me where I got the money for such an expensive bag.”
---Participant O
The tensions between showing off and not doing so may come from the unique cultural context of China, where group harmony is still grounded in consumers’ mentalities. Displaying expensive goods means the user’s departure, or intended departure, from his or her old social group. Therefore, if an individual still wants to maintain harmony with their current social group, they should use or display luxury goods discreetly.
- Cultural capital and conspicuous value
In the current literature, there is a prevailing view that luxury’s conspicuous value is manifested mainly in the display of financial wealth. The findings from this research indicate a new dimension of conspicuous consumption in the display of the user’s cultural capital, which is their distinguished understanding of the aesthetics of fashion and the value of luxury. This value dimension may come from the historical references of the social class hierarchy that existed in pre-communist China. From top to bottom in the traditional social ranking lie Shi (scholar-bureaucrats), Nong (farmers), Gong (artisans/craftsmen) and Shang (merchants) (Lu, 2008). The scholar- bureaucrats were respected for their cultural capital and their knowledge and education, whereas the financial capital of merchants was valued highly. The superiority of cultural capital has been validated historically and inherited, or at least partially inherited, by today’s Chinese consumers. For example, one participant explained his views during the interview:
“Chinese people don’t have modern aesthetics. They don’t know what is beauty and what is uglyness. Chinese people’s aesthetics remains in its infant stage. For me, there are different rich people in society. First it’s Bao Fa Hu (the rich vulgar). They only have money. They can buy all the luxury they want but they don’t have taste. Second is You Qian Ren (the rich), who have better taste than Bao Fa Hu, which places them in a higher position. They make their own choices on fashion
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consumption, but their choices might not be the right ones. The real elites are different. They can represent the value of luxury by wearing them. Meanwhile, luxury fashion can enhance their charisma.”
---Participant C
Judging from this statement, a consumer can move to a higher position, from Bao Fa Hu to real elite in the luxury consumption ladder, by showing their taste. However, for this participant, as a senior manager in the luxury industry, his explanation is grounded in his world view that luxury only serves the rich, while cultural capital is an added value on someone’s financial capital. Another participant, however, from the creative industry, described cultural capital in luxury fashion in a different way:
“Let me put it this way, people say there is no social class in China. They are wrong. Their social class is there, no matter if you call them out or not. Comme Des Garcons and Louis Vuitton represent different people in society, they represent different social classes… Comme des Garcons represents people who have cultural capital. It presents the intellectual and culturally-aware people who don’t want to Ren Yun Yi Yun (immerse in the crowd). As for Louis Vuitton, it represents consumers who are not that cultural... My friend D is a successful enterpriser, Mr. Luo is a senior party leader, and Mr. Lu is the chairman of the city’s literature association. However, none of them know luxury. The social class in China is not only classified by financial income. A business owner who makes millions of money can be uneducated or culturally naïve.”
---Participant Y
Participant Y was used to holding senior positions in the creative industry, and therefore valued cultural capital more than financial capital. There is no denying that both of these statements could be biased due to the individuals’ backgrounds. However, the emergence of cultural capital in conspicuous consumption cannot be neglected. This concept can also been traced in younger Chinese luxury consumers, as Participant E said:
“if I wear luxury clothes, I will get appreciation and also compliments from others. That is a validation of my tastes.”
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---Participant E
Participant E’s words indicated that her satisfaction comes from the validation of her cultural capital and her understanding of aesthetics (her tastes), instead of the expensiveness of her luxury outfit. Another participant also spoke about how she achieved conspicuous value by showing her distinguished tastes, often by choosing niche brands that are not commonly recognised or easily identifiable:
“People will be impressed by my outfits but they don’t know about the designers. Just like when they see some lady with her face veil on, walking down the street with bodyguards. And everyone will guess who she is. The mystic aura is something undefinable, to truly intriguing to me.”
---Participant Y
Beyond the psychosocial benefit of receiving compliments or being recognised as a taste-maker, displaying one’s cultural capital in luxury fashion has also been adopted by Chinese consumers as a self-positioning method in their day-to-day social strategy. For Participant N, who works in a creative industry in Beijing, Ren She (individual’s social identity) is important and using luxury fashion in her own style can facilitate her with a favourable social image in a professional area.
“And from what I experience, your charisma comes from inside, about how and what you talk with people. It’s my Ren She (social identity). It’s a social identity. It’s also the game rule in the adult world. That’s the principle in my social circle, as the creative class in China. Ren She is just as important. It’s like a celebrity’s characteristics. It is the right way how others remember you. Like a tribe. So for me, people know me as someone qualified, low-key but difficult. And also Ren She helps me to keep authentic or consistent with being myself.”
---Participant N
When the research inquired what role luxury fashion played in constructing her Ren She, the participant answered:
“Well, no one sees me as a luxury lover but they often say N has good fashion tastes and she is pretty chic. She can style right.”
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---Participant N
Ren She and Yan Zhi She Hui (society being judgemental towards people’s looks) are different manifestations of how Chinese consumers use luxury fashion as a social tool. People who want to construct an intellectual, cultural identity tend to avoid products with big logos or from well-known brands. People are motivated to achieve social recognition based on the judging criteria in Yan Zhi She Hui and may use more visible, well-recognised products to meet people’s expectations. What there is in common is that Chinese luxury users are fully aware of the conspicuous value of luxury, and have been actively engaging or re-inventing this value to fit their social needs in their own social world.
4.3.5 A symbol of the West Luxury fashion is a relatively fresh concept in Chinese society. A recent study by Mueller et al. (2016) found that consumer xenocentrism is prevalent in China, especially among the wealthy elite consumer group. This research also found consumer xenocentrism in the specific context of luxury fashion consumption. During the interviewing process, the researcher invited the participants to reflect on how they discovered or approached the concept of luxury fashion. Some of the participants explicitly stated their perceived co-relation between luxury fashion and the Western world:
“I have to admit that I was somehow Chou Yang Mei Wai (worshipping and having blind faith in all foreign things and forfeiting national dignity). Well, imported brands are Yang Qi and high-end. Say it’s not about the price gap. Say Longchamp, it is not a posh brand and you can purchase them in mid-range shopping centres in foreign countries. However, at that time I chose it more or less because it was a foreign brand. And at that time you could not buy them in China. So I could use the handbag that others couldn’t get. I did feel quite Yang Qi (cool) when I was using it.”
---Participant S
“You know, I went abroad for some visits before but never shopped overseas. It was hard to go abroad at that time anyway. So even the outlet malls were selling discount products, but they educated me that there were so many big brands! The really famous brands! International big brands! I mean, they were the luxury.”
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---Participant Y
The participants used the term Yang Qi (literally meaning ‘foreign style’) to describe something cool and trendy. For participant Y, her statement suggested luxury brands are mostly “international.” In this research, another young participant used the word Gui Zu (Western aristocratic) to describe the image and value of luxury fashion. This can be seen as evidence for Chinese consumers’ xenocentric traits. Therefore, in Chinese consumers’ mentality, foreign brands are superior than domestic products. This perception leads to an interesting fashion landscape where luxury domestic fashion brands tend to name themselves with a borrowed Western name (for example, Marisfrolg, ICICLE, Lancy and Mo & Co).
This research has attributed the cause of xenocentricism in China to the fact that more expensive, and formerly rare, foreign goods can contribute to consumers’ conspicuity needs to demonstrate their financial wealth and their social status as having Hai Wai Guan Xi (foreign connections). Today, as Chinese consumers adopt more Western values and lifestyle habits, (Eckhardt and Houston, 2002), this consumer xenocenticism has been reinforced.
The reasons for consumer xenocenticism in luxury were rather straightforward following China’s unique social changes after the opening-up policies of the late 1970s. During the 1980s, there was an ‘anti-tradition’ trend whereby traditional Chinese values and culture were recognised as contributing factors to the stagnation of Chinese society (Xu, 2001). Later, in the 1990s, it was Western brands that first introduced the term She Chi Pin (luxury goods) to Chinese consumers. Foreign brands have been dominant in fashion advertising and marketing ever since. This has led consumers equating the concept of luxury with foreign origin. In this research, the researcher invited the participants to reflect on the first luxury fashion product they purchased, and all of respondents identified foreign brands. Even though some participants raised the possibility that they would choose more domestic brands in their fashion consumption, or expect to see more domestic brands as alternative to foreign brands, their early experiences of discovering luxury fashion by interacting with foreign brands still have long-term subtle influences on their consumption behaviours.
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4.3.6 Luxury fashion as art The research findings suggest that experienced Chinese luxury consumers not only see luxury fashion as a high-value commodity with added social and psychological value, but they are also creating a new perspective and seeing luxury fashion as a form of art. Participant Y used the term Zuo Pin to describe luxury fashion items, although the term is normally used to describe fine art work in the Chinese language. The same mentality was seen in the other participants’ answers. They tended to perceive the designers behind luxury fashion brands as artists, and therefore the products attached with their names as artworks, not just to be used but also to be appreciated for their aesthetic excellence:
“I got to know about Yohji Yamamoto firstly as an individual, rather than as a fashion designer. From many years ago, I started reading some interviews with Yohji from here and there, learning about his story with Rei Kawakubo. So my interests of Yohji Yamamoto the brand didn’t start with my shopping and picked up this brand on the shop floor. For me, I knew his artistic identity first and I validated him at a spiritual level. And for Rei, you know her personal image, a cool grandma with cool hair. I do admire her style and I read her interviews before I started buying her brands. And later, when I saw their Zuo Pin, I felt that the designers’ own images, their philosophy and the actual fashion design were so holistic and consistent.”
---Participant Y
“What I want to express is the idea from Yohji Yamamoto’s book. He says something like even if one day you are too poor to buy a bottle of chilled beer, pull your hair back, look at the mirror, and you will still have your style. That’s kind of my philosophy. No matter whether you are going up or down in your life, the spirit of fashion will never go away.”
---Participant N
Judging from participant Y’s and Participant N’s statements, it appears that both consumers perceive this particular fashion designer as an artist. Therefore, design products tagged with this designer’s name are seen as art work. With this mentality, the consumers justify their purchases as interactions with artists and as a validation of the artist’s philosophy. They transfer or extend their luxury purchase practice from a
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money-spend conspicuous-related activity to one which is much more cultural and highbrow.
“You have to know the value of designers first. So the value is not only about a handbag or shoes, it represents the spirit of the time… Those Margiela I bought, are not really in-season. I buy the iconic pieces he designed ten years ago because I think those products define the brand, so I will buy them. ”
---Participant N
Participant N’s reasoning for luxury fashion comes from the artistic value of the designer. The zeitgeist virtue has convinced this consumer that the designer’s fashion products are a form of art. Furthermore, this participant purchases specific designs which “define the brand,” rather than buying the latest, trendy pieces. This can be recognised as an appreciation of the originality of art. This consumer’s unique purchases also enable her to demonstrate her extensive fashion knowledge, and can contribute to her achieving conspicuous rewards by showing her cultural capital.
Chinese consumers’ proactive exploration of the artistic side of luxury can be interpreted as a spontaneous inquiry of the concept of elitism using materialist tools. Their actions echo the historical tradition of the Chinese elite’s pursuit of fine art and craftsmanship (Lu, 2008). However, today, artistic images of fashion designers and their brands are produced by the luxury branding strategy of artification with twisted authenticity (Kapferer, 2014). Therefore, confusion and distractions are raised in front of consumers. When the researcher raised this issue, Participant N declined to admit that she was influenced by marketing and branding since she had her own critical thinking for evaluation. But for some younger participants, their idea of ‘fashion as art’ could be constructed or manipulated by luxury’s branding and marketing communication activities:
“I still remember the film about Chanel and I’ve even got the soundtrack on my phone. I remember the end of the film. Chanel was sitting on her mansion’s stairs and seeing her models cruising out at the finale. Guests were applauding, and everything was under her control. She represents the modern female who can achieve success without
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compromising gender roles, social classes. The film intensified my interest towards Chanel the brand. When I am using a Chanel bag, I think I can be the next new female.”
---Participant M
Chinese consumers perceiving luxury fashion as a form of art may have been influenced by another traditional ideology. Some consumers show anti-trend tendencies. They value timeless, iconic styles and fashion designs, rather than novelty. What is behind their ‘timeless’ luxury tastes may lie in the Chinese thrifty consumption value. These groups of consumers may be using their cultural knowledge to justify their non-seasonal less-trendy choices of luxury fashion. By spending less money than other trend-chasing luxury consumers, they may be achieving the same level of self-reward compared to some of their peers.
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4.4 Discussions and reflections
4.4.1 The double-edged effects of luxury’s democratisation in China Understanding the impact of luxury’s democratisation was one of main objectives of this research. Luxury’s democratisation can be seen as a significant feature differentiating contemporary luxury from the traditional, old-luxury concept, and its evolution has visibly expanded the market size of luxury fashion. From the brand management perspective, the democratisation evolution can be interpreted as implying an ‘abandon rarity’ strategy. From the consumer perspective, this research identified the tensions between how Chinese consumers perceive and how they adopt this concept. Theoretically, the emerging category of accessible luxury brands or entry level products from prestigious luxury houses, with their competitive price, are attracting consumers whose income levels are lower than their peers in developed countries. However, from what can be seen from the research, Chinese consumers have shown confusion and even denial towards the idea. As one young student participant indicated, she is not attracted by accessible luxury’s lower prices:
“For Coach, I know this brand’s design is constantly getting better and better now, but I am not paying £300 for a Coach bag…It sticks in-between. Pricewise it’s not a big spend but neither is it a bargain. The design is neither forward nor classy. I don’t understand what kind of need can be satisfied by Coach… You are not buying because it’s cheap.”
---Participant J
Meanwhile, another young participant, who has a longer luxury fashion consumption experience, stated that accessible luxury brands should be excluded from the category of luxury:
“I believe these two are very different concepts. Accessible luxury doesn’t belong to real luxury. It is situated between fast fashion and luxury.”
---Participant E
There is no denying that accessible luxury brands, such as Coach and Kate Spade, still speak to certain audiences in China. However, this down-to-earth branding strategy has affected the aura of luxury fashion’s exclusivity, and this makes such brands less
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desirable to Chinese consumers. The reason may be due to the fact that Chinese luxury consumers desire conspicuous value from luxury fashion. For fashion brands, there is a trade-off for promoting their ‘accessible luxury’ image — on the one hand, it may inspire consumers to ‘trade-up’ from non-luxury consumption, but on the other it may drive sophisticated luxury consumers away. Another participant gave her reasoning why she denies those more accessible brands a luxury image:
“And also about how other people see that brand, how media defines that brand. If people assume some brand is accessible luxury, it is accessible luxury. Also, for some brand like Michael Kors, everyone has a Michael Kors, so it is not luxury.”
---Participant M
For luxury brands in China, creating and maintaining an exclusive, upper-class brand aura is key to convincing status-driven consumers, especially in a nation where consumers’ fashion brand knowledge is increasing rapidly. Nevertheless, an opportunity for accessible brands to develop in China is to cater for the nation’s handbag lovers with a premium ready-to-wear wardrobe to match their valuable luxury accessories. From this research it appears that young consumers invest heavily on visible fashion accessories like handbags and shoes, either because luxury ready- to-wear is “too expensive” (Participant J) or it is “impractical” (Participant O and Participant Z). Only one young participant said she would buy accessible luxury brand ready-to-wear and be satisfied by the product’s offerings:
“Personally, I purchase quite a lot of clothes from accessible luxury brands (including) Theory, S’MaxMara, Acne Studio. Maybe I haven’t purchased any clothes from super luxury brands but from what I see, they are the high-end for me, quite luxurious. You can tell a big difference between them and non-luxury.”
---Participant E
Compared to Michael Kors or Coach, Participant E’s choices for ready-to-wear shopping were in a similar price category but less-known and subtle. This can be construed as evidence for Chinese elite consumers’ preference for the exclusivity of the brand image.
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Another strategy in luxury’s democratisation movement is expanding products offerings to a more accessible level compared to flagship products. If the brand’s prestige price level and brand position are well-perceived, Chinese consumers can achieve a higher level of psychological reward of social recognition than when buying accessible brands. Nevertheless, as the mass-market movement inherently conflicts with luxury’s essence of exclusivity, over-expanding product categories can drive high-profit clients away from the brand. One wealthy participant stated his experience with Prada as follows:
“I fell in love with Prada after Bottega Veneta. However, it didn’t last long. Prada’s product categories are too wide. Anyone can afford Prada and that put me off. For me luxury means not everyone can afford. That’s my basic understanding of luxury.”
---Participant C
The participant who made the comments about Prada started his luxury fashion consumption with a Bottega Veneta wallet, and this gradually developed into a long- term “obsession” with the brand. Bottega Veneta’s high entry-level product prices allow a solid luxury image to be sustained, whereas Prada’s history of selling “luxury bargains,” particularly through their discount retailing channels, has created an image of the ‘luxury brand for everyone.’ Nevertheless, the statement cannot be generalised as that luxury’s democratisation is overall vicious. China’s unique culture may also create another potential opportunity in gifting, which is a common practice in China. The participants claimed that entry-level products can be decent gift choices (Participant M and Participant Y). Participant S, who has developed a sophisticated understanding of luxury fashion brands and regularly shopps for J. W. Anderson and CALVIN KELVIN 205W39NYC (the brand’s new premium fashion show collection), started her shopping from diffusion lines such as REDvalentino. In China, the practice of luxury brands providing accessible alternatives does in a way contribute to the overall brand development by attracting younger consumers into luxury fashion. But at the same time, brands should carefully manage their presence in the market place, and balance the tensions between visibility and exclusivity.
4.4.2 The reviving Chinese traditional luxury value
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The findings of this research have answered the research objective of investigating the socio-cultural influences on luxury fashion value formation by indicating a new value paradigm that Chinese consumers have endowed luxury fashion, as a material culture, with non-materialistic philosophical reflections. Different from Western luxury’s origin as an endorsement of lasciviousness and self-indulgence (Dubois et al., 2005), the ancient Chinese leisure class, the scholar-bureaucrats, incorporated luxury lifestyles into their life philosophy (Lu, 2008). In the Song Dynasty (960-1279), Emperors adopted civil service examinations to select top civil and military officials, which led to the nation being shaped by education rather than traditional aristocratic and military governance (Harrison-Hall, 2017). The educated class developed a distinct identity and consolidates its power, while the unique scholar-bureaucrat identity was recognised as China’s elitism (Lu, 2008). With limited religious impacts, today’s Chinese society is highly influenced by thoughts from Confucianism, which emphasise self-cultivation, performance of one’s moral duties, along with praise of Yi (which can be understood as artful escapism). It is grounded in China’s cultural landscape and is the guideline for China’s elites daily practice. Via aesthetic activities around creating and appreciating different forms of rare and precious goods—ancient master’ paintings and calligraphy, bronze, jade—the purpose of engaging with superfluous but highly valuable things was to achieve a status of mindfulness and to connect with escapism as the ultimate goal (Clunas, 1991). Meanwhile, creating, collecting and appreciating these items, presumably speaking, shall be seen as the pioneering activities around the concept of luxury. The practice itself can be seen as the Chinese interpretation of the French “L’Art de Vivre” (Lu, 2008).
In summary, to some extent the Chinese manner of luxury consumption does not lead to total individual self-indulgence, rather “a reminder to recall the lifestyle of ancestors from China’s long and splendid past” (Lu, 2008, p. 5). The value of historical luxury is grounded in its artistic techniques as well as its philosophical references. Regarding the form of presentation, scholar-bureaucrat luxury always encompassed a minimal and quite visual presentation, which is significantly different from the luxury of the Manchu royals, who originally came from the northeast and conquered China to form the Qing Dynasty, the last imperial dynasty of China (Harrison-Hall, 2017). This brief historical reference of luxury and elite culture may provide further insights into understanding luxury in China today. 97 / 167
“luxury is appreciation of beauty of Wuyong (uselessness). It’s not situated in the realm of utility or usefulness. It’s about aesthetics; it’s about how you play with luxury. In Chinese history, during its golden age in Tang and Song dynasty, Chinese elites appreciated those superfluous things, and they were guided by escapism. It’s probably the equivalent idea how Chinese see luxury today… Today, the Xin Gui (emerging elite class) who are influenced by the West, mainly through their education, are using their own critical thinking to reinvent the essentials in Chinese culture. They incorporate the two sides and create a new idea of fine living.”
---Participant N
Participant N identified the dynamic nature of the luxury concept in China. On the one hand, it comes from the old scholar-bureaucrats’ way of fine-living by “appreciating superfluous things” to achieve “escapism”; the modern concept of luxury is imported from the Western world because the idea of fine-living was absent due to China’s civil war and the national poverty that followed. Modern luxury consumers are playing two roles simultaneously, as adopters of Western concepts and re-inventors of long-forgotten traditional fine-living philosophies.
Luxury, no matter in the East or in the West, is validated by its role as a social class signifier. In China, the most ironic phenomenon is the tension between prevailing luxury consumption and the Communist Party’s ideology, which rejects social class hierarchies. Participant Y, who experienced those notorious radical political movements for social class eradication, explained her view about social class and luxury shopping:
“People say there is no social class in China. Well, they are wrong. Social class is there no matter if you name them out or not. Comme des Garcons and Louis Vuitton they represent different people in the society. They represent different social classes...... People who buy Rei Kawabubo’s design are Wen Yi (intellectual). They are the educated and culturally-aware people who don’t want to immerse in the crowd.”
---Participant Y
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The participant’s insights are based on an assumption that the social class system survived political intervention. We may assume that the cultural values of the historical scholar-bureaucrat-led China had a stronger impact than the one created by politics’ ideological jargon. After a period of being overshadowed, rather than being destroyed by the Communist Party’s social movement, today’s Chinese neo-scholar- bureaucrat class, which is educated and affluent, is picking up its forgotten identity. One method for this identity reconstruction is to purchase luxury goods, including luxury fashion with a certain aesthetic style, as the participant later explained:
“For me, luxury fashion’s design has to be original and unique. And it should also achieve some spiritual highness.”
---Participant Y
Participant Y used the term “spiritual highness” to identify her idea of luxury, while another participant (N) chose the phrase “the value of luxury fashion is beyond items,” and later said that “luxury is endorsed by the spirit of devotion through the process of making and by the pursue of ultimate beauty.” Here, both of their statements echo how the traditional Chinese educated elites appreciated luxury — by its artistic excellence and its philosophical references.
Participant N and participant Y went much further in the discussion of cultural identity in luxury consumption. The reason might be their own life experiences, which bred the neo-scholar-bureaucrat identity. Both of them had worked in the publication industry, where critical thinking is a daily practice, and therefore their self-reflection was quire deep. However, the pursuit of “spiritual highness” is not exclusive to this specific social class in China, and other participants in this research project also mentioned similar ideas on how their luxury consumption has enlightened them in different ways beyond materialistic indulgence:
“It is about Sheng Huo Pin Wei (taste of life). Your fashion tastes and your Sheng Huo Pin Wei show your Ge Diao (elegance of life) …Say if someone is culturally naïve, he/she won’t have good tastes. But someone who is culturally aware may have no idea what fine living is. They are all intertwined together: lifestyle, Ge Diao, tastes. It shows your personal charisma and lets people know you have a quality of living.”
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---Participant S
“What I want to express is the idea from Yohji Yamamoto book. He says something like even if one day you are too poor to buy a bottle of chilled beer, pull your hair back, look at the mirror, and you still have your style. That’s kind of my philosophy. No matter you are being through up or down in your life, the spirit of fashion will never go away. ”
---Participant I
“Luxury for me is about the pursuit of a refined life. It’s a self-discipline. You invest in yourself and maintain your life with a certain standard without compromising.”
---Participant E
Today, there is neither an in-depth study that can give us a crystal-clear portrait of the status of Chinese ‘L’Art de Vivre,’ nor a rigid definition of elitist consumption by neo- scholar-bureaucrats. In this research, the insights from the ten participants provide different conclusions or perspectives of luxury’s aspiration — Participant S stated that fine-living is built on strong cultural awareness; Participant I stated that luxury consumption guides a spiritual “zen” and can be free from materialistic restrictions; Participant E clarified that luxury comes with discipline rather than indulgence.
Indeed, the conceptualisation of luxury is situated somewhere in between — on the one hand, it is China’s ancient cultural heritage and consumers’ unconscious and spontaneous identity-seeking activities; on the other, it lies in Western influences and the even more consumerism-oriented society that is hidden underneath the jargon of the socialist free-market economy with Chinese characteristics. For Chinese consumers, luxury fashion consumption also comes with Chinese characteristics — the dual identities of luxury fashion. One identity serves to increase consumers’ competitiveness in their social life, the other serves as an aspirational tool to enable them to achieve a better self.
There are two prominent schools of thought to explain the activities of achieving ;self; in consumption. One comes from Belk’s (1988) theory of extended self, where consumers expend the self-identity from a core self to an extended self which is
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situated in various social contexts; while the other school of thought subscribes to the postmodernist grounds of Cushman’s (1990) empty-self by stating identity is a black hole (Ahuvia, 2005) and that consumption is a way to represent consumers’ freedom for identity seeking (Firat and Venkatesh, 1995). Therefore, achieving the idea of Chinese fine-living can either be at the core of the self for Chinese luxury fashion consumers, or as another identity seeking action that comes from consumers’ continuous desire to fulfil the empty-self. What is in common is that the awareness of acknowledging the cultural traditions, the scholar-bureaucrats’ ideology, and the spirit-driven luxury perception is awakening in today’s China luxury landscape.
4.4.3 Framework of luxury fashion consumer value After the data analysis and the further discussion, the researcher purposed the framework of luxury fashion consumer value as a conclusion for the research findings (figure 4). Adopting the philosophical assumption underlining this research, understanding the Chinese consumer value for luxury fashion means comprehending how the luxury value is projected on the social fabric of China’s luxury consumption, where the democratisation of luxury and socio-cultural tensions have been identified in the previous framework concluded from the literature review (see figure 2). These two key value-shaping tools are intertwined in the consumer experience and further impel a two-dimension value paradigm grounded in consumer perception.
Figure. 4 Framework of Chinese luxury fashion consumer value 101 / 167
Value in the instrumental realm emerges in consumers’ direct interactions with luxury fashion within the context of luxury’s democratisation, during the process of searching, purchasing and using. It comes from the perspective of how consumers interpret value delivered from brand’s marketing and advertising activities that are carried out to enforce the illusive exclusivity of today’s luxury. The four segments of instrumental value, financial, functional, conspicuous and hedonistic, which have been identified by luxury consumer researchers, were ascertained again from the research data. The repetition of terminology can be seen as a further validation from a postmodernist researcher’s perspective of some predecessor research (e.g., Shukla and Purani, 2012; Shukla et al., 2015; Chen and Laberti, 2015).
Even the representation of Western luxury has been significantly transformed through its democratisation into a bigger market, and the consumer world is entangled by social simulation, some of the most essentials in luxury value have remained consistent through the industry’s re-invention and consumers’ re-interpretation. However, the researcher must resist the temptation to further argue that these four value segments would be recognised as a true value of luxury, because the ideology of luxury is formed by advertising and marketing and change-chasing consumers. Therefore, the instrumental realm of luxury value can be seen as the product of luxury’s democratisation, and as evidence of how some parts of luxury’s concept have become prototyped by the democratisation evolution. For an industry that faces a global market which is intensively segmented and contextualised, delivering a unified message to reinforce artificial exclusivity (Kapafer, 2014) across different cultural and social settings has become its strategic must-do. For Chinese consumers, not to mention how their consumption perception is still deeply manipulated by brands’ advertising and branding messages, adopting some common luxury value with their Western peers could be a voluntary response to make themselves feel ‘stable’ and ‘familiar when they have to confront consistent stimulative marketing ideas for newness.
The aspirational realm of luxury fashion value for Chinese consumers is rooted deeply in Chinese culture and has been surfaced by Chinese consumers’ interaction with luxury consumption. It shows a perspective of how consumers proactively grant their ideology, which is cultivated within their social-cultural environment, onto a
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consumption phenomenon. For luxury research in the West, luxury’s exclusivity serves Western consumers’ desire of elitism, whose concept is often materialised in an aristocratic fashion of living as the leisure class. In China, the elite status which luxury’s exclusivity in modern China’s society echoes to have two images: one as the globalised vision and its way of living by adopting Western lifestyle; second as the superiority of scholar-bureaucrat class who believes in the spiritual aspiration from fine materials. Two dimensions in the aspirational realm—Western symbols and art of life—respectively reflect the social evolution of moving from isolation to globalisation and a cultural renaissance of Chinese traditional values. However, it should be noted that as a piece of contextual research, these two dimensions are highly relevant to today’s consumer ideology in China’s luxury market place. It means in the future, the meanings of elitism in China might further evolve due to the unpredictable nature of the political, economic and social environment in China. Therefore, the content in the aspirational realm can be altered. It does not undermine the validity of the framework. On the contrary, by acknowledging potentially changeable parts of the framework, it empowers further investigation/re-investigation within this research field. Meanwhile, it authenticates its postmodernist philosophical root as a denial of the universal, ultimate truth.
4.5 Theoretical contributions This research has investigated the experiences of today’s Chinese luxury fashion consumers whose interpretations of luxury value are based on a dynamic manner constituted by the self-evolving luxury concept and the socio-cultural references in the marketplace. One of the most critical theoretical contributions made by this research is that this study embraces the new ‘nature’ setting in consumer research to represent the tensions of creating and colliding in the consumer world that can be seen in the final conceptual framework. The framework of luxury fashion value in China (figure 4) shows a new perspective of understand the value formation of consumer goods. It projects a lived consumer world: one side records the consumers’ interpretation of luxury fashion brands’ marketing and branding activities, which aims to create a strong reinforcement of the ideal consumer ideology and where the consumer plays the passive role and is led by brands; and on the other side illustrates how consumers bring their influences onto a consumption concept and where consumers function as creators. The arrival of this framework indicates the achieving
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of empirical evidence for raising discussion of the postmodernist consumer (Goulding, 2003; Firat and Dholakia, 2006; Cova et al., 2011). The theoretical framework is a new paradigm for understanding consumer value (as in figure. 4). It reveals how the impacts of social simulation and social-cultural significance that lead consumer value evolve to two dimensions. It confirms Shukla and Purni (2012) understanding of luxury consumer value that conspicuous, functional, financial and hedonistic values are the four vital aspects of luxury value formation. It also explores a new aspirational realm of consumer value. The related discussion is raised as a part of literature review by Xu (2008) in his research on luxury consumption in China. Now there is empirical evidence to support Xu’s (2008) discussion.
Within the findings of Chinese consumers’ value perceptions, this research confirms Eckhardt et al.’s (2015) finding of a “new conspicuous consumption.” Moreover, the research further explored luxury’s conspicuous value that can achieve the rewards not only by displaying financial wealth, but also by showing cultural capital in terms of knowledge and understanding of luxury fashion aesthetics. The complexity in luxury fashion’s conspicuousness also supports Han et al.’s (2010) discussion of the departure of the two-tier consumer society (the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’). Today in China, consumers are using luxury fashion as a flexible tool to construct their social image and identity. This research also confirms Chen and Lamberti’s (2015) finding of usability value emerged in functionality evaluation that Chinese consumers are showing great interest in the aesthetic side of luxury fashion. This research also challenges Wang and Lin’s (2009) conclusion that collective cultural background restrain the development of hedonistic consumption. Instead, the research findings show that consumers will achieve an extra level of hedonism by interacting with their in-group peers. Meanwhile, the findings regarding the hedonistic value in luxury fashion consumption also confirm Vigneron and Johnson’s (2004) statement that individualist traits and hedonistic consumption are nature-bound together. In the aspirational realm, “Art of life” value perception confirms Xu’s (2008) discussion on the impacts of Chinese traditional social class system on conceptualising luxury today. The research findings suggest that this consumer mentality comes from a perception to see luxury fashion as a form of artwork. Another value perception concerning Western symbols confirms Dong and Tian’s (2009) study that luxury’s Western identity can bring consumers a sense of liberation. However, in the luxury sector, 104 / 167
Dong and Tian’s claim on the dominating power oppression is absent in this research result. Moreover, the finding of the aspirational realm provides insights into how China’s unique cultural background can construct consumer value and lead consumers to re-invent the value of luxury fashion consumption. Therefore, it confirms the cultural authentication theory proposed by Eicher (1995) that domestic culture will have a vital impact on the transformation of an imported culture through consumers’ characterisation and incorporation of it.
This research also gathers empirical evidence for understanding the impact of luxury’s democratisation that was introduced by Kapferer and Bastien (2009) as the brand management strategy setting the value paradigm for modern luxury. This research explores its influences on consumers by investigating consumer’s changing perceptions. For Chinese consumers, the abundant rarity principle in fashion marketing creates confusion regarding luxury’s exclusive image. They tend to perceive the ‘accessible luxury’ as a separate category from ‘luxury,’ rather than as one of luxury’s sub-categories. At the same time, diluted exclusivity pushes Chinese consumers to find compensation from luxury’s aspirational value in order to self- validate their expensive purchases.
Some of this research’s exploratory findings come from the integrated adaptation of interpretivist paradigm in consumer research. This enabled the researcher to gather insights that were generated by consumers’ experiences. The phenomenological interview strategy adopted from Bevan (2014) successfully empowered consumers to construct their contextualised reality on luxury fashion consumption, and made a further contribution to the depth of the research outcomes. This work has proven the practicality and effectiveness of this former sociology-oriented research method in consumer research, particularly for which aims to investigate emergent consumption phenomenon where some fundamental concepts await clarification.
4.6 Managerial contributions As regards managerial implications, firstly, as one of the contributions to the theoretical realm, today’s decision makers in the fashion business should have stronger cultural awareness of the local marketplace. This awareness should go beyond superficially acknowledging cultural taboos. Influences of culture construct 105 / 167
local consumption ideology. Decision makers should also acknowledge consumers’ self-evolving features, and their decisions should be readjusted to create offerings that make consumers feel relevant.
As this is a research focused on China’s luxury consumption, some contextual insights may also contribute to luxury industry decision makers to make their brands form strong connections with Chinese consumers. Firstly, though being thrifty has been recorded in previous research of Chinese consumers, this feature still remains one of the most important consumer insights, even for wealthy Chinese consumers. Chinese consumers still hunt for value-for-money. On the one hand, luxury brands’ pricing strategies should be rational. Chinese consumers today have strong evaluation and research skills. If a brand is sold overpriced in China, they can use daigou or purchase from overseas online retailers to find the right price for them. Secondly, luxury brands should work on creating more value added on their products and their brands. In the initial stage of luxury marketing and branding, luxury should be marketed as an image of success, possibly focusing on an individual’s financial achievements. However, today’s elite consumersare looking for a materialised modern luxury fairy tale for escapism, as well as a sense of being integral to the nature that comes from the same aspirations as the old leisure class. Luxury brands, in conducting localised marketing activities, should adjust their story-telling to form stronger and deeper connections with consumers in China.
4.7 Limitations and further research suggestions
Although the researcher strove not to bring personal prejudices into the field by adopting the reflective phenomenological interviewing technique and by respecting consumer-centric views on data analysis, there might still be a residue of the researcher’s own experiences and biases, which may have emerged in different stages during the research process. First of all, the researcher has worked in the creative industry in China. This experience led the researcher to be inclined to focus on investigating the cultural aspects of the research phenomenon. Secondly, in spite of the fact that the research employed the snowballing technique to maximise the diverse representation of data, the process might still be affected by Chinese people’s 106 / 167
collectivist social mode, which values social group harmony. This means that participants may have referred contacts to the researcher who were like-minded. Also, it should be noted that the claims of research findings are contextual due to the nature of the interpretivist approach and the fact that China’s consumption culture is still evolving. This research is intended to represent a multifarious conceptualising process of luxury fashion in today’s China, rather than establish an infinite truth about luxury and fashion.
As China will continue to be one of the most dynamic consumer markets in the world for the foreseeable future, the topic of luxury fashion consumption deserves further investigations. The researcher recommends that scholars from different backgrounds integrate knowledge and bring in different perspectives of understanding of that consumption phenomenon. Theoretically, this research proved the central role of the conspicuous aspect of luxury fashion for Chinese consumers, and explored the interaction between cultural capital and perceived conspicuousness. Therefore, future research could further explore the interactive mechanism of these two elements. Secondly, as one of the main findings of this research was the exploration of the aspirational realm, further research could be conducted retrospectively to investigate the development of Chinese luxury throughout history. For instance, researchers could focus on investigating the evolution of elitism and how it has affected the conceptualisation of luxury throughout history. Meanwhile, more in-depth research may contribute to the understanding of the subjectivity of Western symbols in the aspirational realm. Although China is rapidly embracing its new national identity on a more global level, the cultural boundaries between the East and the West still lie on an unpredictable edge, and therefore it would be a vital topic for understanding consumption behaviour in China.
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Appendix
Interview Transcripts Participant N
A(N): luxury is an appreciation of the Beauty of Wuyong 无用(Uselessness). It’s not situated in the realm of utility or usefulness. It's about aesthetics. It’s about how you play with luxury. In Chinese history, during its golden age in Tang and Song dynasty, China elites appreciate those superfluous things: flowers, plants, Hua Cao Chong Yu… And they are driven by escapism. It’s probably the same idea how Chinese see luxury today. From this perspective, China may have longer and deeper history on luxury consumption. But for modern luxury, we borrowed from Western. Today, the Xin Gui (emerging elite class) who influenced by Western, mainly from their education, are using their own critical thinking to reinvent the essentials in Chinese culture. They incorporate the two sides and create a new idea of fine living.
Q: So what do you think about cultural difference towards the understanding of luxury between Asian culture and Western culture?
A(N): Western culture values human but Asian philosophy is about Tian Ren He Yi 天人合 一. So the ideal existence of the human being is the disappeared individual. Here is an example, I interviewed Kengo Kuma about his new project in Beijing. I asked him that your project is next to Zaha Hadid’s Soho, so what do you want to bring to China. He said Zaha’s architecture is about standing out, about what human can do on the land. But my philosophy is architecture should be invisible. Architecture should immerse in the world. It’s same about luxury. The idea of Asian luxury is grounded in its philosophy.
Q: So shall we start the interview by sharing your story about how you discover the idea of fashion and luxury?
A(N): my knowledge about fashion and luxury, or generally lifestyle came from my early experience buying magazines in China during my high school and university years. I loved Vogue and Marie Claire. And the idea of style and fashion came from there. Also my mum likes dressing up. Well it’s a quite simple reason, I think they are beautiful so I liked reading those magazines. And that time I truly access to luxury since I worked in the lifestyle industry in China. I started working for fashion and lifestyle magazines in China so I got the chance to access the real luxury world which is over-the-top for someone in same age, occupation or income level like me. And I feel quite lucky because from what I am doing, I can communicate with people in the luxury industry so I knew earlier than normal people about things like the core value of fashion is beyond items. As a consumer, at first I think those luxury fashion is irrelevant to me. It was just my job. And even earlier I believed it’s valueless to buy a bag from certain brands. But the more you know, the more you know luxury is true beauty, true delicacy. The pursue of ultimate beauty by human leads me to appreciate the products. And the more I know, I find it’s a universal concept. Like I always want to do the best, and being grown-up I realize making something truly excellent needs lots and lots of efforts. And in a world where chaos of values becomes inevitable, somethings can lead you to the wrong directions. So what requires to achieve the fine result? The creativity,
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the practice, will power and the power of liaison. So I know the efforts behind a find product: no matter is an intangible event or a tangible pair of shoes. So I really appreciate them and want to own them. So that what happens on me. Today sometimes I do have the craving to own something from my preferred designers. But you need to know the value of designers first. So the value is not only about a handbag or shoes, it represent the spirit of time. And the devotation leads me to appreciate the designer's personale. So, buying his/her designs is a way to show my validation.
Q: That’s very Asian thinking.
A(N): you think so? But Western create brand value, brand culture and marketing strategy.
Q: Yes. So let’s review what we have talked. Do you think it’s our cultural heritage or we are purely being brainwashed by marketing?
A(N): Not brainwash. Because we are the people who can think critically.
Q: So what makes luxury fashion different from other forms of luxury?
A(N): for me, from words’ meaning, fashion and luxury are contradictory. Fashion, if I say it right, is trend. And luxury is timeless. So luxury is beauty and fashion is pretty. Beauty and pretty are different. Beauty does not necessarily meet the baseline of pretty. So luxury does not necessarily to be fashionable. For me, I spend more money on other things than fashion. Even for fashion, those Margiela I bought, are not really in-season. I buy the iconic pieces he designed ten years ago. For Louis Vuitton, I adore the classic monogram design so as to Dior or YSL. Because I think those products define the brand so I will buy them. Luxury for me, is more and more about experiential consumption. I don’t know if there is same term in fashion but in hospitality, there is a term called experiential travel. It doesn’t matter how expensive the hotel you stay in. It’s all to do with your experience, your memory and your vision which could not be quantified or materialised. And that’s luxury. For me, I would rather spend 20,000 RMB on a trip than a bag. I don’t need to be seen. I need my own experience and my own achievements after the trip.
Q: Can you achieve the experiential experience in luxury fashion?
A(N): I may achieve that experience in buying an iconic design. But most of luxury fashion items for me are not luxury. Today’s luxury fashion marketing strategy is to do with social media celebrity endorsement. I don’t like it. I don’t buy in it.
Q: when you purchase or use luxury fashion items, will you consider how others will think of you?
A(N): No. what do you mean about how others think of me?
Q: for instance, you may want to adjust what you wear based on the social context.
A(N): it’s an issue about manners. But for me, I don’t have any dramatic fashion items so it never will be a problem. But I don’t care people commenting on why I buy this brand or they think some of my luxury fashion purchases are not petty. Whatever….
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Q: I am really interested in the experiential consumption. So when did you start consuming in this way?
A(N): I don’t really remember. Maybe I have been doing that for a year. It may come from what I am doing career wise. I am working in hospitality and tourism magazines. Things I come across are generally less materialised you know but they are all something fine. Also I feel the world has changed. People don’t really value visible things like brands or logo. At least it is happening in my social circle. And from I experience, your charisma comes from inside, about how and what you talk with people. It’s my Ren She 人设 (position of social identity). Maybe someone’s Ren She is “oh she is someone wearing big logos”. It’s another identity. And she may work on building that Ren She. But it’s not me.
Q: How do you define Ren She?
A(N): it’s a social identity. It’s also the game rule in adult world. That’s the principle in my social circle, as the creative class in China. Ren She is so important. It’s like celebrity’s characteristics. It is the way how others remember you. Like a tribe. So for me, people know me as someone professional, low-key but difficult. And also Ren She helps me to key authentic or consistent of being myself. You know there ae so many temptations and people always get lost.
Q: So what role luxury fashion play in your Ren She?
A(N): well no one sees me as a luxury lover but they often say N gets good fashion states and she is pretty chic. She can style right.
Q: anything more you want to share?
A(N): I think domestic designers or Asian aesthetics will revive. I have seen it in hospitality. There are some questions which cannot be answered by Western philosophy. And Asian aesthetics is booming. Muji is expanding and Western are buying in them. I think the Western Muji buyers are not only driven by novelty. I think they do appreciate the Asian style, or way of living. Asian-oriented design agencies are expanding to overseas.
Q: One last question, has your consumption pattern changed after being married?
A(N): No. not at all. The only change is I will shop for my husband. And I will buy luxury for him.
Q: Why do you buy luxury for him?
A(N): I know those products are fine. I want to let him know what is fine.
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Participant M
Q: would you like to tell me when did you get your very first luxury good? What is that and what drove you to buy that product?
A(M): Luxury…So you are not asking about accessible luxury, you mean high-end luxury right?
Q: That is very interesting. So How do you define luxury and accessible luxury?
A(M): Well accessible luxury for me is I can make the purchase after bit browsing. Something I don’t need to have a second thought before buying well at least I don’t need to let my mum know. I am relying on my parents’ financial supports since I am now in uni. Well for luxury, I tend to think twice. I need to pursue myself that is the stuff I really need. Or if it is something really suits me.
Q: You used two different terms luxury and accessible luxury. So what are the differences between them?
A(M): there probably are three criteria. First of all, it is about the price range. It’s not about the price of single items. It’s the whole brand’s price range. A cardholder can be from a luxury brand can be the same to an accessible luxury’s coat. But luxury is still the luxury. And also about how other people see that brand, how media define that brand. If people assume some brand is accessible luxury, it is accessible luxury. Also, for some brand like Michael Kors. Everyone has a Michael Kors, so it is not luxury. Luxury shouldn’t be seen on the high street. You know certain items from those big brands are becoming quite popular. You can see them everywhere on social media. In that case, I won’t fancy them anymore. I want something unique.
Q: what do you mean about unique? You mean something hasn’t been owned by others, or with the novel design, or from a niche brand? Can you think about what is most important things for you?
A(M): I think it is design.
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Q: In the past few years, is there any change about your criteria for buying luxury?
A(M): I think so…
Q: probably you can think about what was your first luxury.
A(M): I think it was when I was in uni couple of years ago, my dad bought me a Hermes scarf. But I never really used it since the pattern of the scarf didn’t fit my look at that time.
Q: you mentioned it is a gift from your family, so have they influenced on your buying preference?
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A(M): well If I buy the luxury for myself and I will be the one paying for it. But If it is a gift for others, I definitely will. It is just like a materialized mediator between us.
Q: So will you buy luxury gift for your friends?
A(M): it depends who they are.
Q: Can you recall your memory about a recent luxury gift you had given to some?
A(M): I bought a Burberry scarf for my friend as his wedding gift. Well firstly I like the heart print it has which is low-key and casual. And it was on offer so why not I paid for the same money but got a better stuff which has a higher price value, and more classic.
Q: you mentioned higher price and classic design. You know not everyone will give away such an expensive gift.
A(M): well the price was alright for me regarding my friendship with him. I will spend more money on gifting to people who are really close to me. But I will not buy posh gifts for normal friends. I would rather spend that money on charity. I will be really happy seeing him using that. Maybe it is our culture. Our social code is…let’s say, people always carry some gifts when they visit friends on all sorts of festivals. Gifting can make people closer. And gifts can light up our tough life.
Q: I like the metaphor, can you explain that to me?
A(M): hum…First, I’d like to share with others. It is a nice thing that money can buy some happiness and being given to others, than just leaving the staff there. You know what I mean? You know there are loads of difficult which can be solved by money. (luxury) brings us a flash of joy. I think it’s lovely.
Q: it’s very interesting hearing about that. Well shall we back to some of other luxury fashion shopping story…
A(M): Oh yes. I bought a McQueen clutch bag. Quite expensive even when it was on sale. And it was bit showy really.
Q: Why made you buy it?
A(M): I like the design.
Q: Ok, have you taken McQueen brand meanings in account of your buying decision?
P：Not McQueen the brand, it was more like the designer Alexander McQueen his own images.
Q: Well McQueen today is not designed by McQueen. A lot of luxury brands use their founders’ legends in their branding tools. So those commercial activities will affect your purchase decision?
A(M): Oh that enlightens me!
Q: So you agree with it?
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A(M): well, maybe half-half. Let’s say, I still remember the film about Chanel and I even get the OST in my phone. I remember…in the end of film, Chanel was sitting on her maison’s stairs and seeing her models cruising out at finale…Guests were applauding, and everything was under her control. She represents the new female, who could achieve her career success with compromising to the gender roles, social classes. The film intensified my interests towards Chanel the brand. When I am using a Chanel bag, I think I could be the next new female. Well that the positive half side. The another half negative side is when I spot another Chanel users whose images don’t represent The Chanel’ identity, sometimes they even are the ladies I don’t want to be…That downgrades the Chanel image in my mind. But I can’t quantify the effects on the brand image, so I don’t really know if it leads to a positive or negative outcome. So…I judge by the design in the end. The influence from brand image…Since it changes from time to time…May not be that strong on me.
Q: So what does the brand image mean to you?
A(M): hum
Q: Well you mentioned Hermes before. So why your Hermes is something important for you?
A(M): It is a big brand name. And I own one!
Q: Did you have any friend who was using Hermes?
A(M): But why did you still fancy it? A Hermes, a luxury fashion product.
Q: Maybe I want to show that I am a grown-up. I would no longer be a girl. I could be a woman from then. What is luxury…Say I was not wearing that scarf for a bit because my behaviors didn’t really match it. I did have the same level bags or shoes to match its look. I only started using it two years after.
Q: There are a lot of things I want to know. First how did you hear about the brand name under the circumstance that there was no one you knew was using it.
A(M): Well my mum told me that. And I was learning pattern design in university and Hermes is famous for its prints. And I learnt about its good quality and high price. The delicacy of their prints. So that is luxury. That is what people all want. And you also heard people saying it is luxury. You know all women when they have grown up? Love beauty love exclusivity love the things don’t belong to other people. It is the desire of possessiveness.And I want it too.
Q: Well so why luxury can make a girl to be a grown-up woman?
A(M): I was feeling in that way maybe was contributed to the fact that I wasn’t confident enough. And when you were not confident from inside, you wanted to add some value on yourself from outside.
Q: why you were unconfident?
A(M): I have always been like that, even a bit today. Perhaps it’s a gender thing that girls generally are quite picky to themselves. If someone worth five points, girl will mark herself 3 and boy will mark himself 8 or 9. Women always look at what other people have which they
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don’t have. I always compare myself to others from time to time. It is just more or less in every occasion. And I never deny that.
Q: how can you describe that feeling, or situation?
A(M): maybe it’s about Mianzi? But I don’t really want to stand out. It depends on who I am with. For example, if I hang out with someone who doesn’t wear anything luxury at all, I would not fully “army up”, maybe use one piece of luxury. But in a formal occasion, I would be rather nicely dressed. It’s like play in a video game, and the game character needs to be army by different weapons: sword, shield, spear. You need the add-value to survive.
Q: what’s the add-value about?
A(M): Social recognition?
Q: Can you imagine how different will you feel when you use your McQueen handbag comparing to not using any luxury?
A(M): I will definitely feel quite different. Luxury makes me feel good about myself. I would rather use a old luxury bag then using a brand new normal brand bag. And I will be feeling like: oh yes my bag is luxury.
Q: Will you take other people’s perceptions in consideration? Say, Will you think about how people will see you as a girl wearing luxury?
A(M): maybe.. not that much…Well I am just thinking if I’m going to somewhere posh, I definitely need to wear big brands.
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Participant J
Q: Shall we start with the Givenchy bag you recently purchased? Can you shall the story about buying the bag?
A(J): Where shall we start? The brand Givenchy?
Q: From anywhere you’d like to share.
A(J): OK. Recently I bought all my luxury fashion with my boyfriend. I used to quite believe in my taste. I always bought the one I spotted, rather than concerning about what was trend on Internet. But I take those online comments into consideration.
Q: Why do you start looking at these online comments?
A(J): I don’t really know. Well maybe what I am thinking if I spend the money for a big brand. should let other people be aware of that.
Q: did you think in this way before?
P No I didn’t really.
Q: When did the change happen？
A(J): it gradually changes since I know more about luxury online retailers, and socio media. You receive a lot of information everyday so there is no way you can avoid those voices. It is an unconscious influence. Say, you won’t actual search for those items being talked about online. It’s like when you bump into a item and you will recall that it is the one I have looked at online. You may start appreciating its design, and try it on. I quite likely end up buying.
Q: So when you look at those socio media, are you more incline to do the research for a specific buy, or just generally browsing?
A(J): Browsing. Just see if there is anything interesting.
Q: Is that make you happy? You enjoy it?
A(J): Depends. It is good when you have the budget and know how to spend the money. But not really good when you are skinned.
Q: So it is spending the money makes you happy or owning luxury good makes you happy?
A(J): both. They all make me happy.
Q: in that case, shall we back to your happy story with Givenchy bag?
A(J): Oh yes. When I first noticed the bag, I am happy with its size, shape, and the leather has corcordior effect which was nice. And later realize it’s Givenchy. That was the first time I realized Givenchy had that one and could rarely be owned by many people. And the price…it only few hundreds! And I had been told there was a bit extra discount. See, I had to get it. Be honest, I had browsed the bag once when it was on full price. I was struggled if I shall buy that bag. I mean it is only a mini crossbody bag. And the second time I got there it was on sale.
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Q: So budgeting is important to you.
A(J): yes, price is still important to me.
Q: what is the most important one to you in luxury fashion?
A(J): Depend on what style I want to present. And I will also take current trend in account…But I may not end up buying the most trendy one. You know the most fashionable items maybe are not suitable for you. For luxury fashion. I don’t buy luxury clothes they are too expensive for me. That is something I will only browse. I buy handbags, accessories and sometimes shoes. So the most important things to me are price and product style.
Q: so you tend to get them on sale or get them early?
A(J): depends on the style. If they are seasonal style and I can’t predict they will go on sale, I will get them when they get discounted. For classic style which would never be discounted, it doesn’t matter about sales season, I would like to pay full price.
Q: why would you spend more on the classic one?
A(J): well they never go on sale.
Q: So it is like an investment for you?
A(J): not really, their value will definitely go down once you get them. But for those luxury fashion always end up in sale, maybe it’s my strange belief, I don’t recognize them as true luxury. They lose the value(掉价). For those classic, always full-priced products, you will believe they are true luxury.
Q: So how do you define luxury? I find it’s getting tricky now. Say, Givenchy is expensive and we perceive it as luxury but you can often get them for a discounted price.
A(J): It is hard. Let’s say Off-white or Vetements…
Q: Do you recognize them as luxury?
A(J): Streetwear Luxury? For price they are seriously expensive. For design style, they all get the street look. I still believe style (风格)is a key feature for luxury.
Q: How do you define style?
A(J): For example, Chanel and Dior they are luxury but have distinctive style. They are elegant in different fashion. For Off-White who inclines to bring out crossover collections. But these crossovers with different brand can affect the consistency of its style. From what I can see, the consistency it has is its sign.
Q: What is the sign?
A(J): the X—Off-White’s Logo. You can recognize the brand by its logo. But when you sole examine its design, you can’t tell it’s Off-White. But for Dior, you can easily recognize it’s Dior without any logo.
Q: Crossovers is a big trend in luxury industry. 125 / 167
A(J): Yes, I heard about Off-White had collaborated with Moncler…and other brands from cheap to luxury.
Q: How does it affect your perceptions about the brand?
A(J): Not about the brand images. For the crossover collections, I focus on its design style. To be honest, it’s a kind of hype. They sale these collections with premium price. And people are “wearing” the price tag.
Q: So why those street luxury can sale on that price level;?
A(J): There is another brand Thom Browne. It’s a new brand. But they are really innovative regarding how they use fabric and cuttings. And for Vetements, the brand concept is famous, as being the deconstructivist
Q: So will you define them as luxury?
A(J): Maybe. I would call them fashion than luxury.
Q: So what can make them to be the luxury fashion?
A(J): Time and history. You can just come from nowhere as brand yourself as luxury. Price can’t justify the idea luxury. There is a difference between the the nobility 贵族 and the vulgar rich 土豪
Q: That is very cool description. So luxury for you should represent the 贵族 image?
A(J): Let me put it in this way. I am not judge these street luxury as Tu Hao and we all know every brand has its own design philosophy and style. But don’t you think time is the most luxury thing comparing to others? You can become loads of money in your way and become Tu Hao overnight. There is nothing wrong about it. But you can’t buy history. So for a brand, who can be the innovators through history is such a achievement.
Q: Let’s say Balenciaga and Givenchy who all put their name in fashion history but their current design style are quite different from their old images.
A(J): That is what I call the innovators through history. They have history and their current design keep relevant to today’s customers. It’s a dynamic age and the evolution of fashion style also should be dynamic. They can still create new and distinctive image. For example, today’s Balenciaga and Saint Laurent they are very different.
Q: So when did you get into the luxury world?
A(J): Only since I got here (UK). I did pay much attention to luxury when I was studying in China. I studied in Hangzhou and there are luxury boutiques in the city. But I was not brave enough to walk in the shop.
A(J): What encourage your luxury consumption once you got here?
Q: It’s the more accessible shopping experience. For example, you can walk in Selfridges to touch, try or just browsing its massive luxury products freely. But in China, those boutique…though snob sales assistants…they made me feel distanced. 126 / 167
A(J): Talking about the difference environment between China and here, socio media is different here. You can use Instagram and other platforms. Do you think the more accessible channel to acquire fashion information can contribute to your luxury fashion shopping?
Q: To some extent. I find Instagram the image-based communication is more straight forward and leaves me stronger impressions. So when I do my shopping those images will come into my mind and resonate.
A(J): So what is your new discovery on social media? Any new impressive marketing campaign or products from luxury brands?
Q: Not really. But I have been following few luxury online retailers. For instance, I find Farfetch’s own content on socio media is rather interesting.
A(J): Do you thing online retailing and luxury is a contradicting partner? You mentioned luxury is about 贵族 but online retailers are open to everyone.
Q: I don’t think so. Online retailing is the trend. Yes there might be less exclusivity on online platform but they can provide more interesting experience. For physical store, there won’t be a lot of changes regarding the merchandise and story environment. Some shops look the same like five years ago. But you can get more from online retailers. Second, online retailers also provide good service. Say, same-day delivery and free return. Every now and then they have exclusive discount. Also, not everyone can afford them even they are online. Price is there. It still maintains exclusivity only with larger stock.
Q: So what are your favorite online retailers?
A(J): Farfetch and Net-A-Porter?
Q: Why?
A(J): I am really impressed by the styling presented on Net-a-porter. It produces its own styling guide on each item than giving you the brand’s lookbook. They have a decent range of brand selections, exclusive collections and quite decent service.
Q: So apart of getting aspirations from online retailers, do you still read fashion magazine.
A(J): I only bought one issue of fashion magazine in my life! I even don’t really read their e- version since they start charging fee for that. You can see, there are free information everywhere and I can’t be bothered to pay 2.99 to read vogue. It’s unnecessary.
Q: But people would say they present the authority in taste. Do you believe in some authority voice in fashion?
A(J): No. Bloggers are taking over now.
Q: Have you been following some bloggers?
A(J): Not a lot. Well there is one Gogo Boy. I have been following him since I read one of his Wechat post. He’s fun.
Q: Can you think about if Gogo boy had influenced you to purchase certain?
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A(J): Well I considered but I haven’t done the purchase. Recently, he posted something about loafer shoes. I did a screenshot about those products but I haven’t done my research yet. Well and I don’t think I am going to do so. I do feel the content bloggers post is getting boring. Either they write something about the events they have been invited to, or fashion trends? But they write about the trends in same way. We all say print media is dying but those bloggers are becoming the authority voice based on their followers.
Q: Do you think those fashion bloggers can endorse luxury fashion?
A(J): luxury…I don’t know…
Q: So how do you usually do to make the purchase decision when you are buying luxury fashion?
A(J): Firsts it must come from my own needs. And See if I have the budget and if there is any interesting new design.
Q: What do you think about accessible luxury? How do you define that? We know the its concept is quite subjective.
A(J): You are right. For accessible luxury I will think about Michael Kors and Coach first. For Coach, its deisgn is getting better and better now but I am not paying £300 for a Coach bag.
Q: Why not?
A(J): It stuck in-between.
Q: What do you mean?
A(J): the price is not a big spend but neither as a bargain. The design is neither avant nor classy. I don’t understand what kind of needs can be satisfied by Coach.
Q: but they are still cheaper than tranditonal luxury. everyone can afford to buy a Coach,
A(J): But you are not buying because it’s cheap. They should have the design.
Q: And history as you mentioned.
A(J): Coach has a decent history. Oh I also pay attention to the brand logo. For instance, I love YSL but I don’t like its big logo on their bags. So as to Coach, and the old Mulberry.
Q: I can’t remember the old Mulberry’s logo. Can you remind me?
A(J): it was a tree. Who want to buy a bag with a massive logo of an ugly tree?
Q: What do you think about Mulberry now.
A(J): I think they want to be the next Burberry. Both of them have very similar price level. But Mulberry is less well-recognized then Burberry. So Why can they sell for that price…it stuck in middle. Though Burberry’s recent design is really dull.
Q: Burberry is trying to be younger.
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A(J): Only for their catwalk show. Their merchandises in physical stores don’t look young.
Q: For luxury fashion shopping. Which part you enjoy most?
A(J): Unwrapping the bag! When I JUST own it. I only get the joy from luxury shopping for a short term. After couple of day, I feel those new expensive purchases can actually be replaced by something normal.
Q: So for those luxury fashion items you bought. Are you wearing them on daily basis, or saving for occasions.
A(J): Save for occasions. It more depends on the social scene. I will use luxury if the others are using them. But if they just dress normally, I don’t want to stand out. I will follow what other people’s wearing.
Q: what do you parents think about your luxury shopping?
A(J): They didn’t advocate when I was not working. But now I get a part-time job and generally their attitude is here is the money and you can make the decision how to spend them.
Q: How about your boyfriend’s attitude?
A(J): He is fine with it. And He is educated by me saying “you get what you pay for”. For me, I don’t believe cheap products can be good.
Q: So you also value quality?
A(J): Yes, I bought two Chloe bags but I found the stitching is not that well executed. So I won’t buy that brand again. I was shopping for a new wallet and I checked Chole’s. But again it was not well-made.
Q: So what on your shopping list now?
A(J): Celine? Dior? I tried the Dior one but I don’t think it works on me. I am thinking about get a big Celine bag to put my everyday stuff in. I have been looking them online and they are in my budget.
Q: So back to the question. How do you define if a fashion brand is luxury.
A(J): My standard is really simple. If other people recognize the brand is luxury, and I will think it is luxury.
Q: So what else you want to say about luxury fashion?
A(J): I still believe they are expensive for a reason. It’s like an illustration art. It looks simple but involves lots of disciplines and technique and so as luxury fashion. Once you know the knowledge about its aesthetics, its cutting technique, its fabric, you will know why it is worth the money. Like Off-white…or Vetements.
Q: I remember they sell a pair of sport socks for £80.
A(J): Is the one worn by Mi Yang?
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Q: I don’t know…Well she is a strong influencer now. What do you think about her?
A(J): It’s like listening a pop song, though you don’t live the lyrics or melody but if you repetitively listen to it, you will get used to it. Just like her, since she maintains that high level of visibility to public, you will end up think her style is right. It’s like brainwashing.
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Participant C
Q: Could you tell me your first experience about luxury fashion?
A(C): The first time I came across luxury fashion was at age of 17, 18. I was influenced by my mum. She is from Shanghai. You know ladies from Shanghai know how to dress themselves. And she is the lucky one made money from business. At early 2000s, my mum and her friends were the first group of people shopping abroad. They went to Paris to buy luxury. The luxury brands I used at that at was what is recognized as old-fashion but was really exclusive brands like Bottega Venetta. My mum likes BV and it affects me a lot. BV was the first luxury brand I used and the brand’s craftmanship, the leather weaving technique, and the aesthetics influenced me on my future personal style. BV is a brand that the more you use, the more you know about its quality. When I was about to graduate from high school and my mum bought me the first BV wallet as gift. Today I thought BV the brand was bit too much when I was at that age regarding my financial situation. Later I gradually knew more brands but still BV is the most important influence. I used to be really obsessed about BV, I bought everything from that brand.
Q: When was that?
A(C): After I started working. I got a decent job in Dubai so I could afford what I want. That was around 2008. BV was not as expensive in middle east than in China. That was truly obsession. But when I think about that time today, I found BV was bit too mature for me. I don’t mean BV is a old-man brand. I was not mature or sophisticated enough to match the brand’s inner value. Today I think BV is for man with story. But anyway it is all part of a learning process. After BV, I fell in love with Prada. But it didn’t last long. Prada’s product categories are too wide. Anyone can afford a Prada which put me off. For me luxury means not everyone can afford. That’s my basic understanding of luxury. Later I bought Dolce & Gabanna for half year. You know it’s a process of discovering what truly match myself?
Q: So what does it match to? You job, lifestyle or just you as a person?
A(C): all of them. Professional wise, you need the right things to enhance your image. For example, when I worked for Porsche, I had to wear suits at work so there is a need. But most of big brands’ tailoring couldn’t satisfy my needs. So I ended up buying suits from Dior. They are skinny are flatter my body shape. So from 2013 to 2015 I bought all my suits from Dior. what I valued was its modern tailoring. But that’s for work. But for leisure wear, or my personal lifestyle, I would rather not to choose big brands. I prefer niche designer brands to show my personality. That’s almost my understanding of buying luxury fashion. You need to find the match point between you and a brand. say, I used to hate LV. Its brand image was contaminated by its Chinese users. Same as Gucci. Chinese people don’t have modern aesthetics. They don’t know what is beauty what is ugly. Chinese people’s aesthetics is still in its infant stage. they like Bo Lai Pin (Goods from foreign countries). What foreigners say good is what they think is good. So I hated LV has nothing to do with the brand itself. You know, because it was everywhere on streets. But from last year, I started to reembrace LV. Maybe it’s due to my age. At age 30s I would like to dress young. Last year I bought three LV bags from their fashion show collection. They put animal figures on bags which is quite young and unique. And I bought their travel holdall. The brand image is younger now and not stand away from tastes of the mass. We all change regarding our tastes and style. So it’s a
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two-way interactions between luxury and you. It’s not that if you are rich, you can make all luxury match you. It’s not true. And if you are loaded, it is still luxury’s role to choose you?
Q: can you further explain that?
A(C): let’s talk about Chanel. I never think Chanel is a brand for the young. I’m talking about its fashion line. Chanel’s tweed suits are not for the 20s. young girls cannot style them right. They only make themselves look old. But for ladies over 40s can style them, they enhance the beauty of the design and the design enhance wearer’s image. So it is luxury choose you, even you have the money. Put all the big brands on yourself is not fashion, it not luxury, it’s only waste of money.
Q: so what do you think about the idea of luxury fashion. There must be a tension between luxury and the ever-changing fashion system.
A(C): fashion is an constantly changing which is right. But you need to cooperate the trend with your personality. For luxury fashion, firstly luxury brands produce their products with high quality so when wear them, it enhance my personal image from outside. Inside, it also satisfied my needs of bit vanity because not everyone could afford luxury. and it makes me confident. So the what I wear outside can improve how I feel inside. That’s the value of luxury fashion. They are not only pretty. Worked as PR my job was socializing with people. And what you wear and how you look, your tastes directly affect how people perceive your professionality. And there is another thing which may sound negative. But luxury is luxury because not every could afford. So what I use signify my social class. That’s the meaning of luxury for me. For me, there are different rich people in the society. First it’s Bao Fa Hu. They only have money. they can buy all the luxury they want but they don’t have taste. Second is You Qian Ren who have better taste than Bao Fa Hu which make them in higher positions. They have their own choices on fashion consumption but their choices might not be the right choices. The really elites are different. They can represent the value of luxury by wearing them meanwhile luxury fashion can enhance their charisma. So they jump out of box: they are the people who don’t need luxury to show off anymore. They can even create value for the luxury fashion they are wearing.
Q: so luxury fashion and wearers are interactive.
A(C): Yes. It’s a Xiang Fu Xiang Cheng relationship. That’s my understanding about luxury fashion. A very good example is my mum. When I was young I knew she bought all kind handbags but some of them were not the wise buy. Again, it’s a learning process for all luxury users in China. Now I am on my 30s. So I am jumping out of the box for a bit. You know I really really really love BV. But I aware that even today that I couldn’t fully represent the value of BV. That the reason why I may not choose to wear BV in some occasions.
Q: Do you buy more niche brand? Things like Lanvin. They do really good menswear.
A(C): Lanvin is becoming more well-received today in China. I think all the niche will become the mainstream.
Q: Tell me more about it.
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A(C): Hermes is a good example. Hermes started as a small atelier and gradually expanded to a luxury house based on its reputation. Once it has the reputation, there will be more consumer needs. They will produce whatever consumer want. For niche, people start chase after them because they are bored of mainstream, and the niche has the simulating power to wow them. And consumers believe niche brands are novel and unique. But when more and more consumers start buying niche to be niche, there is no niche anymore. And for brands side, they may give up their original niche followers who appreciate its own unique aesthetics or products and please the mass market by producing more mainstream products. Business is driven by profit.
Q: will you defined yourself as someone who appreciate the niche?
A(C): Yes I am. I used to be a big brand follower because I needed to enhance myself by borrowing values from luxury brands. But I neglected the fact who I really was. Later I became more mindful about myself and clothes I am wearing. I don’t confront the mainstream anymore, as what is represented in mainstream fashion magazines. I don’t follow the so- called fashion trends. I will evaluate between what is in and my personal style. Personally, I like minimalism, nothing complex. But small details can show you are different from the crowd.
Q: So how China’s socio environment influence on luxury fashion consumption here?
A(C): I think fashion started itself only after year 2000. There was no such concept as fashion in China before in mainstream. China is a nation highly influenced by politics and economy. And why I say Chinese don’t have contemporary tastes, they don’t know what is beauty what is good. It all came from the history. After open-up China was influenced by Hong Kong and Taiwan. But they were modified Western tastes. And after open-up…..how can I put it…it like “Bom! I have money now ! Hua! Everything is coming to China!” so people buy what they are being told to buy. They don’t have individual judgments. On one side, there is a massive market need in China; on other side, there is no healthy socio influences on people’s consumption. People buy stuff are not because they appreciate the products. They buy because it can show they have money! That’s the impact from luxury’s early stage in China. There is no education about what is luxury value. Everything is driven by showing off their socio status as the rich.
Q: How does it affect your individual consumption?
A(C): to be honest there is. Like I knew LV the brand because there were people as what I said using LV. And there will be two consequences: one, I follow them, I buy what they are buying, I become mainstream; second, on opposite, I will not buy them because that. So there are two concepts here: brand awareness and brand acceptance.
Q: As you said before, you moved from hating LV the brand to reembrace it. So what are motivations behind it?
A(C): the major reason I reembrace it is I discover the brand from a different perspective. I know the background history, their craftsmanship, their materials features. Is what underneath the brand name charms me. Meanwhile, from their latest collection, I feel its product design is relevant to me again.
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Q: So how do you define your style in luxury fashion.
A(C): simplicity. There are lots of brands emerged in market places and name themselves as big brands. But I don’t really get it. Say, I don’t like Balenciaga. I can’t accept. They are ugly from my personal tastes. They may be endorsed by celebrities or looking young. But they are doing well on media communications with the mass. They will produce everything which can sell. They are too much on the profit-driven side.
Q: So what will do regarding this brand?
A(C): I will give up the whole brands. Today I’m getting away from those brands who focus on maximizing their profits. That’s why I stopped buying Dior and Prada.
Q: Is there anything more you want to share?
A(C): I am quite confident about the luxury in China. We need to be patient and give it bit more time. Our economy only set up for 30 years. Things are getting better. People are exploring their own fashion and luxury tastes.
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Participant I
Q: Can you briefly introduce you self and share your story that how you experience as a luxury fashion consumer?
A(I): I studied Russian language in university and after graduation, I went to Mosco working for a female lingerie company. After two year I got back to China and started working in fur industry. The first time I heard about fashion, or started knowing about it was during high school when some girls in class brought fashion magazines to school. It was quite niche in 1996 to 1998 reading fashion magazine. I would be really amazed if I could find one in ten ever read fashion magazines at those years. So I knew a very shallow bit of fashion. The first time I started buying luxury fashion, was two year after graduation when I left Moscow and back to China. I bought my very first luxury fashion item, was an Givenchy tote bag with allover brand monogram print.
Q: Why did you choose to buy that Givenchy bag?
A(I): it was based on my basic, very basic fashion knowledge from my reading of fashion magazines. I gradually built up my interests towards couple of brands from magazines and Givenchy was one of them.
Q: so what was the idea of luxury fashion to you, or what kind of luxury fashion you liked at that time?
A(I): that was end of 2006. Say, I don’t have any special family background, and as a common graduate worked in a normal company, I rarely saw anyone was using luxury goods. So I was quite ordinary, you know. The first reason was that was something I did like, second was that I probably saw it as a self-validation, as the first guy in my social circle using a Givenchy bag. What I mean is I wanted to show that I had the capabilities to own a Givenchy bag. Capabilities here not only refers to show my fortune, but also as an self-recognition about my achievement career wise. Just like “Yah I finally made money now and I could afford an luxury bag now!”
Q: like rewarding yourself?
A(I): Yes Yes.
Q: Givenchy was one of your favorite, what else did you like, if you could still remember
A(I): Gucci, Versace, Louis Vuitton and Giorgio Armani. What I liked at that time were all those well-known brands, or people call them Da Pai. What I may use now, more niche, but not really niche brands like McQueen, Yves Saint Laurent were my later discovery after knowing more about fashion. They were not my first love. That was my second stage on luxury fashion shopping.
Q: so can you tell us how did you move from the first stage to second stage?
A(I): It credits to my working experience, my social and life circle, and those people I socialized on my second job. I was in a management position managing the northeast area of China. So there were some social scenes where I came across some people who were not those you may see on streets. So I was influenced by my experience going to those social 135 / 167
occasions and meeting those people. My second stage was about year 2008, around the Olympic games. And you could start sensing the impact of fashion on normal Chinese people. Here was a example, the first time I came to Beijing was 2003. I was quite shocked about how Tu uncool Beijing was regarding what people were wearing on streets. I had the same feel till 2007 that Canton is more Yang Qi than Beijing. Maybe in Canton area there was strong pop cultural influences from Korea and Japan. But things changed from 2008. People in Beijing started dressing in the style of Western fashion. And gradually Beijing was getting really fashionable. Social media played a important role that the influences of fashion media could reach to the mass, and change their fashion style and lifestyle. That was my second stage where I boarded my eyes with more fashion knowledge.
Q: What changes happened on you since you moved to the second stage?
A(I): there were more brands I knew. So I freed myself from aimlessly following the big brands as what in most Chinese eyes present the idea of luxury: Louis Vuitton, Gucci…I gradually developed my own style however, I still made my decisions from a selection of Yi Xian (premium) brands. and the motivation of buying luxury more or less came from the need of my work, I mean going to certain social events and meeting clients. There were invisible requirements towards how you wear. And I wear what could make me fit in the social scene. Later I moved to my third stage since I met my friend Q, who showed me more in-depth understanding about fashion industry, and fashion design.
Q: so what were those in-depth understandings about?
A(I): I was somehow bit superficial about fashion. Say, I often just aimlessly followed the trends and bought what was popular or trendy. And what those new understandings brought to me was that I would think twice about those trendy items. I will think if they suit my style. Also, I started considering the less popular items in a brand and to discover less-known niche brands. I became more mindful to investigate and appreciate the beauty of fashion and luxury. That is my third second. I came across branded I had never heard of. The most representative case is Maison Margiela.
Q: Can you tell us your story with brand?
A(I):talking about Margiela, even in today’s China, it is not a brand people would know. And Q introduced me the brand and took me to its shop in Beijing.
Q: So is that friend as your main influence?
A(I): Yes. He opened the door of niche luxury fashion to me and I started to discover the whole new world by myself.
Q: so why did you trust his tastes?
A(I): Well me and my friend got on quiet well. And that guy did change some of my mentality. He is younger than me and a rule-breaker. He is an independent thinker and it made me realize that I shouldn’t just be 人云亦云 (be a conformist in the crowd), not only in fashion taste, but also in life. So in luxury fashion, I started to realize the popular one may not be the right one. I started shopping like him. i will examine the product design more critically,
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than making the purchase decision following the trends or what other people told me what was good.
Q: So why did you like margiela so much?
A(I): it’s just what I like, I couldn’t believe I find that brand so late! Margiela has achieved reputation in a niche luxury consumer group in China. And that can be seen as a milestone in China’s luxury fashion culture. Some people started constructing their own understandings about fashion than following what they being told to buy from fashion magazines. they people started resisting advertising or sponsored contents. They make the decision by critical evaluating the garment, and how it could work with their own features.
Q: so even though Margiela is niche but it is still a expensive brand. So what is your criteria buying luxury fashion?
A(I): The first thing is if it is something I truly like, if it is lingering in my mind even I have walked away. So design comes first. Second is price and I don’t really care about functionality. Not matter unpractical they are, if I like them and I could afford them, I would get them. I have loads of them.
Q: Can you come up with an example?
A(I): there is an simple case. I bought an Marigela T-shirt which is partial leather. So you couldn’t wash or dry-clean it because its materials
Q: Do you have a luxury shopping social group?
A(I): Well that is bit sad. After my friend Q left Beijing I find it’s hard to find shopping mates sharing some ideas about luxury fashion. Today my friends are either not keen on luxury or aimless buyers. When Givenchy was on its Hi-day in China two years ago they all rushed to Givenchy. You ask about social group, or Quan Zi (community), I feel pretty lonely. For example, I spot one piece I really like. Like is not necessary as what I want to buy. It might just be the design I appreciate and I would recommend it to my friends because I think it may suit them. But they won’t really validate or appreciate that. It makes me upset really. There is no more people who can share the joy of sharing, or discovering beautiful design.
Q: so the joy of luxury shopping comes from it?
A(I): yes, if you have friends who can share our opinion and validates each other’s tastes, it definitely will enhance the joy. If I don’t have them, I may feel lonely.
Q: so you mentioned your friends are big brands followers. So would you go back and buy big brands today?
A(I): I won’t exclude the possibility. Let’s say Givenchy. their bulldog t-shirt was so popluar almost like street uniform but it didn’t stop me buying it because I did like it. So if I really like the design, I won’t mind if it’s too mainstream or not.
Q: So what do you think about those big brand followers?
A(I): probably two or three year ago. I was quite critical to them. Because I felt privileged as an pioneer. But today, I won’t be that snob, I will be more chilled about it. Even though they 137 / 167
buy anything purely for showing off, I am cool with that. It’s fine if they enjoy it. there is nothing to do with me.
Q: from you telling, your attitudes and tastes have changed a lot. So what luxury fashion mean to you today?
A(I): luxury for me is a pursue to the fine. (对美好的追求)。Luxury itself is fine and beautiful. I believe if a luxury house can survive in the market for so many years they must do something right. They have an perfectionist eyes, or even bit control-freak on quality control and design which comes from a vision of pursuing the fine aesthetics. And that is reason they create so many beautiful things to the society. For other brands, they are aimless followers of those luxury brands.
Q: let’s back to concept of luxury consumption. They are some many luxury which we can enjoy, luxury resorts, michelle three starts or fine wine. Why do you choose fashion than others, why do you have such strong passion on fashion.
Q: those luxury fashion products endorse the idea of quality. So I buy luxury maybe reflect my idea of quality of life. it is what luxury enlightens me. And the reason I like luxury fashion because they are something once you own it, you always have it. they won’t leave you. For luxury travel or those fine dinning resturants. They are something once you experience them, they are gone. Also personally, I am not really high maintenance guy. Well I like nice hotels which interesting design features but I don’t need ultra luxury.
Q: So will luxury fashion play its role in your future life？
A(I): yes it will. it’s part of my life now and it already changed my life in many different way. Though pursuing fashion needs some financial support but it doesn’t mean being rich can make you fashionable. And not being rich you can still have the style. What I want to express is the idea from Yohji Yamamoto book. He says something like even one day you are too poor to buy a bottle of chilled beer, pull you hair back, look at mirror you still have your style. That’s kind of my philosophy. no matter you are being through up or down in you life, the sprit of fashion will never go away.
Q: is there anything you want share?
A(I): first I am happy to see there are emerging new luxury consumers who already have their own tastes and different styles. They are not buying for the sake of it. however, what I worry about is the social trend that people are buying luxury to young too early. Some young people are from quiet humble family backgrounds are buying luxury. I don’t know if they buy luxury to fit in some social circles or just for the sake of chasing trend. i worry about the consumerism is getting too much in China. It’s good for the business owners but the excessive buying is a deformed.
Q: where is that come from?
A(I): as I said, people may use luxury to fit in some social group. You know people are really judgy about what you are wearing. People say China is a Yan Zhi society(颜值社会) so people will judge your social status by your look. Probably it is the consequence of that social mentality. 138 / 167
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Participant O
Q: You have been purchased luxury fashion goods for couple of years. So the first thing I’d like to know is how did you discover the idea of buying luxury fashion?
A(O): it was on my cousin’s wedding, I saw a handbag someone is using really pretty. She is a friend of my cousin. So I asked her which brand it is and I did research by myself to find out more like how much it is. I thought it was an acceptable price so I bought one.
Q: what kind of handbag it is?
A(O): it’s just a Kate Spade bag.
Q: Anything else? Some more recent shopping?
A(O): My recent purchase? I bought a Tory Burch bag. Because I wanted a backpack for traveling. It looks nice, small in size and reasonable priced so I bought that.
Q: Ok so what’s the reasonable, or acceptable price for you regarding of luxury fashion?
A(O): not too much…not over 10,000 RMB. I only purchased one thing over ten thousand. It was a handbag as gift to mum. But she doesn’t use it often now.
Q: you also buy luxury fashion as gifts for your family member?
A(O): Yes.
Q: Can you tell me more about the story buying that bag?
A(O): That was years ago I graduated from university and started working on that job. And at that time my mum saw people using LV bag , even just from telly. So she talked about it to me and said “I also want a LV bag.” She said she was only joking but I knew more or less she really fancied one. So I bought one for her birthday.
Q: so where did you get that bag from?
A(O): I bought it from Hong Kong.
Q: did you do any research about the purchase before?
A(O): No. I didn’t do a lot research about the price or what so ever. I went to the store, looked at the styles they have, asked the price and bought the bag.
Q: let’s talk about this. What takes most of your consumption budget?
A(O): Oh travelling! one trip costs a lot of new dresses!
Q: So why did you spend money on travelling.
A(O): it’s fun! Seeing the world and….putting things on my Wechat posts!
Q: New bags can be posted on wechat.
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A(O): but I feel it’s shallow. More importantly. Sometimes you can’t get what you want by showing handbags on Wechat. You know some people they don’t know about the brand therefore they can’t know about its price. So you can’t achieve the purpose of showing. You know, if they only think it’s a normal bag…you cannot get the same feeling comparing to what you are expecting. You know once I was using a Dolce & Gabanna bag and my friend commented on it say：”nice bag! It definitely costs more than a thousand right? ” It really pissed me off.
Q: So what’s your last trip?
A(O): I went to Cambodia, Angkor.
Q: how much a trip could cost?
A(O): Cambodia is cheap. It only costed me about five thousand. But going somewhere further can be more expansive. I went to Netherland earlier this year costed me over 15,000 RMB. And those days I spend more for better quality of accommodations. I didn’t do that before. You know, it’s different from buying stuff. The clothes you buy will be with you forever. Staying somewhere is not tangible. But for me I would rather staying somewhere better. Have you heard that some five-stars are not even clean. I opted to expensive choice for quality guarantee. But anyway I still prefer spending my money on it. it helps me get rid of the town I live, the same world I’m dealing with everyday and meeting new friends. I feel better doing it. and I cant take leave during school’s holiday. So I don’t need to worry about time.
Q: what’s your criteria when you shop luxury fashion?
A(O): first thing I consider is the design, if it’s something pretty just to look at. I also consider if it’s something value-for-money. And also quality, I bought Coach bag, you know it is a famous brand. But the stitches on its handles were not solid so the leather were falling apart. I tried to find a place to fix. But it costed over 2,000 RMB. I could have put some more to get a new one. it was ridiculously. I won’t buy anything from coach again.
Q: So do you believe the more expensive, the better?
A(O): well since there was a quality problem happened on me so I am confused now. my cheap bags don’t have the problem. Maybe it’s due to different manufacture technique?
Q: So how about more prestigious brands? do you reckon they are better than Coach or Kate Spade?
A(O): I don’t think so.
Q: why?
A(O): being expensive doesn’t mean better quality. They only put the price tag there.
Q: apart of what you may take into consideration, quality, value-for-money, design. What else you will think about when you buy luxury fashion?
A(O): bags and shoes? Or clothes? I don’t really buy luxury clothes.
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Q: Could you tell me why?
A(O): you know for clothes, if you have a good figure so less expensive clothes would look good on you. So it’s not necessary to spend money on them. And luxury clothes are delicate. I don’t want them get damaged if I wear them everyone. But handbags are different. They are good investment.
A(O): so what is your favorite luxury brands for bags and shoes?
Q: I love Celine. I don’t really like things with big logos on. For example, the LV bag with obvious monogram on I think it only suits for mums.
A(O): So let’s imagine, if you are using a monogramed LV bag, what will be your worries?
Q: I will worry that people may think I am using a fake one.
A(O): Why will you think in that way?
Q: Because I will think in that way if someone else is using a LV. Sometimes it’s so easy to tell some of them look fake, sometimes you will evaluate its authenticity buy looking at the user, look at how she styles it. so people will think that if I use a LV you know.
Q: That’s very interesting! I mean those super big brands, are they too much?
A(O): maybe I am too young to use them.
Q: Why don’t you think they are not for the young?
A(O): their incomes. Young people don’t have the matching income.
Q: But you have decent income. You know some people earn much less than you living in Beijing Shanghai. But they buy a lot of luxury stuff.
A(O): Oh really?! I should have bought more! There are so many things I want to have! It must be family influences. Older generations, like my mum. They don’t like me shopping. I am currently living with my mum because my own flat is under furnishing. So not to mention expensive things, even for things I bought from Taobao, my mum will blame me say I am too lavish. You know I won’t stop shopping even they don’t like it. but it will affect your….behaviour pattern. Even I use my own money. She always say “oh what a waste of money!” she is very practical.
Q: do you have any your own friends or colleagues using luxury fashion?
A(O): for colleagues no. some of them are pretty rich but they spend money on their kids, not bags. I have only a few friends buying luxury fashion.
Q: will you share fashion information between each other?
A(O): Yes. We share some posts on Wechat. We will get advises from each other before making purchase decisions.
Q: so where do you access to those fashion information?
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A(O): I read things from Weibo. Those Da V posts are quite well-informed. Like Mr. Bag and Gogo Boi. Of course I also use Wechat. there are loads of post on WeChat about lipsticks those days.
Q: so you think some cosmetics can be defined as luxury?
A(O): Yes. Some of them are really expensive so I think they should be luxury.
Q: So how do you define luxury?
A(O): if it’s price is much higher than normal products, it is luxury.
Q: so what stops you being more self-indulgence in luxury fashion?
A(O): I need more money. There are some much potential expense and they make me worried.
Q: So what is your big concern at this life stage.
A(O): let me think…..hum….I have my own flat and car…just need money on furniture.
Q: So why don’t you decide to get them done at age of 20s?
A(O): Well flat and car are practical. I believe it is about the sense of security. I know if I don’t get them today I will keep worrying them in the future. And they are necessities, handbags are not.
Q: Can you reflect your life, what made you being practical-oriented today?
A(O): my family. You know for year my family were never rich. We never got the extra money to buy luxury. Before my dad passed away, the money for the old house we were living was borrowed from others. We were in debt during the year of growing up. It was like that for many years before their investment brought benefit. So for me, being safe and secured comes first.
Q: Can luxury bring you sense of security?
A(O): No it only brings me vanity.
Q: What’s the vanity about?
A(O): Vanity is about…being complimented, and showing off my life is better than yours.
Q: And how about fashion? Are you interested in fashion?
A(O): I do. I want to look good. But I don’t really chase after fashion trends.
Q: Anything you want to share?
A(O): I think I will buy some good designer furniture for my own new flat. I dislike the dull, boring mass-market furniture in China. Nice ones are expensive, but they are the luxury I want to own.
Q: So home is most important for you. 143 / 167
A(O): Yes. It is.
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Participant S
Q: When was the first time you come across the idea of luxury? and How did you become a luxury consumer?
A(S): The first time I came across the idea of luxury…definitely was from parents. I was a teenager at that time so there was no way I could go and buy luxury but my mum and her peers who were quiet established career wise had started buying luxury so I heard about a selection of luxury brands. Besides, some brands had conducted some advertising and branding activities in the early stage in China and it contributed to my initial brand awareness of luxury fashion brands. And later, more and more brands entered China at the same time, when I grew up for a bit and I had some standard about what I should be wearing so I started buying some small pieces from luxury brands, mainly about shoes and handbags but not clothes. Later on when I was just about to graduate from high school there was a luxury shopping centre open in my hometown called IFC. It made my luxury shopping more accessible than before. I didn’t need to rely on Daigou. See, luxury stores are everywhere in China now so the frequency that people being exposed to luxury is much higher than before. And they are gradually adopting the idea of luxury. People may not dress themselves in luxury brands from head to toes but from the few pieces they already got, the desire of owning luxury is accumulating. And when I ended up to study a degree in UK, I was getting even closer to luxury fashion shopping. You know in UK there were much more choices and price was cheaper in China. Is that right?
Q: Oh of course.
A(S): You know because it was cheap so I ended up buying loads. I felt like the more I bought, the more money I saved.
Q: haha same on me.
A(S): Actually we spend more money! That makes me sad haha!
Q: We all live in Lane Crowford warehouse. Well you have mentioned you started luxury shopping from small pieces so could you remember what was the first luxury you bought?
A(S): So luxury…hum as what I define as luxury?
Q: Yes.
A(S): the motorcycle bag by Balenciaga.
Q: When was that?
A(S): 2014? Well that was the first real luxury I had. not putting all those accessible luxury I owned before in account.
Q: So you were buying into accessible luxury.
A(S): Yes. Well I used to just borrow my mum’s luxury items to use but never really owned one by myself. At that time I also bought brands’ diffusion lines, for instance See by Chole, RedValentino. They are not right? They are only the brands’ Shao Nv Xian (the girly line). For handbags I got from my mum. And Longchamp was very popular in China, I also used it. 145 / 167
Q: what did you think these diffusion lines, or brands like Longchamp and why did you buy them? They are still expansive to many others and quite different from domestic brands. Have you influenced by your family or your peers?
A(S): Both. But the influences from my family were quite minor. They only provided the pocket money. Peers are more affective in my case. I think it’s a universal fact that the consumption values of who you are with will change your choices of products. Say, I studied in international school in China and all students there were from really rich families. Also for domestic brands, some of them are quite expensive even today. Shoes and clothes easily can be priced for quite few thousands. They are not that cheap. So why I switched to those foreign brands, I have to admit that I was somehow Chou Yang Mei Wai. Well, foreign brands are Yang Qi and high-end. Say it’s not about price gap. Say Longchamp, it is not a posh brands and you can buy them in mid-range shopping centres in foreign countries. But at that time I chose it more or less because it was a foreign brand. And at that time you could not buy them in China. So I could use the handbag that others couldn’t get. I did feel quite Yang Qi when I was using it.
Q: talking about Chengdu. Have you heard about Chanel presented its new collection in Chengdu.
A(S): Yes, and you know Chanel, Cartier they all opened their biggest flagship stores in Chengdu.
Q: So will those more experiential marketing strategies affect your shopping preference?
A(S): Yes. Also the sales staff are quite important. But it more affects more loyalty on certain store than the brand. I will revisit the same shop and to contact the same sales assistant who leaves me a good impression. Service is the key.
Q: So about luxury fashion. You think accessible luxury is not truly luxury now…
A(S): Yes. But I used to think they are quite luxury.
Q: So when did you start putting them in different categories?
A(S): When I started learning university. I studies fashion and my peers were really into shopping and fashion. Now I realise some of them do not really know about fashion. But you know, the people I used to hang out with, the places I went, my social life, my lifestyle…all lead to a better understanding about fashion. And gradually I categorise accessible luxury in different level.
Q: So why did you start your true luxury shopping with that Balenciaga bag?
A(S): let me have a think. Well first of all, I am not a girl’s girl and I wear lots of trousers than dresses. So I chose the motorcycle bag because it was pretty, roomy and the leather is durable. And at that time people always say the first bag girls have should be Balenciaga or Dior. But for me, at that time, I thought Dior’s bags were too girly though I eventually bought them couple of years after. Haha. So I was thinking my first luxury handbag should last. But really it was not true. I mean I quickly ended up having the second one…and many others.
Q: So for you today, do you have your own personal style or more versatile? 146 / 167
A(S): I have a quite fixed style.
Q: Can you describe it?
A(S): I only have four colours in my wardrobe: black, grey, white and camel. And I don’t have any clothes with patterns or prints. I only dress in maximally two colours once. Very simple…extremely simplicity.
Q: Why do you carry out that style.
A(S): it’s my personal tastes. And I know my facial structure suits what kind of clothes. You know, I don’t have the Ming Yuan (名媛 social celebrity)face so there is no way I will put those floral prints on me.
Q: Oh I see. But Ming Yuan are the group buying luxury in China today.
A(S): And they are also influencing some others luxury fashion shopping choices.
Q: So have you ever influenced by Wang Hong, Ming Yuan, or whoever represent sort of universal beauty.
A(S): I was influenced by them at high school. When I grow up I develop my own style. But fashion bloggers up till today, are the biggest influence for me.
Q: Can you tell me about few bloggers you are following?
A(S): there is one Chinese blogger called Shui Yao VV. She has a good taste on presenting that everyday look and another blogger Sunmi who is good at styling colours. Well I follow Sunmi but I don’t buy the clothes she wears. I don’t think those clothes will suit me but I do appreciate how she style them.
Q: So You see them as inspirations?
A(S): Yes. But for my own shopping I choose them on my own style. Say, you can’t a whole new look to match one item you want to buy. It should fit in my wardrobe.
Q: how about Western bloggers?
A(S): well not really. Most of them only wear high-street. But do you know the blogger V ? She used to only wear high-street and when she had bit fame she wear big brand top to toe.
Q: So for you. Will you mix match luxury with high street or only luxury?
A(S): mix-match. Oh god it’s shallow only wearing luxury.
Q: so what is role luxury fashion items play in your style.
A(S): they are highlights.
Q: So why will you choose luxury than high-street alternatives? What luxury fashion mean to you?
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A(S): that’s a good question. Well they give my look a touch of classy. Say for handbags, I choose luxury because of its quality and the originality in the design while many other high- street are the copycat.
Q: So do you prefer big brands or niche brands?
A(S): designer brands. I rarely buy big brands anymore. I like Acne Studio, J.W.Adnerson. And the new Calvin Kelvin.
Q: So do you recognise them as luxury brands?
A(S): Yes and no. Yes as for the price level. No as for many people, luxury only refers to those big brands from big groups...Gucci, Chanel, LV.
Q: So did you change from big brand lover to a designer brand follower? What are the unique charms from those designer brands?
A(S): their design, and their cut. I am not keen on big brands design and cut. Well again I only like the designer brands which carry out a simple style and elaborate on cutting than loud prints or colour.
Q: where did you hear about those designers?
A(S): My own shopping, bloggers and online retailers. Well online retailers play a important role.Say they display the designer brands and big brands together.
Q: So when you do those luxury fashion purchase, or on everyday you choose your outfit, will just listen to your heart or will you think about how other people see you?
A(S): for dating I would consider if my date like my outfit or not. For everyday, I just choose whatever I like. The other day, my friends asked me how many black clothes I have. They commented that my life is so dull without any colour. But I answered that black is different from one garment to other. Black will present different style on different fabric and different cutting and there are so many different shades of black. But they still said I look all the same in photos.
Q: So what are reasons encouraging you to buy designer brands?
A(S): they are more Ge Diao（格调.）
Q: What is the Ge Diao?
A(S): It is about Sheng Huo Pin Wei（生活品味）. Your fashion tastes and your taste of living show your Ge Diao. People will know what level of your life is. For example, someone can tell who you are by judging what you are wearing. They can tell if you are someone who has a fine living, who looks after his/herself, who has good eyes on aesthetics.
Q: So Ge Diao and tastes you are talking are about someone’s cultural capital, or someone’s lifestyle.
A(S): I think it’s both. Say if someone is culturally naïve he/she won’t have good tastes. But someone is culturally awared may have no idea what is fine living. They all intertwined 148 / 167
together: lifestyle, Ge Diao, tastes. It show your personal charisma and let people know you have a quality of living.
Q: So what’s your definition of Ge Diao. Or what is the image you want to achieve?
A(S): I don’t want to be someone wearing gold and silver just showing he/she has money. I want to be someone who has individualist tastes and style and don’t follow the crowds.
Q: Chinese people quite incline to follow the crowds. So what makes you different regarding your individual-driven luxury fashion tastes?
A(S): my friends. I don’t hang out with people who only buy Bao Kuan. My friends and I share similar idea about fashion so we kind of grow together. Our fashion tastes are developing together. And also I am influenced by my mum. She is very stylish. Say, my tastes of fashion are largely influenced by her though my growth.
Q:is there anything else you want share about luxury fashion?
A(S): I think more and more Chinese consumer are adopting niche brands, or designer brands. Especially the younger generation is growing up and we don’t buy what our parents’ generation like. People often say Chinese like Chanel, Gucci and LV. Because they are from the biggest fashion companies and they entered China in an early stage. So their brand images are deeply rooted in Chinese people’s mind. But that happens on last generation who believe those brands are the symbol of social status, tastes and fortune. But their kids are growing up. Younger people no matter relying on their parents’ fund or by themselves, quite some of them already generate the fortune and have the purchase power to buy luxury. they have individualist attitudes or tastes about how to live their life and what kind of fashion to buy. I would say they all want to wear clothes with modern design. Big brand’s name can’t satisfy them anymore. So it gives a huge opportunity for niche designers and their brands to enter China. Also people are buying domestic designer brands. Other thing I realize that the Bao Kuan (the “IT” item )popularity of design rely on how much endorsement it can achieve from bloggers, or how much money they will pay for them. The followers of bloggers will overlap and people will immerse in the simulations. They will be told to recognize a piece of fashion is good if that piece is endorsed by different influencers, who are recognised as the taste- makers.
Q: So consumers are aimless?
A(S): Yah most of consumers are just following what other people do and they chase after Bao Kuan. There is nothing wrong buying Bao Kuan because their tastes will develop though the process of picking up which Bao Kuan they will buy. It only takes to develop their own tastes.
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Participant N
A(N): talking about luxury…well when I was studying in university back in late 1970s, I was probably the very first group of people who valued what was being called the capitalism lifestyle. I had a Kun Bao (lady’s crossbody bag)when I was in university in Chengdu and that bag was bought from Shanghai. At that time, there was no retailer in China selling handbags. And you could barely see anyone using a bag. There was no such thing as hangbag. The only related word was Shu Bao. Even today people in my generation still use the phrase Shu Bao. And in some occasion they still ask me which brand my Shu Bao is. What I mean is there is big leap from no bag to bag for everyone and It happens just like overnight. Today, some immigrant workers only earn 2000 RMB and when they move from rural areas to cities, the first things they will buy are a pair of high heels and a handbag. Well handbag is such a big thing in China. Some people are using fake LV bags because they have no idea there is a brand called Louis Vuittion! Well what I mean is comparing to today, I already had a handbag forty years ago. In university, people only use the utility bag from Cultural Revolution. I still remember that was a white bag little bit shine. To be honest it was really like the white Versace bag I have today! I spent 30 RMB on that bag and the national salary for university graduate is 54 RMB.
Q: So why did you spend so much money on a bag?
A(N): I was curious. Say, that is something which we could only see from Western films that ladies should have their handbags. my desire towards handbags is originally from the early age impression in films. Lady who uses handbag looks Gao Ji. It was a such a small bag which could only contain my keys and wallet. There was no such a thing of tissues or napkin!
Q: So why did you dream of the capitalist lifestyle apart of the influences from Western films?
A(N): In 80s, literature was a big thing in the society. Yi Fu Xing was one of the key themes in open-up policies. The restrained literature thoughts and lifestyle got released just overnight. We suddenly adopted the Wai Lai Huo (foreign goods): jeans from Hong Kong, bags from Shanghai. They all costed more than half of monthly salary. The reason why I bought them…well the capitalism lifestyle was what I crave and value.
Q: So what was the capitalism lifestyle mean to you?
A(N): I wanted to be the one like those characters in the films. For example, holding a handbag and having a cup of coffee. It is really superficial if you think about it today but again, those thoughts can only be realised thanks to the Open-up but I had been reading Western literature before that. I remembered in books some Western lady taking out a lipstick from hangbag, or a bottle of perfume. So I started to achieve that lifestyle in my 20s my during the adolescent age I had constructed that idea. I love literature so I love the charters in literature and I love the lifestyle of those charters. So again, before open-up all of those ideas are illusive and after 1978, they could be partially achieved.
Q: so 80s is the first stage.
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A(N): yes, that was the stage where I could finally see those goods from “another world”. In 1980s, people can get perfume from Vietnamese board and nylon stockings from Sha Tou Jiao (board of Hong Kong). That was the time people would be wowed by those products. There was no such concept as luxury. we call those novel goods from foreign countries Yang Huo. And younger generation start consuming. They will save their salary to buy them. You could call them the trend chasers.
Q: So there was already a concept as Shi Shang (fashion)?
A(N): Yes Yes. And the best compliment you could get at that age is Shi Mao (trendy). I remember people comments on me at work “Oh Yang, you look so pretty and Shi Mao”. Haha, I was wearing high-heels, perfumes, handbags and mini dress! It was really short! Well people may have different lifestyle but what I represent is a group called Wen Yi Nv Qing Nian (the young intellectual). Even today, people in creative industry, writers, editors…they all have very distinctive fashion style. There is no writer would wear what common people wear. They are all Biao Xin Li Yi. 1707
Q: So when was the first time you come across the idea of luxury?
A(N): it was in late 1990s, probably after year 2000. More precisely I have to give the credit to those outlets in China for its contribution to introduce the idea of luxury to China, rather than the idea of discount retailing. Before the first outlet mall opened in Beijing, the best shopping centres in Beijing were Shuang An Mall and Dang Dai shopping centre. What on the products shelves were all made in China, all domestic brands. But when the first outlet mall opened I went there will my girl friend and that was my first time seeing a Givenchy bag, Burberry bag. You know, I went abroad before but never shopped overseas. It was not easy to go abroad at that time anyway. So even the outlet mall they were selling discount products but it educated me that there were so many big brands! The really famous brands! International big brands! I mean, they were the luxury. I remember a small canvas Givenchy was tagged price of 4000 RMB in outlet. I only earned 2000RMB per month. It was really expensive but again, really pretty. I really liked it for the sheer of its beautiful design. I don’t know what is the shock luxury brings to others but for me, is the perfection.
Q: what do you mean to perfection? About the style or its design?
A(N): style, design, quality and its uniqueness. I bought my first Chanel 255 bag because it was the first handbag I saw with double flap covers. Even today, I still believe the design of that handbag is incompatible. A lady only with her 255 bag can achieve the true elegance.
Q: So why do you believe every lady needs a 255?
A(N): it enhances their Qi Chang, and their quality of living. Let’s say, it gives you’re a sense of confidence and pride.
Q: Where those emotions come from?
A(N): for me, it is not about how people see me. It comes from the inner joy. The joy comes from me using the bag. So the charm of luxury comes from the self-satisfaction, than recognitions from others. Let me tell you an example. Say, I wear a Sacai dress to go
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to work but who knows the brand Sacai. You probably couldn’t find one person from a hundred Chinese who knows that brand. You know, no one recognizes those niche luxury fashion brand. So the joy comes from yourself. Also you know, for people like me, who are already quite achieved in our own professional area, don’t need any more validation from others.
Q: So can you remember before you started buying into niche brand, did you feel the same about luxury like what you feel about it today?
A(N): Different. Well I was quite keen a Da Lu luxury brands because it can bring social recognition alone with the self-satisfaction. I don’t deny there was a sense of showing off there. I wanted people know what I was wearing or using. However, with more I know about what is the story behind each luxury goods, and more luxury products I have, the less interests I have on well-known brands, like Louis Vuitton. Well I still buy that brand but it lost the factors which would surprise me, or about the vanity. I appreciate brands with personalities today, Sacai, CDG, Issey Miyake and Isabel Marant…for example, Sacai and CDG not only achieve the highest level of fashion design, it also have a mystic aura.
Q: What do you mean to be mystic here?
A(N): It comes from the brand and design’s personalities. Say people will impress by my outfits but they don’t know about the designers. just like they were seeing some lady will her face veil on and walk on the street with bodyguards. And everyone will guess who she is. The mystic aura is something undefinable, about truly intrigue me.
Q: How did you start getting knowing these niche brands? You see there are quite some luxury shoppers in China today they only purchase big brands.
A(N): Hummm…I think it comes from literature. for example, I start hearing about Yohji Yamamoto as an individual, than his identity as fashion designer. From many years ago, I started reading some interviews with Yohji from here and there, learning about his story with Rei Kawakubo. So my interests of Yohji Yamamoto the brand didn’t start with my shopping and picked up this brand in the shop floor. For me, it was I knew his cultural identity first and I validated him in spiritual level. And for Rei, you know her personal image, a cool grandma with cool hair. I do admire her style and I read her interviews before I started buying her brands. And later, when I saw their Zuo Pin, I felt that the designers’ own images, their philosophy and the actual fashion design were so holistic and consistent. Say, I think it’s not a single case on niche brands. The problem why people only purchase Hermes and Louis Vuitton is that they don’t know what’s behind the brand. If they know more, they may give some old things up. I know the history about Louis Vuitton or Chanel. However, comparing to Rei’s life story, they lack the sense of Ge Xing which could charm me.
Q: Seems Ge Xing, an individualistic vision, is important for you. But people say Chinese is a nation of collectivism. So what makes you think differently?
A(N): Let me put it in this way, people say there is no social class in China. They are wrong. They social class is there no matter if you call them out or not. So CDG and Louis Vuitton they represent different people in the society, they represent different social classes.
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Q: So which social class Rei Kawabubo is representing?
A(N): People have cultural capital. Or Wen Yi Qing Nian, Zhong Nian, Lao Nian. They present the intellectual and culturally aware people who don’t want to Ren Yun Yi Yun. So for Louis Vuitton, it represents consumers who are not that cultural. Well I would say Louis Vuitton represents the majority in the crowds and niche presents minority in the coward. So Louis Vuitton is Da Zhong (mainstream luxury) and CDG is Xiao Zhong luxury. There are two categories in luxury fashion right? And I think niche luxury endorse those new cultural elites. Niche is a social phenomenon objectively exists in Chinese history for long time, even during time when social class hierarchy remains inexplicit. I moved to Zhu Hai and I socialize with decent people. My friend D is a successful enterpriser and Mr. Luo is a senior party leader, and Mr. Lu who is the chairman of city’s literature association. But, none of them know luxury. The social class in China is not only classified by financial income. A business owner who makes millions of money but being uneducated or culturally naïve, he/she can only be listed on the bottom half in the hierarchy…which is not on the same level of using Vuitton. And personally, if we put the those luxury brands in hierarchy from 0 to 10. Niche luxury fashion designers ranks from 8 to 10. And big brands, LV, Chanel and Givenchy, rank from 6 to 10. So it doesn’t mean niche is better than mainstream. I bought a Vuitton bag recently because I just need a functional bag and the purchase did cause me second thoughts. So for those mainstream brands, only functionality attracts me and besides that, I rarely see them as valuable as those niche brands, or an object that I will treasure. Say, I use my Louis Vuitton bag on daily basis, going to the health club, doing shoppings but for some niche designer brands ready-to-wear, I won’t overwear them. But I still feel satisfied just seeing them hanging in the closet. So mainstream for the mainstream, niche for the niche.
Q: So you mention the niche luxury stands on the top of luxury hierarchy. So what is the idea luxury? What does it stand for?
A(N): it should achieve perfection in any aspect. For me, the design has to be original and unique. And it should achieve some spiritual highness. Yao Zhi and Gao Ji. It must link to my vision. It reflects what I believe you know. It’s not necessary defined by user’s income. I would say, the idea of ultimate luxury comes from someone’s education background, family background and his/her cultural capital. and niche luxury designers can only be truly appreciated by people with high cultural capital.
Q: So niche luxury can bring you a sense of belongingness?
A(N): Yes, it’s about identity belongingness. So I won’t spend my money on Chanel or Hermes. Well Hermes is an unique case. Let me tell you that when Hermes just entered in China, it was niche because it’s so mystic for everyone. But now the niche has evolved to the mainstream. And because Hermes is expensive, so being expensive has become the tag of this brand. And people may have forgot what is the story behind the brand. The only thing they know is its price tag. It put me off a lot. You know, Hermes is a brand with authentic story and craftsmanship. But it was contaminated by being massively used by Tu Hao. And spiritually I don’t want to be with Tu Hao by using the same brand. So I have to give up Hermes. I give up because I dislike its users. That is very crucial, and I believe there are many people holding the same opinion like me. Luxury is becoming poisonous that its commercial outsides covered up its cultural soul. So people buy Hermes not as an 153 / 167
validation of brand’s craftsmanship that how they choose the materials, how the bag being handmade by artisans, not about its unique print technique. They don’t know them, they don’t know them at all! So who are those rich people using Hermes bag today? They are some businessmen who have nothing but money. They don’t have any Shen Fen and Bei Jing (background). We call them Tu Hao. And another group are so-called Wang Hong. Their money contaminates the Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Hermes, they ruin the idea of luxury. There is an old Chinese saying: a flower roots in bullshit. Flower is still the flower but lost its fragrance.
Q: Is there anything else you want to share?
A(N): There is an idea but I know there is no way we can do it. All those people should be banned from using luxury. Luxury sales at high price so that people use them for the sheer of showing off their fortune. So why not make luxury bit cheaper? Say if a Hermes Birkin only sells for 50000 RMB and so it no longer serves as a symbol of money. And Birkin’s users would be people who really appreciate it.
Q: That’s an interesting point.
A(N): People perceive if it’s luxury or not by judging its price. So luxury is defined by its price which is vicious to the brand, to the design. So a brand cannot signifies its status in marketplace by price. Say I feel really embarrassing using my Chanel bag because people will perceive me as some rich man’s wife…and that is not what I want to be. I would rather use a Margiela’s canvas bag.
Q: so as an experienced luxury user, do you have other insights you want to share?
A(N): towards the culture of luxury, there is a big difference between the South and the North. In South, people see their property as the most important luxury. They judge it by its size, and say, if it has an oceanfront view. And what idea of luxury in south is how many properties you have, and what watches you wear. They know nothing about fashion. The reason behind it is the weather condition in south which is extremely humid and hot. There is no way you can wear your luxury designers’ clothes. That is true. I spend a lot of my time in the south now and my designers’ pieces become utterly unpractical. So here real estate business dominants the luxury market. Developers brand their projects as Gao Shang. No again, even here it’s the frontier of China’s open-up, they don’t wear luxury. Second, there is no luxury culture here which is odd for me since Hong Kong is just at neighborhood.
Q: So how luxury culture can land somewhere? Opening new luxury shops or malls?
A(N): I think a city should form a cultural elite group. They will educate people. So there is no luxury community here. Let’s take Beijing for example, if you have no clue about styling or fashion, go to San Li Tun (Beijing’s answer to London soho) and just do people- watching, you will be inspired. Say, there is an community who like dressing up. And here, Zhu Hai and Guang Zhou, I spend all day on the street and cannot spot a tasteful look. But there are many places like San Li Tun in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Hangzhou. So before stepping into the luxury world, people should be Xi Li cultural (new term? ) So what should we do? We should engorge those educated, foreign cultural elites to China. So why is Shanghai chic? Well Shanghai was colonized by European and cultural fusion 154 / 167
happened there 100 year ago. And the influences cannot be undermined. And that’s the reason people say girls from Shanghai will starve a month for a handbag. Well people they are educated by their parents, their parents are educated by their parents who lived through 1930s. so the luxury culture is a cultural inherit. And in South, they don’t have the inherit.
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Participant Y:
Q: Could you share your story about how you started knowing about luxury fashion? And what was your first luxury fashion experience?
A(Y): I started knowing about luxury when I was in University in China. By that time, I have heard some brands which were quite expensive and later I noticed some of my classmates were using Dior or Louis Vuitton bags. Till that point I understand they were luxury. That was 2012. It was an early age when there were limited luxury stores in my city. And the idea of luxury gradually solidified in my mind when I went abroad and started doing more shopping. But the idea of luxury fashion reminded rather unclear for me. So at that time I recognized Coach and Michael Kors, and the other Zhong She as luxury fashion.
Q: As you refer Michael Kors as Zhong She. So what do you think about the two concepts luxury and Zhong She?
A(Y): Be honest in my mind, I believe these two are different concepts. Zhong She (middile range luxury )doesn’t belong to the really luxury. it situates between fast fashion and luxury—a Shen Sheng (divine) circle. And for other category which includes Chanel, Gucci and Dior whose price and reputation are in a higher level than Zhong She. So I categorises brands like Hermes are Ding She; followed by big brands like Chanel and LV as luxury; Michael Kors, Coach and Kate Spades are underneath them. It is quite like a hierarchy by its price level.
Q: You referred luxury as Shen Sheng. Where is that come from?
A(Y): It comes from the early experience with luxury when I haven’t not been about to afford them. Luxury was something which is difficult to access. And perhaps I was influenced by how other people saw luxury as a symbol of social status. Luxury at that age was the one I dreamed about but couldn’t access. That is why I think luxury is scared.
Q: Do you remember what was your first luxury fashion item.
A(Y): My first luxury fashion items was a hilarious story. Something ended up being abounded and being given to my mum. It was a Miu Miu handbag. It was my first year I went abroad and I went down to Selfridges London with my boyfriend for Christmas sales. Well there were lots of discount at that time but not on every brands as I thought what it would be. Say, there was no sale in Chanel. I ended up walking into the Prada and Miu Miu’s. You know Miu Miu often has very bright colour of its design and the brand gets a quite a girly look. Remember I was only 18! So I spotted a bag which was bold red and was full-priced. So I spent £800 bought it. It was quite expensive for me regarding my purchase power at that time. And I was not ever thinking about buying a RMB20000 or 30000 yuan handbag like Chanel. So that was a purchase that based on no research. I spent my budget on something which I believed as luxury and I liked. Well after few more buying of luxury fashion I could not figure out how on earth I bought something unpractical and non-classic. So I no longer used it.
Q: Compare to 2012, what was the biggest changes on you as a luxury fashion consumer?
A(Y): I was quite aimless when I started shopping.
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Q: Why you were aimless?
A(Y): It is like buying luxury for the sake of it.
Q: Why do you feel in that way?
A(Y): I often bought the ones recommended by my friends or what was popular on social media. It majorly came from my limited knowledge of luxury fashion. I could only be able to evaluate by what I knew. In other way, I bought what I heard of. With more shopping experiences, more knowledge I can do the evaluation with depths. And I no longer passively follow other people’s opinion. So if today a handbag become a hit, I may give it my own critics. I wouldn’t say yes only because other people say so. I have my own insights now. And I have gradually formed my fashion style and taste. Personally I like the classic look. I like something never gone out of trend. Something sleek, normally comes within a quiet colour palette.
Q: Why do like this particular style?
A(Y): hum…I think Britain changed me. What I worn before was rather colourful. Well my mum shopped for me when I was younger. She made the decision by herself to choose what suits me.
Q: So who in your family influences you the most regarding your luxury fashion shopping or tastes?
A(Y): my mum. But she had not done luxury fashion shopping when I was a kid. Her influences are more about her fashion attitude. My mum had a strong awareness what she wanted and she never shopped aimlessly. And she often bought me the clothes which fitted my age and my student image. I also looked at her younger age photos and indeed she had a very outstanding fashion tastes. She is a very traditional Chinese lady, quite conservative, and she is a full-time housewife. And that character also affects me. Even today I won’t wear anything crazy or revealing. I would feel really uncomfortable if people are looking at me because I wear strange clothes.
Q: Well as you mentioned you mum had a strong personal style though she was not a luxury shopper. So why would you like to purchase luxury fashion goods to build up your own style?
A(Y): I always believe there is a massive gap, regarding the product itself between luxury and non-luxury. Maybe it’s very subjective point of view. For instance, for handbags, the luxury one always has better details and the craftsmanship. So as to clothes and shoes, luxury has the attentions to details which can’t be achieved by non-luxury. Personally I purchase quite a lot clothes from accessible luxury brand…
Q: For example?
A(Y): Theory, S’ MaxMara, Acne, Burberry. Well Burberry is more luxury than others their clothes can sale for more than 10000 RMB. Maybe I haven’t purchased the super luxury ready-to-wear yet and from what I know, they are the high-end for me, quite luxury. You can tell the big differences concerning its fabric and cutting between them and non-
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luxury. Also I know my body shape, I am not skinny as many Chinese girls. Only garments with good cuttings can flatter my body and make me feel psychically comfortable.
Q: So when did you start knowing the concept of accessible luxury?
A(Y): I had a part-time job in Kate Spade in the second year of uni. And the working experience gave me knowledge about the brand and other accessible luxury. So in my mind, I differentiates that category from Louis Vuitton with other luxury. I knew accessible luxury is welcome by younger consumers, mostly students with limited purchase power. And the idea of accessible luxury reinforced in my mind when Michael Kors was on it hi day. I think the concept of accessible luxury is invented by Coach or Michael Kors themselves. So it’s….fairly good quality, cheaper price…but personally I believe their product design can not compete with big brands.
Q: So what is big brand for you?
A(Y): I think big brand has the capability to implant a story in our mind. I even could remember where the story came from, maybe from advertisements, maybe from the social media, maybe from the in-store experience, but I have a deeply-rooted image about what the brand is. And its characters are very strong. For instance, Chanel…you will automatically resonate to its Boy bags, 255, tweed jackets which are all very expensive. So I perceive it as a luxury brand. Luxury is the amazing story-teller. Once the idea of luxury is formed in my mind, I would know what the brand level is even before I visit its stores or do any purchase. But I don’t have such strong “brand experience” in Michael Kors. I can’t get what statement Michael Kors wants to make.
Q: Today, some luxury brands have their own trade-down lines. And also in some brand, some products are not that luxury comparing to others, say a Hermes key ring is still cheaper than accessible luxury’s RTW. Also we can see a lot of collaboration and crossovers. So what your opinion about those activities which blurred the fashion hierarchy.
A(Y): For those diffusion line and the cheaper products offering in the brand, I think they might be a good idea if you need to buy gifts for others, or you still want something from that brand with your limited budget. But I think they weaken the brand’s luxury image.
Q: So why do they weaken the luxury iamge?
A(Y): Say for LV. When I start knowing about this brand, those canvas products about 10000RMB was something decent and value-for-money. However, the more I know, especially when I know about its primer leather products and show pieces I realize those entry level goods are the cash cow for luxury firms. Their design lack product innovation which you can only find in its brand’high-end products. There is no Wow factor in their cheaper products. Well that is for big brand or luxury fashion accessories. For ready-to- wear, as so far I only be able to afford accessible luxury. well let’s say I tried on the iconic one from MaxMara and the similar one from S’ MaxMara. Judge by the products itself of its design or materials, they are very similar. But the iconic piece has the distinctive MaxMara style which is widely recognised as timeless and classic. Well it’s only on my experience. As for me I can afford the high-end leather handbags from Louis Vuitton but still can’t dress in MaxMara’s mainline RTW. for collaborations…well I haven’t purachsed anything like that. 158 / 167
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Q: So what are the major information channels or platform you use to be updated about luxury fashion information? Can you come up with some example?
A(Y): I rarely read print magazine but I follow Wechat blogger account and Instagram bloggers. I rarely follow brands’ own accounts. So back to the collaborations. Well once I get the information and I check their design I’m not convinced. Also for brands, like Kenzo…I don’t like its brand style. Too fancy. It doesn’t suit me.
A(Y): So what luxury fashion bring to you. Can you imagine how will you feel dressing up in Dior then Asos.
Q: There will be lots of differences. First, I will get appreciations from others. That is a validation of my tastes. Also the compliments I can achieve is another validation. Also, the luxury fashion and accessories I bought are all what I truly like. I tend to spend a long time to do research on my shopping. So I do enjoy just looking at those items I own. So it’s not only about others. It’s about feeling good about myself and make me confident.
A(Y): So will you adjust what you wear base on different social scenes?
Q: Yes I would. I really pay attention to the socio environment. I am not a showy girl so when people are dressing down, I will dress down. Say, I always keep low-key hanging out with friends or go for a job interviews. I don’t want to leave the imagine I am someone using luxury. You know, be modest. Luxury is inherently showy. There are lots of critics about luxury.
A(Y): So where did you hear those information?
Q: Mainly from my parents. Their generation doesn’t understand luxury. They think luxury is a waste. And they even accept fake products if quality were ok. So for me luxury is something showy and superficial.
A(Y): So you mentioned influences from parents, bloggers and peers. Anyone else will influence your luxury shopping?
Q: hum…I think that’s all. Well I have my tastes, my standard of dressing and living. You know I’m on the age now…a quite stable life stage. I may be aspirated by bloggers but will make the decisions on my own judgements. I won’t just follow other people’s comments, or what they like. I like something exclusive, and low-key.
A(Y): So the exclusive here refers to limited editions or niche brands?
Q: I am not keen on limited editions. Well I don’t really want to spend that money on limited editions. And I rarely buy niche brands. First of all, there is limited access to niche brands information. And I like to see and examine the products by my own whereas those niche products often have limited retail channels. I don’t really trust them.
A(Y): Why? It’s about its quality or tastes?
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Q: Both, mainly about quality. I really value quality and craftsmanship and functionality. And also if it’s too niche…you know, if there is no one knows it, they may think you are using something from Topshop. It’s tricky if its price range is not well-perceived.
Q: and recently, is there any marketing and brand campaigns you are impressed?
A(Y): There is MaxMara video I quite like.
Q: Tell me about it more.
A(Y): I saw it on Wechat. It’s about inviting models and their mums showcasing the same iconic cashmere coat. It’s about a emotional connection between daughter and mum. It’s quite unique and sweet. (Wenxin). I already had a good brand perception about MaxMara and the video strengthens my perceptions. Also it presents a idea that “every woman needs a coat like that”. So the MaxMara coat is now on my shopping list.
Q: You mentioned you will do research before shopping and you always have a shopping list in mind. Why do you have the programmatic shopping behaviour? You know some people just buy what they see
A(Y): well again as I said I’m in a quite stable stage about tastes and I have my comfort- zone of dressing. I know what suits me, what gets me away from being judged. And I only feel comfortable wearing what suits me. Also I learned a lot from the style crash I had before. So now I know which brands I should buy into, which shops I need to go. You know, Classic never makes mistakes.
Q: So what luxury fashion mean to you.
A(Y): It’s about pursuits of life 生活品味和生活追求
I：What the tastes or pursuit exactly are?
A(Y): It's like...self-discipline. You invest on yourself and maintain your life in certain standard without compromising. So that’s reason I don’t like highstreets brand. It already become a fixed mentality. So I won’t think too much anymore.
Q: Anything more what to share.
A(Y): Do you know the anti-fur movement from some luxury brands? To be honest, I don’t give it a dxxn.
Q: Why?
A(Y): think luxury needs to have fur.
Q: why do you think in this way?
A(Y): you can’t expect fur in Topshop right? You can’t expect to sale Fur in large quantities. So luxury, even its RTW, it’s a niche in whole market. And luxury needs to have the aura about being unique, being rare and being exclusive. And fur is a good example.
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Q: There is another question. Have you bought any domestic luxury fashion designers? Have heard of them?
A(Y): No. I don’t really know them. And there is no one using them in my social group.
Participant Z
Q: As you have mentioned that you had done some luxury fashion shopping recently. Can you share some story about the most memorable purchase?
A(Z): Recently? In the past three month or half year?
Q:: Doesn’t matter. And no matter the purchase is big or small.
A(Z): I really like Celine. Anytime if I have a budget for shopping, I will always visit Celine’s shop. And I currently bought three handbags from them. First one is Qiuqian (the nick name of trapeze in Chinese). It was not on my list to be honest, but you know it was in Biscter Village, it was on offer and it was good color. I just want to have everything from Celine.
Q: Why do you have such strong desire for a brand?
A(Z): simply speaking, I like Celine because I appreciate its simplicity, good leather materials, and value-for-money. For that bag, the color design really caught my eye. It is not pricy, and it doesn’t require PeiHuo.
Q: when did you hear about Celine for the first time. We know it is not a traditional luxury brand.
A(Z): I heard about it when their Qiuqian and Jiong bags were on the hit in China. Jiong got the very eye-catching design which was my first impression about Celine. And some of bags are so functional, like Trapeze. Cheap, practical and good leather. You feel the brand is quite Shizai (paritical). And later I start following their RTW, so called monocore style. In all, it’s simple, it suits my style. That’s the basic.
I later started buying from Chanel. But their design is getting too loud. I also love Hemes but their price level is there and quite difficult to get hold them. You can really start from Hermes. As for Chanel, I don’t look at its design. It is the innovation which impresses me.
Q: what do you mean about innovation.
A(Z): well track back to Coco Mademoiselle, she was the first one put trousers in womenswear design and use Chained shoulder straps in handbag design. You can see the innovation from there. Though I didn’t start buying from Chanel since it was not my style, for me, Chanel and Hermes, they are the classic. Anything underneath them, they are the same.
Q: So do you have your own luxury hierarchy? 161 / 167
A(Z): Yes.
Q: what is your criteria to list them from top to bottom?
A(Z): first it is the design. I mean as innovation in the design. Talking about Hermes, we all aware about they use supreme materials but the most attractive parts are the history, and the craftmanshiQ: The charm of Chanel is from Coco the brand founder.
Q: you are very interested in Coco. Can you share how do you access to these stories and brand history?
A(Z): I heard the name from a uni’ lecture. And It was last year a film about Coco gave me a holistic idea about her. You know, those firms are the most straight-forward way to communicate. And it’s easiest way to understand. Plus I will do little bit research by myself.
Q: So you will do some research on social media?
A(Z): well just google it. As for social media. Well for Chanel, I only fancy the CF, the most original collection. And their recent design all the classic design elements are getting over- interpreted. For fabric, it is all about the tweeds! And all the media, print magazines, none of them would dare to have any negative reviews. Chanel put loads of money on them. In that case, I choose to ignore their voices, and all of the latest. I only focus on the original collection I adore. And for what Chanel has been doing recently, having celebrity endorsement or street naps…I mean, I won’t call it is become the rabble of trend. But Chanel’s image got immersed in trend. Only the original brand culture is shining there.
Q: you refer Chanel as being immersed in trend. Is it not what you want?
A(Z): I am not a trend follower. I buy luxury is because I feel being connected with a certain point in the brand. Also Chanel is posh, it is too expensive for me to follow that trend. But its all about the point. For Celine, I don’t know anything about its history and I am not aware if it gets a remarkable past, but the point I got from Celine is the simplicity, the material and the colour palate. they are not pricy anyway so quick easily to end up having quick a few. And they always have stuff in stock.
Q: When you buying luxury fashion, will you consider how other people will think about you? Or have you been influenced by your family members, friends, or colleagues?
A(Z): In family, I am mostly influenced by my sister cousin.
Q: how did she influence on you?
A(Z): she shopped a lot of luxury. I always looked at her purchase and she would share her ideas to me. Well I mean she gave me a lot of information which may have evoked my certain parts of interests in luxury. But she never affected on my final purchase decision. She was just, sharing information.
Some of other popular trendy bags, talking about Chole from last year Faye, and this year’s new design which is with a metal loop on the bag, they look nice, good price but I still don’t fancy them.
Q: why? 162 / 167
A(Z): they are pretty but they are just another bags in trend. I can’t see the original point from the design. It’s a bag with no history. And the loop, is a design element which have been used by many designers. It is just a pretty bag. And I don’t share any loyalty with that bag. So when other people are using or talking about the bag. What I will do is only follow their ideas and say : yes, it’s a nice bag.
Q: Can you remember when did you get your first luxury good?
A(Z): the first one I bought by myself is Celine’s bag. But mum gave me few before, Prada, the basic Vuitton bags. I don’t have special feel towards them. For Prada, though I haven’t done any research, it is not a brand which has an obvious history. For Vuitton, they do really good canvas bags, really good canvas which I would have to buy them in the future. They launched a nano bag which did catch my eyes. So I bought one which has the unique canvas material feature.
Q: You mentioned Vuitton. Do you feel that brand is trying to make itself younger. Have you heard there crossover collection with Supreme? And their menswear collection endorses Drake. So will those brand activities affect your perceptions about the brand?
A(Z): Definitely will! They make me confused! What is Louis Vuitton trying to be! For the collection with supreme, firstly, I don’t like the looks. And it is not a good collection as even from Supreme. What is their intention to collaborate with Supreme? It only makes confused. let’s say, if Vuitton was attempting to connect with generation Y, their products were not convincing.
Q: but Supreme is a trendy streetwear brand.
A(Z): It is. And I have bought other crossover collections between Supreme and other streetwear brands. So for collection between LV and Supreme, what brand am I buying to? LV or Supreme? They are two different things. But for Vuitton’s own special collections, the Tahiti and the Badge, I was truly intrigued because they are originated from its own brand culture. Back to the one with Supreme, I only see Supreme’s features not LV’s.
A(Z): You talked quite few points/features. So what is the defining line between luxury and non-luxury fashion.
Q: I think there are two. First it is the brand culture, including its history. Second one is style, or materials, fabric. Say, for celine, I credit its simplicity, top-notch materials and colours. For Vuitton is about its canvas and brand culture.
A(Z): Well as you may know there are some more niche brands. Good quality, and they all have their brand history. Do you fancy them?
Q: Not really. Say for the handbag brand which is favored by Queen and being featured by Mr. Bag.
A(Z): Which brand?
Q: whose logo looks like a pussy bow. It says it is the royal’s manufacturer. But I won’t buy that brand.
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A(Z): So what put you off? The design, brand culture or price?
Q: maybe I really value the innovation which that brand doesn’t have.
A(Z): You mentioned innovation a lot.
Q: Yes for me, why luxury is luxury because it has the original design, which can push the boundary of fashion design vocabulary. All the IT bags now, those one from Chloe or Loewe’s puzzle. What they have been doing is just put some design gimmick in the pot. And those elements are not as strong as Gucci. So they just immerse in trend.
A(Z): Yes everyone is talking about good.
Q: Yes I bought a Gucci bag.
A(Z): From Michelle’s collections?
Q: Yes, I bought it this year.
A(Z):Where did you get the bag and why you bought it?
Q: I bought from Harvey Nicolas. Firstly, the price is…even cheaper than Chole.
A(Z): So what is your standard of Cheap?
Q: For me, anything not from the top two (Chanel and Hermes), which are the origin of luxury fashion, and not from Celine, as my personal taste preference…anything lower than 1000-2000? Well but people were saying the quality of Gucci is not there. And I can say they are right after buying the bag.
A(Z): So quality is important for you?
Q: Not that important so I got the first Gucci. But look at the quality, oh gosh, it’s ridiculously bad! It’s embarrassing! So I had to take two more Gucci items off my wishing list. The first one came with such poor quality, and there won’t be a second one.
A(Z): You are a big fan of handbags! Are you also buying shoes, clothes, from those luxury designer brands?
Q: Yeah I also buy some luxury fashion accessories and shoes. Well for accessories…talking about channel, they are bit normal, and they always come with big logo on it which I don’t like. Their most iconic design element in accessories is the pearl though…they are faux pearls. But look at their price, same as a handbag! But again, I cannot buy any copycat design. Some Chinese domestic brands have the product offering with very good pearl quality, however there are lots of references from foreign brands that puts me off. The most important is design and quality shall not be left behind. So for Hermes, their accessories have both design feature and quality. Celine’s stands out thanks to the minimalism look, fairly good quality and affordable price.
A(Z): Have your purchased Celine’s clothes?
Q: I’d like to, but they are expensive. Besides, the tailoring and cutting are too baggy. And I have a petit frame. I have that problem for most luxury clothes. They are all too big! 164 / 167
A(Z): Fit is a problem?
Q: Yes… and I also adore Valentino’s clothes though they are utterly unwearable, especially all their evening dresses. I would rather buy cotemporary brands whose price is reasonable.
A(Z): Shall we talk about accessible luxury for a bit? Have you purchased any of them and what’s your idea about accessible luxury?
Q: Hummm…oh yes I bought Furla. They are alright. Just random shopping I don’t really think they are luxury.
A(Z): not at all?
Q: No. well at least they have their own design.
A(Z): Let’s imagine, will you feel a massive difference by using a Chanel bag than a Furla bag?
Q: well the most straight-forward one is that I will try to maintain my luxury bags try not to get them stained. For Furla, I use them when it is raining or dry.
A(Z): So what is the most enjoyable part in luxury shopping? Browsing, buying, owning or having compliments from other people when you use them?
Q: I think is when I own them. My biggest satisfaction comes from…yes I have another celine bag!
A(Z): Will you consider if people will look at you differently?
Q: Humm…more or less it will contribute to my purchase. You can’t deny it. Say, we know about fashion so using Celine’s stuff won’t be a big deal but for whole loads of other people, who never know about fashion, never know about those brands. But at the time they see me using luxury, they will be amazed about the fabric, the design, the look. Still it is only a part of the motivation. Say if I really care about others’ opinion, I would buy more trendy products.
A(Z): so you reckon it comes from your personality? Or it comes from the social environment where you live?
Q: well it is hard to say. Oh something is quite funny that I would not use my favorite or my best luxury goods when I back to China, especially at the time of family gathering. I try not to be the center of attention. It is me.
A(Z): Why don’t you like being the center of attention?
Q: You know family members can be really gossipy. It’s annoying. But when I hang out with my peers, I will use some unique, top-notch stuff.
A(Z): What is the reason that you will dress differently in front of family? Are they moaning about you buying too much?
Q: You know, all my family members, my grandparents, mum and dad, all my cousins they have different consumption attitude. Some of them…they are…what can I say. I bought my luxury because I love the design. For them, they can’t see that and all they see is the brand 165 / 167
name, and how expensive they are. Same happens on some of my Chinese friends. I know quite some of Chinese they only buy particular luxury things because some Chinese social media celebrities “endorse” them. They don’t understand the design and that is maybe where the fake-luxury shopping emerges. All they want is Xu Rong (conpicuousness).
A(Z): have your ever being conspicuous in your luxury shopping?
Q: oh yes, definitely yes. It was the very early stage of my luxury buying life. I had the situation is the reason I got some was only due to the brand name.
A(Z): When was it?
Q: Back to my uni years in China. Those were the crazy buying for showing-off time. I studied in Hangzhou and there were quite some rich students in that uni. I shopped a lot…to fit in the scene.
Q: So it’s a story start from showing-off and ends with laid-back?
A(Z): you are right.
Have your ever thought about your shopping preferences will change if you back to China? Try to imagine it.
Q: I don’t think there wouldn’t be big differences. I already have my values. I have a quick fix shopping patterns now. Clothes with simple design, quite some of them are from Zara. Shoes I am happy to buy niche luxury brands, but also I shop for Louboutin and Roger Viver. They are brands with culture and history and their shoes are really fancy and comfy! And I hate any brands who copy them! Well even for Zara, I won’t buy items if their design are an explicit copycats. Products come first.
A(Z): apart of luxury fashion, where are your other interests?
Q: traveling is some expense and I do interest in investing properties and doing research about that. And I am not really such kind of foodies who only eat in Michelle.
A(Z): What luxury fashion is so different for you?
Q: maybe I am brainwash by the minimalist lifestyle. I used to shop a lot and bin a lot in the end of season. And I realize that should stop now. So I try to avoid buying anything in- between, things like £300 jackets. I’d rather buy expensive alternatives. want durability. The durability firstly comes from quality. But for some domestic brands, they only have quality but not design. and I can only get durable and original design in the luxury category. So that is why I bought Celine, and for Coco, I even follow which hotels she stayed, and I want to stay there. It is like a cult. It’s about personal obsession of the founder’s legend. And today’s Chanel products, I feel they are getting irrelevant from its original founder, the icon. Hermes has the authenticity.
A(Z): You are obsessed by the brand story.
Q: I am also obsessed by the fact it’s so inaccessible. It is difficult to purchase.
A(Z): you want something can’t be owned by others? 166 / 167
Q: I don’t mind. Some people don’t like the idea of Zhuang Jie (using same products). For instance, Some people don’t like Valentino’s Rockstud shoes because they are too popular. But for me, I appreciate the originality of the design and craftsmanship so I would like to invest.
A(Z): Are any of your family member or your partner against your shopping?
Q: my boyfriend is ok about that. My mum doesn’t again me to buy expensive clothes since she used to be a designer. But sometimes she would moan a bit if I am shopping handbags. She though I bought more I could use.
A(Z): will she affect your purchase decision?
Q: No. I have the right to decide how to distribute the money. And I also try to influence my mum to buy luxury goods. It depends on the family. Being as the only child in family, I do benefit from that.
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