China Fashion Now: Inside China's Fashion Industry

Professor Natascha Radclyffe-Thomas will take a broad look at China's fashion industry. Learn about the past, present and future of China's key fashion city Shanghai and consider China's potential role in a sustainable future for fashion.

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The site of China’s first department stores and the heart of China’s tailoring industry, Shanghai was associated both with innovations in fashion production and fashion retail, particularly in the “Golden Age” of the 1920s and 1930s. But is Shanghai still the centre of China’s fashion scene, and which other cities are emerging to compete for its crown as China’s pre-eminent fashion city?

The scale of China’s fashion footprint in textile and fashion production and consumption has enormous implications for the future of fashion. The talk will also discuss how the industry and consumers are responding to the challenges and opportunities of sustainable fashion.

More about the speaker

Professor in Marketing and Sustainable Business at the British School of Fashion, Natascha Radclyffe-Thomas is a National Teaching Fellow, Vice Chair of The Costume Society and Editor-in-Chief for Bloomsbury Fashion Business Case Studies. Natascha’s cross-disciplinary research spans creative industries practice; sustainable fashion; social enterprise and responsible business; cultural heritage, consumer behaviour and international fashion marketing.

Natascha has extensive experience teaching in Europe, Asia and North America and is an award-winning case study author and co-author of Fashion Management: A Strategic Approach (Palgrave Macmillan). Natascha has presented at conferences internationally and her publications have appeared in journals including the Journal of Fashion Management and Psychology Aesthetics Creativity and the Arts.

Natascha is a contributor to industry and media pieces on fashion business and consumer behaviour including for the BBC, SHOWstudio and The Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

The image shows a Business Confucius Institute event for Leeds Light Night 2015. The catwalk show included garments designed by Leeds College of Art (now Leeds Arts University) students mixing elements of Eastern and Western design.