Rather than just offering a collection of scholarly work narrating empirical stories of “Chinese fashion,” the edited volume Fashion in Multiple Chinas: Chinese Styles in the Transglobal Landscape makes an incisive theoretical statement. Advocating epistemological pluralism, this book aims to challenge Western-centric discourse about fashion and China's role in the global fashion system. Based on a wide range of research conducted by key international scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, and using varied methodological approaches, the two co-editors of this book, Wessie Ling and Simona Segre-Reinach, trace the vicissitudes of Chinese fashion styles in the contemporary globalized creative economy. Their introduction raises three important questions: What is Chinese fashion? Whose Chinese fashion is it? Why does it matter – and to whom? Three interconnected conceptual threads – “common beliefs,” “time” and “space” – also shuttle through nine individual chapters, which are neatly stitched into three sections: “PRC fashion industry,” “Fashion in other Chinas” and “Chinese fashion in the West.” The respective authors argue that fashion did and does exist in multiple “China(s)” across time, space and place through the greater China region. In multiple ways, China fashion continues to manifest itself in different shapes and senses through the regional and transglobal circuits of culture and economic exchange.

Using plentiful case studies, the book discusses how Chinese fashion producers, mediators and consumers are both empowered and restricted in creating Chinese fashion. The chapters also collectively illustrate how the production and consumption of fashion in China is subject to contextualized cultural, economic, political, social and technological forces, as well as being influenced by everyday practical norms. For instance, through an archival study showcasing the diverse fabric styles under Communist China's autocratic regime, Antonia Finnane and Peidong Sun (chapter two) expertly challenge the assumed non-existence of fashion during Cultural Revolution. In the Mao era, the varieties of dress and material culture in China complicate such a generalization. Fashionable items such as worn-out army clothes, the Jiang Qing dress and “Mao suits” were adopted not to show wealth but poverty, and to blend in rather than to stand out. In validating the “de-Westernizing” project, such examples succinctly undermine the applicability of Veblenian conspicuous consumption theory or Bourdieusian social stratification theory, given the radically different socio-cultural conditions that prevailed in China.

As discussed by Jianhua Zhao (chapter three), in Chinese practice the symbolism of fashion is often inseparable from its materiality, as mass garment production skills, honed through China's role as the workshop of the world have evolved into high quality fashion production. During China's post-reform era, the transglobal exchange of knowledge, skills and trade has fuelled the development of its domestic fashion industry, and also contributed to fashion's new role in building the nation and one of the world's largest consumer markets (chapters four to six). When taking the increasingly complex mechanisms of co-creation into consideration, the boundaries, dynamics and habits among consumers in their reflective articulation of preferred identity through fashion have also evolved. In Anne Peirson-Smith's ethnographic study (chapter seven) of young creative cosplayers in Beijing, Hong Kong and Macau, fashion is not just a trickle-down Western trend they passively adopt, but also a bottom-up catalyst for acquiring multiple identities and varied fantastic presentation of the costumed self. Often inspired by fashionable sensibilities originating across East Asia, these are evidence of an alternative prosumption model. In May Khuen Chung's contribution (Chapter eight), the quintessential qipao is also more than just a linear Chinese garment or a fantasized, fixed façade of contemporary Chinese fashion; the often-overlooked varying silhouettes and styles across different sociocultural spaces, such as in multi-ethnic Singaporean society, signify the complex role that fashion plays in appropriating and negotiating hybrid cultural identities. The dichotomy of “Western” fashion versus “non-Western” costumes as a perpetuated myth also lacks validity against the global rise of China. The West has come to redefine the DNA of fashion creation in order to increase occidental desire for their designs, indicative of a new cultural-economic process. From the cases of Milanese Romeo Gigli, Parisian Balenciaga to the Swedish H&M illustrated by Hazel Clark (chapter nine) and Simona Segre Reinach (chapter ten), Western fashion labels’ creative inspirations are often culturally hybrid; the senses of fashionability they represent are also restyled, replaced and reborn in the hands of Chinese makers/designers/mediators and in the eyes of Chinese consumers.

While successfully opening up a new theoretical space, this “ex-centric” view may encounter new criticism. Framing an analytic lens along a Chinese orbit to study fashion in “multiple China(s)” may sidestep emergent and escalating forms of political tensions, identity politics and cultural resistance exhibited between different Chinese societies. For example, a few authors in this edited volume (e.g. Wessie Ling, Hazel Clark) also observe that many diasporic Chinese-American, Taiwanese and Hong Kong's designers still deliberately distinguish themselves from being regarded as Chinese designers or avoid expressing a preference for a “Chinese” aesthetic for manifold reasons. At the same time, Chinese designers are encouraged and aspire to attain international acclaim, spend time outside of China to train or showcase their work, and aim to stimulate Western desire and approbation for their creative work differentiated by Chinese signifiers (e.g. Clark, p.120–125). These ironies and contradictions highlight the fact that in terms of production and consumption, China and the world are all involved in creating multiple fashions as a transglobal undertaking. So, the very same set of questions the co-editors raised at the beginning of the book may yield answers that could exclude or overlook these self-perceived “non-Chinese” fashion designers and their creative work by lumping such fashion creations together into the “China(s)” fashion pool. Nonetheless, such a critique could be a new starting point from which to rethink the notions and boundaries of “Chineseness” and “China” along cultural, geographical and political axes, to empower not only “non-Western” voices but also “non-Chinese” commentary. This critical approach questions long-held compartmentalized views about Chinese fashion by nuancing the scope of Western-dominated fashion studies, and by widening the investigation to address contemporary Chinese fashion in all of its multiple forms.