Social Media Makes Your Dream Come True?

Recently, a growing number of independent fashion designers dedicate to speak exclusively for Chinese individuality with their not-go-with-the-tide designs, which seems to make them the hope of Chinese fashion in the future. Moreover, by virtue of the increasingly influential social media instruments, these designers nowadays seem to stand more chances than ever to establish their own labels and survive with very little resources relatively. Though social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are blocked in the Mainland China; their equivalences there (i.e.: QQ, Renren, Sina Weibo, and Youku, etc.) are even more intensely used. Hence, with a research question of: In what ways do independent fashion designers in China exploit social media to run their labels, I intend to find out how independent designers in China undertake marketing, networking and other business-related activities through social media applications, what problems will be implied and what advice in both theoretical and practical senses can be provided, thus making my own contribution to the exploration of development possibilities of Chinese fashion design. Overall, I adopted a mixed method of interviews and desktop research. Through interviewing 14 designers with 11 close-ended questions and 45 open-ended questions, I meant to sum up and analyze essential facts of the social media phenomenon among designers. Afterwards, I tried to find out what problems or prospects the results had implied with the guidance of theories reviewed. Secondly, through desktop researching two experts’ blogs, reports, books, etc. and summarizing relevant information or points of views, I tried to draw lessons from their analyses of the general situation or other industries to pin down the relationship between social media mechanism and fashion business strategies, and to provide constructive advice for designers’ improvement. In the end, I found out that independent fashion designers exploit social media in an individualistic manner and though they rely substantially on several social media tools at the same time, they don’t combine them mechanically to create a synergy, which is a waste of the biggest merit of Internet. From the way that independent designers utilize social media generally, we can see that independent fashion design in China are still in a preliminary phase of development and with limited support from traditional resources, how fast the Chinese independent design can grow at this starting stage depends considerably on the designers’ using of social media. But if a designer can employ both social media and traditional media channels, which are still quite authoritative, to promote his/her label, the chances of an all-round success are more ensured.