Fashioning the Neighborhood : Exploring the Dynamics of Fashion Retail Place Making in an Asian Fashion City

This paper examines how fashion retail and consumption is constructed and encountered in particular neighborhoods of Hong Kong being redeveloped and rebranded. The spatiality of the urban landscape shapes social relations as individual and collective identities are constantly being enacted and negotiated on the street, and in domestic, public, commercial and virtual online spaces. Urban space is socially produced, constructed and directed by knowledge and skills in spatial practices. In this way, symbolic and material endeavors of the modern city and its fashioned and fashionable inhabitants establish and enact a sense of place infused with commodification and consumption practices, memory and history, construction and reconstruction. The outward physical form of retail space and its locational placing appear permanently founded on functional planning strategies, but the use and interpretations afforded by those who visit, work in and inhabit these places and spaces are based on the ephemeral, experiential and relational aspects of human existence and social interplay. Both material and imagined constructions promise “authentic” experiences, while underplaying the destruction of traditional structures or dislocation of inhabitants. Promotional narratives involved in constructing innovative urbanism attempt to privilege the value of one promised location above another to justify the narrative of an essential “must see” experience. This place making narrative content features themes of exoticism, orientalism and imagined geographies of fashioned place located in the binary between the centralized, modernist West versus the marginalized, traditionalist East. Using a case study approach as a grounded analysis of selected neighborhoods in Hong Kong, the intention is to assess how constructed spaces are crafted, imagined and experienced to facilitate experiential value in the process of place-making and selling contemporary fashion and style, from physical, material, symbolic and perceptual angles; and to locate the drivers behind this trend, and identity who benefits from these mythic, place-making endeavors.