©Fred Ramage / Keystone / Getty Images Fashion design may appear far removed from terms like government policy, bureaucracy, and administrative procedures. Yet looking back at the history of the fashion industry suggests otherwise. Fashion has always been bound up with the ambitions of states and cities to organise industry, labour, exports, and cultural prestige. For example, the rise of Belgian fashion in the 1980s, including the Antwerp Six, was supported by Belgium’s 'Textile Plan' (1981), which desired to revive the declining domestic textile industry at the time. The distinctive emerging designer scene in Britain that gained international attention in the 1990s cannot be explained solely by the spontaneous eruption of subculture. The growth of British fashion design at the end of the 20th century was directly linked to the process by which young people attempted to start their own businesses, enabled by the Enterprise Allowance Scheme introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s government as part of neoliberal restructuring. Even the French haute couture industry managed to maintain fabric supplies and prevent the industry’s relocation to Berlin through negotiations with authorities during the Nazi occupation in the Second World War, thereby preserving the foundation of their post-war luxury hegemony. Behind European fashion designers, there was a desire by the government to utilise fashion as a tool for cultural propaganda, reorganisation of employment, and economic growth. ©The Seoul Shinmun In the West, fashion trends emerged from cultures of custom-made dress for kings, aristocrats, and later the bourgeoisie. As the ready-to-wear industry expanded, these trends became entangled with a range of social and cultural contexts, including attempts either to follow fashion actively or to resist it, as seen in British working-class styles and American street culture. This process gave rise to a wide range of styles. If this history forms the foundation of today’s European designer-brand ecosystem, Korea’s textile and fashion industries have long functioned within export-driven industrialisation as key sectors of cheap consumer goods and labour-intensive light industry. In the reconstruction after colonial rule and war, Korea treated garment factory workers as a low-wage industrial workforce, while fashion itself was folded into state-led economic development to meet export targets. This points to a state-level understanding of fashion markedly different from Western cases such as British independent designers, Italy’s family-based workshop ecosystem, and France’s couture houses, where fashion was treated as a high-value-added cultural industry and distinctive ecosystems were actively protected and supported. ©ZHA This difference should not be reduced to a narrative of deficiency, as though the West treated fashion as the humanities and social sciences while Korea did not. Rather, the desires that the state projected onto fashion were simply different. Since the late 1990s, Korea has also incorporated the cultural content industries into its national growth strategy to build cultural influence and transition toward a knowledge and information society¹. In this context, Seoul Collection, now known as Seoul Fashion Week, was officially launched in 2000. As of 2024, the Seoul Metropolitan Government’s budget related to Seoul Fashion Week accounted for 17.1 percent of its overall fashion budget, and Seoul Fashion Week has established itself as a flagship municipal event for fostering domestic designers and revitalising the fashion industry. However, since the completion of Dongdaemun Design Plaza in 2014, Seoul Fashion Week has increasingly served as a tool to promote Seoul as a 'global design city' and 'Asian cultural capital' rather than as a stage for the fashion industry². Behind the all-encompassing display of Hallyu (Korean Wave) across beauty, music, and film, represented by celebrities filling the runway front rows and photo walls, and behind the emphasis on overseas sales, international buyers, and order results, emerging brands were pushed down the priority list because they cannot meet minimum order quantities (MOQ), and ageing garment factories were unable to take on work without the prospect of follow-up orders. The two sides remain facing away from each other. ©Stuart Wilson / BFC / Getty Images The problem is not Seoul’s alone. London, which has maintained its image as a ‘creative fashion city’ through London Fashion Week, has not escaped the criticism that, as its manufacturing capacity has collapsed, it now does little more than reproduce hollow ideological claims around urban visibility, symbolic capital, and creativity. Olya Kuryshchuk³, co-founder of 1 Granary, has pointed to a structure in which emerging independent brands are denied access to high-quality production infrastructure because their orders are too small, blocking the possibility of experimentation from the outset. In a city where the production infrastructure has disappeared, young designers who need immediate work or who cannot afford the risks of starting a business without the support of the British Fashion Council (BFC) leave behind an industry centred on small brands that cannot sustain their presence on the fashion week stage without sponsorship. Instead, they move to other fashion cities such as Paris, Milan and New York where jobs are relatively more stable and opportunities more abundant. The BFC⁴ has acknowledged its limitations and announced reforms this year, yet the practical force of its rhetoric of ‘accessibility’ and ‘growth’ remains an open question. ©Edward Berthelot / Getty Images To be sure, there have also been attempts to turn fashion weeks into platforms for policy agendas by addressing the material problems behind their glamour and the adverse effects of the fashion week itself. Copenhagen Fashion Week, for instance, introduced sustainability requirements in 2020 and made compliance mandatory for participating brands from 2023, thereby positioning itself as a leading platform for sustainability discourse. In Berlin, meanwhile, designer brands may receive municipal support when they pursue a social enterprise model that commits to supporting vulnerable groups in their local communities or sustaining a locally rooted production environment⁵. Yet Copenhagen Fashion Week, billed as ‘the world’s most sustainable’⁶, has been criticised for remaining a form of self-branding as an ethical fashion city. Critics argue that its 19 sustainability requirements serve little more than as marketing assets, while the time and administrative costs of compliance are shifted onto brands without producing substantive changes in supply chains⁷. In Berlin’s case⁸, the deliberate distance from fashion’s ‘glamorous networks’, including the four major fashion weeks, is inevitably damaging to the survival of designer brands. Berlin-based designers frequently travel to Paris to sell their collections, and brands' reliance on public subsidies leaves unresolved political risks to their independence. ©musinsa studio Whether as cautionary examples or as models, these cases prompt us to reconsider South Korea’s fashion industry and Seoul Fashion Week today. Their attempts at agenda-setting are significant insofar as they renew the kinds of questions that a fashion industry can raise. We, too, might strategically consider what agenda only Seoul Fashion Week could put forward by looking to London’s seemingly inexhaustible base of emerging designers, Copenhagen’s sustainability agenda, and Berlin’s social-enterprise model. Yet, as noted earlier in relation to the ties between the fashion industry and policy, these cases have also failed to escape a limitation, where the ‘city’ itself, rather than ‘fashion’, is given greater importance. London has reduced creativity to an economic resource, Copenhagen has turned sustainability into a branding tool, and Berlin has revealed the limits of fashion workers' autonomy. What they have gained are little more than display labels for urban image-making: creative London, ethical Copenhagen, responsible Berlin. Seoul Fashion Week has functioned as a promotional platform in the process of remaking the image of the city and the nation, replacing the older language of manufacturing and exports with that of high-tech industry, culture, and content. But as long as fashion remains confined within the frames of conglomerates, exports, Hallyu, and the ‘K-’ prefix, and as long as policy imagination fails to move beyond them, ‘Generation Next’ will remain resources mobilised by the Seoul Metropolitan Government to construct the image of an Asian fashion and beauty hub and a global cultural capital ultimately. If Seoul Fashion Week cannot intervene in the agendas required to sustain the industry’s production base, then the question of whether Seoul can become the ‘fifth fashion city’⁹ after the four major fashion capitals will not signal a new possibility. It will merely expose the flawed premise of the goal itself, while leaving Seoul with the last seat in a fashion-city discourse that repeats its own limits.” ¹ With the 1999 enactment of the Framework Act on the Promotion of Cultural Industries, the state reimagined culture, which had long been treated as a matter of nationhood, tradition, and heritage preservation, as an industry for economic growth.² Oh and Kim (2025) “Current Status of Seoul’s Fashion Industry and Development Directons for Seoul Fashion Week”, The Seoul Institute. Available at here³ Amy Francombe (2024) “WITH COOL DESIGNER PARTNERSHIPS, CAN ECCO BECOME THE NEXT IT-FOOTWEAR LABEL?”, Vogue Business, Available at here⁴ British Fashion Council (2026), “BFC 2030 ACCESS, CREATIVITY, GROWTH”, British Fashion Council. Available at here⁵ McRobbie, Strutt, and Bandinelli (2022), Fashion as Creative Economy: Micro-Enterprises in London, Berlin and Milan, Cambridge: Polity Press.⁶ Emily Chan (2023), “How Copenhagen Became The World’s Most Sustainable Fashion Week“, British Vogue, Available at here⁷ Subir Ghosh (2025), “Copenhagen FW: How a Fashion Week’s Sustainability Claims Faced a Major Reckoning”, texfash, Available at here⁸ Cathrin Schaer (2024), “Can Berlin Fashion Week Capture - and Hold - the Industry’s Interest?”, WWD, Available at here⁹ Seoul Metropolitan Government (2021) “Seoul Vision 2030”. Available at here BY MUYO PARKJULY 20, 2026 >READ THE KOREAN VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE> READ OTHER ARTICLES