The Tamesis
Last week, former Marni creative director Francesco Risso was appointed creative director of GU, a casual clothing brand owned by Uniqlo’s Japanese parent company Fast Retailing. Risso will also design a collaborative collection with Uniqlo. It is the latest in a series of exchanges between Western designers at East Asian fashion houses and a sign that the industry’s focus is no longer solely on Europe.
In October, Kim Jones was appointed as the creative director of Areal, a newly launched sub-brand of China’s Bosideng – a super brand famous for its down jackets. In September, Kris Van Assche (former creative director of Berluti and artistic director of Dior Homme) collaborated with Chinese sportswear giant Anta to launch a new series, Antazero. In January 2025, British designer Daniel Fletcher joined the Chinese brand Mithridate as creative director. In September 2024, Clare Waight Keller was appointed as UNIQLO’s global creative director.
What’s going on? It would be easy to conclude that the motivation for joining an East Asian company is the lucrative salary. But when I asked my colleague Pan Yiling in Shanghai, she was ” fashion business In China, in her view, the forces at work are more structural.
“In Europe and the United States, creative directors operate in highly financialized systems with shrinking powers, short tenure, and under intense pressure for sustained attention,” she says. “In contrast, many East Asian groups – especially those in China and Japan – are still in the brand-building phase and are willing to offer designers wider creative scope, longer-term vision and greater authorship. On top of that, there is often stronger supply chain integration and faster time to market.
I also contacted Daniel Fletcher, who agreed with Pan’s sentiments. He said he was attracted by the scale of Mithridat’s operations and the level of resources available. “The speed and (often overlooked) craftsmanship with which they operate at Mithridate is truly impressive, and for a European designer who has previously worked for his own label or a smaller brand, having a studio with 50 full-time employees is a dream,” he said. “It allows me to focus on design, develop ideas more and eliminates many of the challenges I previously faced due to production issues in Europe.”
two different scripts
Asia is not a monolith, experts stress, with Chinese and Japanese fashion companies operating in very different ways. “Japan is much more advanced than China in terms of creative direction and brand building,” said Sonja Prokopec, academic director of ESSEC Luxury School, a French business school based on its Singapore campus. She cited Bosideng as an example, which is manufacturing-led but still building its own creative image. “Japan has placed a high emphasis on design for many years and is considered the hub of design and creativity in Asia. Perhaps the reason they are unable to reach the scale of some European brands is due to storytelling capabilities, or a lack of expressive and showy culture, which may limit international recognition.”
