Why Western Designers Are Building Their Careers in the East
Last week, former Marni creative director Francesco Risso was appointed creative director of casual wear brand GU, which is owned by Uniqlo’s Japanese parent company Fast Retailing. Risso will also design a collaboration line with Uniqlo. It’s the latest in a stream of exchanges between Western designers at East Asian fashion companies, and a sign that the industry’s centre of gravity is no longer anchored solely in Europe.
In October, Kim Jones was appointed creative director of a newly launched sub-brand, Areal, within China’s Bosideng — a megabrand known 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 on its new line Antazero. In January 2025, British designer Daniel Fletcher joined Chinese label Mithridate as creative director. In September 2024, Clare Waight Keller was named global creative director of Uniqlo.
What’s going on? It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that the motivation for joining an East Asian company is a fat paycheck. But when I asked my Shanghai-based colleague Yiling Pan, editorial director of Vogue Business in China, for her take, she said the forces at play are far more structural.
“In Europe and the US, creative directors are operating in highly financialized systems with shrinking authority, short tenures, and intense pressure for constant buzz,” she says. “By contrast, many East Asian groups — particularly in China and Japan — are still in a brand-building phase and are willing to offer designers broader creative remit, longer horizons, and greater authorship.” On top of that, there’s often stronger supply chain integration and faster time-to-market.
I also reached out to Daniel Fletcher, who echoed Pan’s sentiment. He says he was drawn to the scale of the operation and level of resource available at Mithridate. “The speed and (often overlooked) craftsmanship with which they operate at Mithridate is really impressive, and for a European designer having previously been working on my own label or for smaller brands, being given an atelier with 50 people working full-time was a dream,” he says. “It’s allowed me to focus on design, to develop ideas more, and remove a lot of the challenges I’ve faced previously because of European production issues.”
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Two different playbooks
Asia is not a monolith, and experts stress that Chinese and Japanese fashion companies operate very differently. “Japan is much more advanced in terms of creative direction and brand building than China,” says Sonja Prokopec, professor of luxury brand management at French business school ESSEC, based at its Singapore campus. She points to Bosideng as an example of a manufacturing-led company that is still building its creative identity. “Japan has had a high focus on design for many years and is considered the hub of design and creativity in Asia. Perhaps the reason they’re not at the scale of some European brands comes down to the ability to storytell or a culture that’s less expressive and showy, which can limit international recognition.”
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