Crafting Glocal Luxury: Kering, Shanghai Fashion Week, and the Making of a New Design Vanguard
The case concerns the launch of the Kering Creative Residency for Artisanship, Fashion and Technology (“Craft”), a decade-long partnership between Kering and Shanghai Fashion Week to nurture emerging Chinese designers. The program offers immersive residencies across Milan, Paris and Shanghai, where selected designers receive mentorship from creative directors inside Kering’s luxury houses, along with structured guidance in brand building, design systems and business strategy. Through an international jury and competitive selection, Craft seeks to identify designers able to articulate a distinctive Chinese creative language while operating within global luxury standards.
Beyond a talent pipeline, Craft positions itself as a laboratory for redefining craftsmanship at the intersection of heritage and innovation. Designers are encouraged to develop “glocal” companies that embed Chinese cultural codes, materials, and artisanal techniques into products and narratives legible to international luxury consumers. By coupling cultural capital with managerial and technological capabilities, the program aspires to convert symbolic value (aesthetic, national, artisanal) into durable brand equity and scalable market propositions across continents.
At a deeper level, the initiative can be read as a strategic intervention in the global field of fashion, where symbolic hierarchies have historically privileged Euro-American centers. Craft attempts to reconfigure these hierarchies by repositioning Chinese designers from peripheral licensees or OEM producers into authors of original luxury meaning. The triadic residency structure (Milan–Paris–Shanghai) functions as a transnational circuit of cultural translation: designers learn to encode Chinese references into forms compatible with dominant luxury semiotics while also subtly altering those codes from within. This is a bid to move from simple localization to genuine cultural hybridity.
Simultaneously, the program formalizes prosumer creativity into entrepreneurial subjectivities. Participants are not only invited to design; they are trained to internalize brand, data and market logics, embodying the ideal of the creative entrepreneur. The discourse of “modern craftsmanship” fuses handwork, digital technologies and sustainability narratives into a single value proposition. In doing so, Craft extends luxury’s soft power, converting mentorship and knowledge transfer into long-term structural influence over how “Chinese luxury” will be defined, circulated and monetized.
Practical Implications for Organizations
- Design cross-border residencies that combine creative mentoring with explicit training in finance, operations, and data-driven merchandising.
- Treat “local culture” as a strategic resource: build programs that help designers translate vernacular symbols into globally legible luxury codes.
- Use juried selection to construct prestige around incubator participation, turning the program itself into an aspirational brand asset.
- Integrate artisans, technologists, and sustainability experts in one curriculum to redefine craftsmanship as a fusion of heritage and innovation.
- Position corporate mentorship as partnership, not extraction, to avoid perceptions of cultural appropriation and to foster genuine co-authorship.
- Track alumni outcomes longitudinally to build a portfolio of associated brands, strengthening corporate influence across independent luxury ecosystems.
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