Unique Fashion Not: Uniqlo’s Commercial Success in Taiwan

Abstract

Uniqlo, Japan’s largest fashion brand, operates over 2200 stores internationally; however, it is largely pan-Asian as 92% of the stores are in Asia. Taiwan is no exception where the notion of fashion, rather than clothing, originally arrived under Japanese rule in the early twentieth century. After being independent of Japan in the mid-twentieth century, many Taiwanese still preferred Japanese rather than Western designs and trends due to the cultural similarities between Taiwan and Japan. This became further evident when Uniqlo opened its first Taiwanese store in 2010. However, Uniqlo’s business model of providing simple design products of high quality can be explained by neither Laver’s Law of fashion cycle nor the strategy of European fast fashion brands that offer fast cycle fashion items without guaranteeing quality. To discover motives and reasons behind the Taiwanese mindset, we have conducted 15 interviews, including two with former Uniqlo workers, at various locations in Taiwan. We then conclude that Taiwanese consumers seek quality clothes from Uniqlo, tangible features of clothing rather than symbolic elements of fashion.

Keywords:

• fashion cycle
• fast fashion
• James Laver
• Taiwanese fashion
• Uniqlo

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Uniqlo admits that it is strong in “greater China,” such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the People’s Republic of China (Fast Retailing 2017).

2 The authors have identified this throughout Taiwan, including the areas of the Taipei Main Station and Tainan Station.

3 The average Japanese worker earns 4.41 million Japanese yen annually (National Tax Agency 2019), whereas the average Taiwanese worker earns NT$687,076 annually (National Statistics, R.O.C. Taiwan 2020).

4 In this research, female interviewees are those who self-identify themselves as female and women. We did not ask interviewees’ biological gender or if they possess two X sex chromosomes.

5 These are five major fashion styles in contemporary Taiwan containing heavy foreign influences – Kawaii, OL, and Cosplay styles originate in Japan, the Korean Wave from Korea, and Nightclub La-Mei from the West (Kimura and Lin 2017, 354).

6 See Fast Retailing (2020).

7 This includes Europe, North America, and Australia.

8 All the researched items were sold for women, and the prices were collected from the official website of the relevant brands on 25 June 2018. The prices were converted to the US dollar by Google.

9 We interviewed 15 individuals considering the view of the qualitative research specialist George Gaskell. He believes that the number of individual interviews for a researcher should be set somewhere between 15 and 25, because the “interviewer must be able to bring to mind the emotional tone of the respondent – more interviewees means more difficulties in recalling emotions that cannot be transcribed in text” (Gaskell 2000, p. 43).

10 Most interviewees are identified under pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This article received funding from the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, grant number 107-2410-H-168-007.

Notes on contributors

Tets Kimura

Tets Kimura, Ph.D., is Research Associate in the Creative Arts at Flinders University, Australia. He studies fashion, art, and cinematic experiences to map and remap historical and contemporary identities of the Asia-Pacific countries, such as Australia, Japan, and Taiwan. His latest publications include “Japanese War Art in Australasia” (Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 20:1, 2020, coauthor: Richard Bullen). A co-authored book project for which he was lead editor and author, Exporting Japanese Esthetics: Evolution from Tradition to Cool Japan (co-editor: Jennifer Harris), addresses the evolution of international impacts and influences of Japanese culture was published in 2020 from the Sussex Academic Press. [email protected]

Shih-Ying Lin

Shih-Ying Lin, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of fashion studies at the Tainan University of Technology, Tainan City, Taiwan. Her doctoral project on bodily practices in post-WWII Taiwan was awarded in 2013 from Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. The duo previously published “Creation of Contemporary Taiwanese Fashion: A Shift in Tainan City toward Original Design” (Fashion Practice 9:3, 2017). [email protected] This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.