I start my project from my self-definition first: I am a student, I am a fashion enthusiast and a learner in the fashion industry, I am interested in the field of anime and manga, feature films and I often spend time in my daily life watching anime manga.
From a self-definition point of view, I found common ground with some of China’s contemporary Gen Z consumers. I decided to use this to define the direction of my research. I wanted to explore distribution through mainstream Chinese video platforms. Can fashion and anime and comic art produce a new twist that
Fans of a single field are likely to exist in more than just one field, they are likely to be fans of other fields as well and have greater consumption potential.
Taking China’s largest mainstream anime video platform by far, Bilibili has evolved from China’s anime, comic and gaming industries to include fitness, beauty, lifestyle, fashion, and music. Its origins have set the stage for its quirky and loyal user base, which separates it from other players in the video space, and Hallanan says the platform has a stronger sense of community than most Chinese social media platforms.
This is because the platform is built on baking fish anime and manga gaming enthusiasts who are equally interested in other areas that generate or already have followers in areas such as fashion and beauty. On the other hand, as the platform expands, even those who are not anime, manga, and gaming fans themselves will, through their use of the platform, become more or less curious about the ACG culture that the platform itself promotes. In other words, it is very likely that fans of fashion or beauty will also develop a new interest in areas such as anime.
China’s fast-growing technology sector is awash with user-generated video platforms, and according to estimates by data intelligence service Questmobile, Bilibili is the most popular app among the “post-90s” in China; the platform’s core user base (78% of the “post-90s”) and average daily usage of the platform are more likely to be in the “post-90s” than the “post-90s”. The platform’s core user base (78% of the ‘post-90s’) and the average time spent looking at screens per day (83 minutes) suggest that these users are very young and very engaged. With global management consultancy Bain predicting that by 2025, China’s Generation Z (often referred to as those born between 1997 and 2012) will account for more than 55% of luxury consumption in mainland China, the digital space offers a lucrative opportunity for brands to target those who are about to become big consumers.
Combined with first-hand research, fashion video publishers explain individual items to spread fashion trends, while also forming fan exchange groups to consolidate their traffic, and the exchange groups are where fan gates share different fashion items and anime and comic content. Through this phenomenon, it can be understood that there is a crossover between fashion and anime and manga-related fans.
The anime and manga sector, itself, has a large cultural audience and with the advancement of technology, there are more and more Gen Z’s who can rely on the platform to watch anime and manga. The anime and manga industry, itself, relies on the sale of retransmission rights and peripheral products to generate revenue. The fashion industry has been empowering different groups with manga-based fashion since the 1970s, and in Japan, which has the most developed anime and manga industry in the world, there are many designers who have been influenced by anime and manga-related films and TV shows to create and break the next-generation barrier to collaborate across borders. For example, Undercover x EVA and Yohji Yamamoto Ground Y have collaborated with a number of manga works.
To summarise the stakeholders mentioned above, they fall into five general categories.
1. The mainstream video and comic (manga) platforms; Bilibili, AcFun…
2. Chinese Gen Z
3. Comic studios, independent artists, producers, and animation companies (Ghibli, GAINAX, Shirō Masamune…)
4. Fashion brands (Loewe, Yohji Yamamoto, Undercover…), Fashion groups (LVMH, Kering, Richemont…), Designers
Investment group (Alibaba, Tencent, The Carlyle Group, KPCB, Accel Partners…)
The two main ways of comparing the original combination of fashion and manga-anime are
1. anime and manga based on previous or self-designed fashion look, with the final output product still being anime and manga.
2. the fashion sector collaborates with existing anime and manga IPs to output products with specific images such as anime and manga, but not anime or manga.
In both ways, the expression is enhanced on the original respective cultures, but the final product is still the product of a single domain, and no joint progress of multiple domains has occurred.
Therefore, I would like to see a change in the way these two fields are combined in a new way.
The direct combination of anime and comics with fashion, through a different creative approach, outputting products from both fields, is a further enhancement of the two cultural foundations or even perhaps the creation of a new one.
The creative approaches that I believe exist as possibilities could be
Fashion brands join forces with anime and comic book creative companies to directly design relevant works that fit the brand image, so that fashion products from anime and comics can be sold in reality, and relevant works such as anime and comics can be broadcast and promoted on mainstream Chinese video platforms.
Zhiyu Zou