It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

Fashioning the City

Fashion and lifestyle are effective benchmarks against which the image of a metropolitan city is measured. Fred Davis cited the above as the epigraph of the first chapter of his Fashion, Culture, and Identity, in which he begins with this statement: ‘That the clothes we wear make a statement is a statement that in this age of heightened self-consciousness has virtually become a cliché.’ While Davis was referring to the relationship between fashion and the cultural identity of individuals, his statement perfectly fits that of cities as well. Usually New York, Paris, London, Milan, and Tokyo top the familiar list of cities that conjure up the image of high fashion, and a ‘big city look’ is deemed as revealing a certain distinctive type of metropolitan chic. Hong Kong has taken pride in being compared with these global cities. For example, when the January 2008 issue of TIME magazine (Asia Edition) coined the term ‘Nylonkong’ to tell the stories of the three connected cites that ‘drive the global economy’, Donald Tsang, the then Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), considered Hong Kong as playing a similar role in Asia as New York in North America and London in Europe, echoing the term ‘Nylonkong’. As Richard Florida argued in his Who's Your City?, however, ‘personal’ characteristics are pertinent factors that make a city attractive in the age of the global economy. Whether Hong Kong could develop its own distinctive characteristics was much more important than the term itself.