This paper aims to analyze the characteristics of the contemporary Chinese fashion market and the competitiveness of Korean fashion brands in China. Fashion professionals experienced in both the Korean and Chinese fashion markets participated to investigate the Shanghai market and consumers. The results of in-depth interviews show that Shanghai is the most favorable city among Tier 1 cities for Korean fashion brands planning on entering into the Chinese market. Shanghai consumers are open to international brands and highly prefer newness in fashion. Contemporary menswear was selected as a potentially big market due to the increase of unique, young, upper-middle-class male consumers. The Korean fashion brands’ strength is that they are capable of satisfying Shanghai consumers with excellent product planning and sensory design capabilities. Their disadvantage is that their brand recognition is weaker than that of global and international brands, and their ability to localize to the Chinese market is weak. The opportunity comes is from the Korean Wave, which is a positive for Korea's products and has good geographical access. The threat is that the Shanghai market is fiercely competitive; having access to many worldwide brands, and the competitiveness of Chinese brands is on the rise. To enter the Shanghai market, creative design ability, trendy product development, skill, and appropriate PR methods such as using Korean culture contents would be required to satisfy the young, powerful consumers in Shanghai.

The purpose of this study is to find an expression method for Korean fashion design that can have competitiveness in the global fashion market. For this, fashion specialists at home and abroad were interviewed, focusing on their opinions on the Korean motifs outlined in existing literature studies. First, aesthetic sense and expression characteristics that have appeared in existing studies on Korean art, Korean traditional costume, and Korean fashion were explored. As a result, they were categorized into: Modesty/plainness, freewheelingness, religion/custom, and humor/joke. During this process, Korean design motifs were extracted based on the aesthetic characteristic and expression method of aesthetic sense. According to the opinions on Korean design motifs and Korean fashion design works drawn from the interviews with fashion specialists at home and abroad, Changhomun was the favorite design motif to be utilized in Korean fashion design. The Korean specialists thought that visual design motifs were important, while the overseas specialists had more interest in abstract design motifs, which embody the background and story behind the motif. Regarding the fashion design associated with the Korean design motif, all specialists at home and abroad favored the design using ceramics and wrapping cloth. Regarding the choice of fashion image, Korean specialists chose the design utilizing Hangeul as the most Korean, while the foreign specialists chose designs reflecting the design motifs of Hangeul and Hanbok for women. The Korean specialists chose relatively more Korean images, while the foreign specialists chose more eastern images or other images than Korean images.