East Asian Art Collectors Are Fashion’s New Darlings

How brands are tapping in

Luxury houses are recognizing this consumer class as a strategic priority. In May, Zegna became global sponsor of the Art Basel fairs, including its Hong Kong outpost, to position the brand as a constant fixture. “East Asian clients value relationships built over time — a clienteling model based on trust, memory and continuity,” says Edoardo Zegna, the brand’s chief marketing officer. “When they travel between Hong Kong, Seoul [for Frieze] or Basel for art fairs and enter one of our spaces, they find a familiar sensibility.”

Art Basel chief artistic officer Vincenzo de Bellis sees East Asian collectors — from both the fashion and creative industries — as an essential part of the contemporary art ecosystem. “Their engagement not only supports artists and galleries, but also drives new forms of cultural expression and cross-disciplinary collaboration,” de Bellis says.

To this point, attendees of Art Basel Paris 2025 will have duly noted the “A-Poc Able Issey Miyake” exhibition running as a satellite event during the fair in October. It showcased a collaboration with Japanese artist Eugene Kangawa, featuring artworks made from paper and cloth. “The response exceeded our expectations,” says Yoshiyuki Miyamae, the designer behind the Issey Miyake sub-brand. “We do not set any special strategies in advance for the East Asian art community. That said, the fact remains that our brand’s practices and attitudes have resonated with many people, and as a result, members of the East Asian art community have been responding to what we do. In East Asia, in particular, there is a deep understanding of craft and textiles, and these values are rooted culturally both in art and in daily life.”

This appreciation for craft and quality beyond traditional branding or logos has crept into the art and fashion spaces over time. According to Ida Palombella, global fashion and luxury co-lead at Deloitte, many East Asian luxury consumers — after a rapid wealth spurt — have moved beyond more basic wealth accumulation into a phase where investment in art, architecture and philanthropy is a means of signaling taste, education and legacy. “To appeal to art-engaged East Asian luxury consumers, fashion and luxury brands need to present themselves less as fashion labels and more as cultural actors,” she says.

Xu, for example, favors more unconventional brands over heritage maisons. She says it’s due to her “belief in experimentation, cross-disciplinary thinking and aesthetic identities that extend beyond the garments themselves” — from Comme des Garçons (“for its intellectual rigor, structural experimentation and refusal to repeat established language”) to JW Anderson (“for the way he blends craft, image-making and cultural commentary with ease”).

Building trust

Art collectors travel frequently between art and fashion events (often by private jet) and have little time to peruse rail upon rail of clothing. So curation — in fashion as in art — is the MO. Lucrezia Seu, founder of Plush Consulting, a boutique brand strategy and marketing agency based in Shanghai, puts it simply: “Their lives are integrated ecosystems where international art fairs, private museum dinners and luxury acquisitions are interconnected facets of a single, rarefied lifestyle. Within this context, deep, trust-based relationships are paramount, making transactional interactions ineffective.”

Cherry Cheng, a Chinese art collector and founder of the Liberty-stocked perfume brand Jouissance, is a valued council member of South London art foundation Studio Voltaire — a frequent collaborator of the Loewe Foundation — and shops for fashion using a “few trusted advisors [personal shoppers from brands] who understand [her] tastes”. Cheng used to try to shop everything herself, but the sheer quantity of events — as a keen attendee of biennales and art fairs — made this difficult. “Fashion is part of how I move through these spaces,” she says. “It’s both a mode of self-expression and a tool for building relationships within the art world.”