What does it mean to be a distinctly premium Chinese brand?

For the past 25 years, I’ve been at the center of luxury in China, working closely with leaders of European and American brands to enter, navigate, and grow in Asia. The question that kept coming up wasn't really “How do we become more international?” It was “What do we refuse to change?” How does an Italian brand stay Italian when it’s selling in Shanghai? How does a French house adapt without turning into something else? The ones that worked rarely became less themselves. They usually just got clearer about the parts they would never touch. Why premium Chinese brands now face the opposite globalization problem Premium Chinese brands are now facing the same problem, only the other way round. For a long time, the industry kept asking whether Chinese brands could compete globally. That question feels old. The more interesting one is simpler and harder: what does it actually mean to build a premium brand that is unmistakably Chinese? I found myself thinking about this again after reading about the Centennial Grand Fashion Gala that the China Institute in America will hold at The Pierre in New York on September 8. Vera Wang and Guo Pei (郭培) are being honored, with Lucy Liu appearing as a special guest. On the surface it reads like another glossy cultural evening. What stayed with me was the institution itself. The institute, founded in New York in 1926, has been doing quiet, unglamorous work between China and the US for a century. Since becoming co-chair of its board of trustees in 2018, Yue-Sai Kan (靳羽西) has made fashion a more prominent part of that work. The September gala is the latest public face of something that has been building for decades. It reminded me of a bias I see all the time: we talk endlessly about brands and almost never about the institutions that give those brands any real meaning. Brands create commercial value. Institutions create cultural legitimacy. Most companies only pay attention to the first. I’ve sat through more meetings than I can count where leadership teams spent hours on product, pricing, distribution, and localization, and almost no time on the museums, schools, critics, craft networks, and publications that actually shape how a brand is understood. Europe’s great houses didn’t appear out of nowhere. They grew inside a thick web of institutions that taught people what craftsmanship and heritage were supposed to look and feel like. That web became a real competitive advantage. China is starting to build its own version. Most brand strategies still underestimate how much that matters. Guo Pei, haute couture, and the machinery that confers legitimacy Guo Pei is a useful example. Calling her “China’s answer” to a European couture house gets it backwards. Her work doesn’t start with European luxury and then add Chinese motifs. It starts with Chinese history, symbolism, and craft. You don’t have to like the aesthetic. The point is that it insists on being read on its own terms. That insistence did not keep her out of Paris. The Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode invited her in, and she presented ten consecutive collections on the official Haute Couture Week calendar between 2015 and 2020. She has kept a Paris business since, and showed in the city again in January. Read one way, that looks like a contradiction. Read another way, it is the argument itself. She went to the institution that could confer the legitimacy she wanted and gave up nothing on the way in. The seat validated the work; it did not author it. She had that option because Paris spent a century building the machinery to confer it. China is only starting on its own. Vera Wang's licensing empire and what it means to own a brand's core Vera Wang took a different path. She built one of America’s defining fashion brands, and her Chinese heritage, while part of her personal story, was never the organizing idea of it. What has happened since is worth sitting with. WHP Global bought the Vera Wang intellectual property outright, closing in January 2025, with Wang staying on as founder, chief creative officer and a shareholder. The name now travels through licensees across fine jewelry, tuxedos, fragrance, tabletop, bedding, eyewear, wine and apparel, and Vera Wang Bride returns to David’s Bridal this year with collections rolling out nationwide. That is a successful business by any measure. It is also a brand whose core now sits in more hands than one. Guo Pei’s work points somewhere else: Chinese culture itself can be the source of luxury, not a decorative layer added on top. For years, the unspoken assumption was that “going global” meant Chinese brands had to become less Chinese. I think that was a bad trade from the beginning. Looking back, we probably spent too many years asking Chinese companies how to look more international and not enough time asking what should stay non-negotiable. What a distinctly Chinese brand actually means beyond dragons and calligraphy Being distinctly Chinese may have almost nothing to do with dragons, calligraphy, or imperial colors. It might be a particular relationship to time, a philosophy of making, a way of treating the customer, or a specific idea of beauty that doesn't announce itself as Chinese at all. The useful question isn’t, “How do we make this look more Chinese?” It’s “What could this brand believe, make, or do that could only have come from China?” Guo Pei's answer will not be the same as Yangwang’s (仰望). It shouldn’t be. What matters is whether that point of view still creates value in Shanghai, Paris, Dubai, or New York without getting watered down along the way. No strong premium brand has become stronger by becoming less itself. I’ve sat in rooms where people wanted to make an Italian brand feel more Chinese or an American brand feel more local. More often than not I found myself arguing the opposite. The brands that traveled furthest were the ones that became stricter about protecting the core, not softer. Some executives will say consumers just buy the best product, full stop. In a lot of categories that's true. Premium has never worked that way. When someone chooses Hermès, they are buying exceptional leather, yes. They are also buying a worldview. The product is only one expression of it. Cultures travel next: the future of luxury brand strategy in China My earlier work focused on helping European and American brands stay European and American while they expanded into Asia. The next chapter looks different: helping Chinese premium brands stay Chinese while they expand everywhere else. They don’t need to become the next French houses. They need to become the first great Chinese ones — the ones that add something to the conversation that could only have come from China. One gala won’t change much. One designer won't either. But the conversation itself is shifting. For a long time, globalization asked brands to travel. The next phase will ask cultures to travel. The brands that manage it will be the ones that take their identity with them. Angelito Tan is co-founder and a board director of RTG Capital, a Singapore-based investment firm backing premium consumer brands in Asia. He co-founded RTG Consulting Group in 2012 and was its chief executive until 2025. He writes about the forces shaping how Chinese and Asian premium brands are redefining global markets.

What does it mean to be a distinctly premium Chinese brand?

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What does it mean to be a distinctly premium Chinese brand?

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag