The Recent dip in global luxury brand sales in china could partly be due to overseas study.

The cool young Chinese “fashionistas” in the know are moving from super-luxury global brands to quintessentially British labels, including anything from high-street basics from Top Shop to Saville Row tailoring. They have become experts in taking classic Englishness and making it their own, playing croquet and eating finger sandwiches in garden clubs in three-piece suits and dressed as dandies.

The early Chinese boom originally lead to a class of nouveau rich with an ostentatious style of dressing now known as “tu hao” translated as local tyrant, or, wealthy landlord. But today English is the lingua franca of the travelled and moneyed who send their children for overseas study (triggering a radical increase of Chinese students in British schools) who, then, on their return to China, become the new trendsetters augmenting the British invasion already infiltrating China through the likes of Downton Abbey and pirated channels and Weibo (a Chinese version of Twitter) importing British pop-culture entertainment. Super-luxury global fashion labels would be wise to add elbow patches and bow ties to their collections.

Reference
-Style, “English Rules”, 13 April, 2014