Love local: Fast and slow culture are merging in Asia

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Culture hits hard everywhere, but the impact and pace of change across Asia is particularly compelling. Ideas, concepts and innovations are spreading with greater alacrity than elsewhere. Once there was concern about ‘Americanisation’ in the region – that notion now sounds quaint.

The east profoundly influences the west in what is becoming an established trajectory. Brands are facing up to the reality that everything from fitness goals to drinking occasions, and from the meaning of wealth to how purpose is defined, plays out differently. Western brands have long struggled to understand the influence of tradition across Asian cultures. Throw in the intensification of emergent ‘fast culture’ factors and the challenge is significant.

While there is much to be excited about for younger generations across Asia, it does generate some cultural tension. We explored a cognitive dissonance: the desire to be citizens of the world, globally plugged in, versus the innate sense of place, connection and pride in localism.
Expressions of ‘fast culture’ (think food and fashion) are drawing from their ‘slow culture’ roots (think history and tradition). Driving this is a fear of a rising global monoculture: from fusion foods bearing no resemblance to their inspiration to global home aesthetics getting more identikit. 

Younger audiences are pushing back from monoculture; we’re seeing hybridising of old and new, local and foreign. From this comes a fresh way to reflect identity, paving the way for something more personally defined, challenging stereotypes and Western hegemony. 

Unsurprisingly, in many ways it started in South Korea, with the explosion of the ‘Korean Wave’ (also known as hallyu), their philosophy of ‘ppalli ppalli’ – meaning ‘fast fast’ – bringing a sense of immediacy to new ideas and how they’re communicated. But it doesn’t stop with South Korea.

We combined trends analysis and collaboration with members of Kin, Crowd DNA’s network of creators and connectors across Asia, to explore how the local love theme is playing out more broadly. They articulated what emerged from this exploration as three shifts.

Shift #1: The rise ofremix culture

In a globalised world, Asian brands are increasingly blending tradition and modernity to reimagine local identity, while still honouring it and appealing to the global mass market.

Chinese brands best epitomise this by redefining their local image on the global stage. If ‘made in China’ has negative connotations, the new refrain is ‘made by China’ and ‘China chic’, showcasing local aesthetics as a competitive advantage and Chinese youth’s pride at what is distinguishable from global norms.

Chinese streetwear is a great example of this. Sankuanz, for example, has been credited by local magazine mRaadii as combining “high-fashion credentials that still feel in touch with the ever evolving Chinese underground”. 

The reverse is happening on the global stage, too, with Marvel’s cinematic universe departing from its anglicised roots to integrate themes, narratives and identities from across Asia (hello Shang Chi, the first Asian superhero from Marvel, and Pakistani Muslim teen superheroine Ms Marvel).

Shift #2: Severing stereotypes

Cultural narratives are moving beyond symbolic tropes and stereotypes, making them less rigid and purist. Culture is not binary; it isn’t about choosing between fully conforming to the status quo or breaking it. Increasingly, Asian youth are creating narratives that are more fluid, experimental, and that truly reflect their journey of invention.

Take Singapore. Much of its approach to diversity is loaded with principles of pragmatism and ethnic difference; its multiculturalism the result of carefully crafted communication around equal representation. But there is now a reassessment of cultural identity, pushing against manufactured narratives, with grassroots communities practising intersectional experimentation, rather than conforming to a given definition of ‘authenticity’.

Commercially, Singaporean menswear brand Duxton does this nicely; its varied approach to design is attributed to its diverse team from across the globe who have come to call Singapore home.

Shift #3: Cultural co-creation

No longer the passive audiences they might once have been stereotypically assumed to be, young Asians are becoming active creators and curators. This is about shifting the right to authorship and democratising access to production via digital platforms. Asian youth are using this to their advantage, empowered in a borderless space where they can easily connect with each other, form communities and inspire.

The rise of young Asian influencers is notable. With Asia-Pacific accounting for nearly 53% of global social media users, their power is significant and the push for credibility intense. Tokyo’s YouTube and TikTok content producer Cyber Bunny produces uplifting segments to teach adults and kids about Japanese language; music content creator Alffy Rev combines folk and patriotic songs with digital tech.

Meanwhile, at this year’s New York Fashion Week, the Asia Fashion Collective incubation project spotlighted emerging designers of Asian descent– WooLeeX, Sung Ju, DOKKA vivid, Glenda Garcia, Yuuna Ichikawa, and Cocotono.

Where do brands come in? They’d better come in carefully and empathetically, or probably best not to come in at all. There is an opportunity to celebrate the blending of tradition and modernity and create new ways for local audiences to explore and experiment.

It’s about advocacy over appropriation, championing local voices and communities, not mimicking their culture. While this may sound obvious, brands still struggle to do it. Ultimately, it’s about reversing the flow – challenging the traditional one-way exchange of the same stories being told by the same people.

By Andy Crysell, El Pigram, Ariel Malik, Caranissa Djatmiko and Myrahans Lafrelle at Crowd DNA.

This article was first published in the January 2023 issue of Impact.