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China represents around 20% of the world's population, and her economy is still performing well under economic crisis. Historical events have shaped different parts of China with different economic developments and cultural encounters. The most prominent difference is between Hong Kong and the Mainland. This chapter would like to examine the development and issues of fashion retailing in China. For better understanding, this chapter starts with a brief discussion on apparel industry development and fashion culture in Hong Kong and the Mainland, follows by historical development and then presents systems of fashion retailing in both Hong Kong and the Mainland. Desktop research and exploratory research techniques were employed. Stores of international fashion luxury brands in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing were visited. Comparison of branding issues, particularly for luxury market in Hong Kong and the Mainland are discussed, so are future directions of fashion retailing in these places.

Online retailing is continuing to grow at a time with many fashion brands are closing retail stores. Social media is now an essential component within the purchase journey of a fashion consumer. As social media networks continue to develop transactional capabilities, this has giving rise to the expansion of social shopping. Fashion brands need to consider how best to optimise social shopping opportunities as an extension of the retail shopping experience. Reviewing developments within retailing, a conceptual model of social shopping is proposed, which places mobile technologies as central to the social shopping experience both on social media and in store.

We examine the work undertaken by salespersons in the menswear department of a well-known department store in New York City that sells specialized “luxury” clothing by using the theoretical perspective developed by Kenneth Burke, the philosopher of language and communication. He has argued that the most comprehensive way to describe human conduct is to examine what was done, what attitude did it manifest, where was it done, who did it, and how was it done. Burke summarized these questions as act, attitude, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. With these terms comprising a “hexad,” a great deal of complexity can be captured within an organizational context. Indeed, Burke refers to these terms as “the grammar of motives” – that is, the motives of human conduct (1969a, 1968). In the carefully staged menswear environment we find salesmen who negotiate the goals and purposes of the store as well as their individual motives through implicitly defined sequences of acts on the selling floor.