| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 科技管理研究所 === 98 === Multiculturalism has becoming a widely accepted norm in today`s society and thus increases the need of self expression through clothing. The rising of entrepreneurship also encourages more and more young and creative people to get involved in the clothing industry in Taiwan. As a result, soon after the introduction of “trendy brand（潮流品牌）”from Japan and Hong Kong, a wave of “trend” catches on in Taiwan.
However, academic researches on how trendy brands are being operated（based on the subculture and lifestyle）are still rare. Therefore, this study applies concept of “circuit of culture” brought up by Paul de Gay（1997）as the research framework. By employing qualitative research methods of in-depth interviewing, secondary date analysis and case writing, this study attempts to explain how the identification of some subcultures and lifestyles play important roles in fusing culture into artifacts through five items（production, consumption, regulation, representation, and identification）in the circuit of culture. Consequently, brand owners can enforce consumers’ identification with their trendy brands. Two cases investigated in this study are（1）Japanese “Godfather of Ura-hara trend”－Hiroshi Fujiwara and （2）famous Taiwan trendy brand－Pizza cut five （brand director【品牌主理人】: Issa & Abee）.
The study indicates that clothing industry’s “trendy brands” are promoted by the flourishing subculture, lifestyle and symbol consuming society. The rise of value co-creation and creativity economy also help trendy brands to cooperate with enterprises in other industries. Moreover, though the way street fashion affects consumers is the same as mainstream fashion, the boundary between producers, consumers, and culture intermediaries in street fashion is breaking down.
Street fashion brand directors, as cultural intermediaries, utilize their abilities of transforming or manipulating symbols to improve consumer’s brand identification. By analyzing cases of Hiroshi Fujiwara and Pizza cut five, this study concludes that both trendy brands are popularized according to the sequence of identification－representation－production－consumption－regulation－representation, and the brand cultures are nourished by their local “terroir.”
Similarly, both cases gained fame and fortune from a brand based on single subculture which subsequently evolved into various subcultures and fused with other subculture. Besides, while the business scopes of both cases gets wider, their organization boundaries downsize in order to reserve the core competency－ability of design. The difference between two cases is that Hiroshi Fujiwara manages his brands by suspending-proceeding method and operates several brands at the same time while Pizza Cut Five creates multi-theme series under one brand.
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