Following fashion in Taiwan

Most younger Taiwanese fashionistas won't admit it but the local fashion trends are more copied fads than anything indigenously original.

In fact one would be challenged to find anything truly "Taiwanese" on this tiny isle, where copycatting and pirating of foreign intellectual property is as natural as apple pie a la mode.

The younger Taiwanese who are fashion conscious generally copy and adopt whatever foreign fads are swept across mass media as TV and the Internet, including Korean, Japanese, American fashions over the decades.

The well-heeled Taiwanese who care about fashion are also dictated by whatever trends are offered at the designer boutiques, whose name brand retailers are found in the department stores and standalone  outlets. In short, there is excessive redundancy of designer boutiques and products in the major cities of Taiwan. Sadly those who can afford designer fashions do so mostly for ego-tripping and status symbols and one-upmanship, sometimes to result in emperor-without-clothes than doing justice to the talented designers at Chanel, Prada, LV, Hermes, Bottega Veneta, Giorgio Armani, Tory Burch etc.

There is a tiny niche in the local fashion scene with a few Taiwanese couturiers promoting their own brands and styles with limited success.

And Taiwan, like most nations with a small proportion of consumers with genuine interest in and capacity for fashion as artistic expression, unfortunately does not rate globally as a place to see and to be seen in cool threads.

The above notwithstanding, there is an amusing clutch of older Taiwanese women and men who helplessly display their awkward, gauche and questionable aesthetics as they wear clothes with clashing colors, in styles that desperately cling to days of yore.