This project will form a new network to examine the role of clothing fashions as a powerful and pervasive cultural intermediary between Britain, Japan, China and Korea. Fashion crosses and confounds geographical boundaries in a myriad of ways, and yet notions of Britishness, Chineseness and Japaneseness remain central to the dynamics of fashionable dress as cultural expression. This year, Tokyo Fashion Week hosted the first Japanese Tweed Run, a bicycling event that celebrates nostalgic notions of British eccentricity through the motif of traditional tweed. Meanwhile, in Britain, the prime-time television drama Doctor Who has drawn harsh criticism for dressing its hero in an acrylic-mix fake Harris tweed jacket manufactured in China. Fashion design often uses the 'exotic' as a reliable source of novelty and luxury, but an item of fashionable clothing can be designed in one hemisphere, manufactured in another, and retailed globally while maintaining a brand identity attached to nation. British high-street chain Marks and Spencer and the Japanese label Uniqlo have multiple stores in China. Both of these brands have also recently been joined on London's Oxford Street by Chinese store Bosideng who are set to create the first tangible presence of Chinese high street fashion in Britain. In China, the influence of Korean fashion is also increasing and threatens to displace the position of Japan as a style leader in some fashion sectors. Internet shopping and fashion blogging further calls into question the significance of national borders, while promoting highly distinct European and East Asian identities. The last decade has also seen a sea change in fashion studies. Western forms of fashion within non-western contexts are being reconsidered to produce new readings of fashion as a far less geographically contingent vehicle for individuality, cosmopolitanism, ethnicity, and global networks of money, goods and ideas. East Asian fashion is recognised as 'speaking' to British consumers as European fashion has 'spoken' to East Asia. The network that we are proposing draws on UK and internationally based academics, artists, museum curators and fashion industry professionals who will work together to produce a new understanding of transnational fashion exchange as an agent of cultural translation. In three themed workshops, the network will forge new relations between fashion academics, fashion professionals, artists and museum collection managers, in creative interdisciplinary dialogues that connect concepts of fashion, brand identity and actual fashion garments. The critical focus and network membership across the national boundaries of Britain, Japan, China and Korea will increase understanding of fashion translations from non-UK perspectives and create long-lasting knowledge exchanges at an international level, with gains for industry and commerce as well as fashion studies. The benefits will include knowledge and skills exchange across disciplinary and national boundaries to improve understanding and rejuvenate the conceptualisation and practice of fashion across the international academic community, third sector and private sector. We will further develop and disseminate new directions in fashion studies by authoring a special issue of a leading peer-reviewed journal and will develop a website that makes our activities and findings accessible to students, the fashion industry and the wider public. We will also lay the foundations for a substantial larger project. Our reference points of Britain, Japan, China and Korea will serve as starting points from which to set a future research agenda on global transnational fashion exchange.