Taiwan in Italy: Cultural Mediation, Validation and Self-Actualization in the Global Fashion System

This article interrogates the strategic engagement of Taiwanese designers with the Italian fashion system, framing Italy as a site of cultural validation, professional legitimacy, and access to the global creative economy. Drawing on twelve narrative interviews and multi-sited ethnography, the study argues that Taiwanese designers in Italy mediate between local histories and global industries, Taiwan’s pluralistic cultural resources and European universalizing aesthetics, and precarious labor and aspirations for self-actualisation. Unlike Mainland Chinese designers who foreground heritage-based branding, Taiwanese creative practitioners navigate ambivalent strategies that alternately embrace or distance themselves from Indigenous and artistic movements. Positioned as fashion mediators, they translate cultural and industrial practices across contexts, while confronting structural asymmetries of East–West legitimacy. The study concludes with a conceptual triad—mediation, validation, and self-actualisation—to theorize validation as a multidirectional negotiation shaped by small-nation cultural strategies, Western dominance, geopolitical positioning, institutional structures, and individual creative agency.