How UK streetwear brand Boy London beat China’s copycats and is finally booming in the country
- Boy London saw its rise in the days of UK punk and counted among its fans people like Andy Warhol and Boy George
- Having finally resolved its IP issues in China, the brand wants to grow in the country and Asia by appealing to more women and younger shoppers
More than four decades after it first emerged from the depths of the UK punk scene, Boy London is witnessing a rebirth.
This time, though, the brand – sported in years past by people including Boy George, Andy Warhol and Sid Vicious – is not showing up in underground music venues. Instead, it is becoming a fixture in China’s trendiest cafes and shopping malls where floods of cosmopolitan, streetwear-obsessed youth have picked it up.
The story of how Boy London arrived there from its start on King’s Road in 1976 is one that involves the rapid rise of streetwear and Japanese influence, plus a mix of hard work, social media and the stars aligning.
But its growth also underlines the ongoing complications with intellectual property rights that fashion brands face when expanding to China. For a long time before January last year, the Boy London brand that seemed to dominate the wardrobes of Chinese hypebeasts wasn’t even the real Boy London. And neither were the hundreds of other Boy London copycats.
Peter Caplowe, co-founder of retail consultancy firm Entrepot Asia, runs two Boy London stores in Macau casinos. He says he first discovered the brand’s copycat problem when he started working with Joseph Woo, CEO of the real Boy London, at a trade show during Shanghai Fashion Week in 2015.
