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When a Hong Kong teenager went to study fashion in New York – and came back to criticise the Chinese city’s lack of individuality

  • When 19-year-old Philip Au-yeung won a scholarship to study fashion in New York, the Hongkonger said he acquired his appreciation for fashion from his mother
  • Upon his return to the city after the two-year course, he said that ‘Hongkong fashions still lack individuality’ and that New Yorkers took this ‘to extremes’

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Philip Au-young won the Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce’s fashion design competition in 1969, and took up a two-year scholarship at the New York Institute of Fashion Design and Technology.

“A $20,000 scholarship to study fashion in New York is the prize in a contest proposed by the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce to the Ready-to-wear Fashion Festival Committee,” reported the South China Morning Post on December 12, 1968.

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“Mr J.B. Kite, Chamber Secretary and a Festival Committee member, said the competition would be open to all residents. The winner of the contest would receive a two-year course in fashion design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.

“The proposed scholarship entailed one ‘condition’ – that the winner undertake after the two-year study to return to the Colony and accept a three-year salaried contract to work in a Hongkong design institution.”

On March 3, 1969, the Post reported that Philip Au-yeung, “the 19-year-old winner of the Chamber of Commerce’s design scholarship, has been designing clothes since he was seven years old.

Philip Au-yeung was the 19-year-old winner of the Chamber of Commerce’s design scholarship.
Philip Au-yeung was the 19-year-old winner of the Chamber of Commerce’s design scholarship.

“He acquired his appreciation for fashion from his mother, whom he describes as one of the best dressed women in Hongkong.

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