PARIS, France - Just a few weeks ago I met Qiu Hao in Shanghai I am thrilled to announce that tonight in Paris he has been awarded the Woolmark Prize, worth €100,000.

The award is is famous for anointing both Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent in 1954 and this year it has been resurrected by Australian Wool Innovation, which recently acquired the Woolmark brand. Said Mr Craig Welsh, CEO of AWI, “We see the Woolmark Prize as an opportunity to support the future of design and at the same time, showcase to the world Australian Merino wool at its best and most innovative.”

For those of you who missed it, please check out our feature on Qiu Hao and his fellow Shanghainese designer Helen Lee, and congratulations to Qiu. Well done.

SHANGHAI, China - While most Chinese are still focused on buying into the prestige and status of international luxury brands, there are emerging local alternatives for those who want something more individual. Bubbling design and fashion scenes in and around Shanghai’s Taikang Lu and JinXian Lu offer a little bit of niche, homespun design to offset the ubiquity, even in China, of Gucci, Prada and Louis Vuitton.

In the new Shanghai, emerging fashion designers seek inspiration from home or abroad, create garments that range from the culturally literal to the conceptually commercial, and target mass and class and everything in between. All the same, they share the same business challenges as their counterparts in other established and emerging design centres, from London and New York to Mumbai and Buenos Aires.

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This month’s Monocle magazine plays "Spot the Shopper" at one of China’s cavernous new luxury malls. Have a look — there’s barely a shopper in sight. We’ve been hearing similar reports about luxury malls and stores in Russia, and the (admittedly anecdotal) fashion grapevine says that luxury stores in India are struggling as well. Add this to the economic uncertainty sweeping through the global economy and it’s enough to step back  and wonder: is this whole Asian luxury explosion overstated?

Not according to Radha Chadha, a leading expert on Asia’s luxury boom and co-author of the book The Cult of the Luxury Brand: Inside Asia’s Love Affair With Luxury. Turns out that some companies and luxury projects are just not well conceived to begin with, and these ones are likely to fail. However, other players are scoring major successes in Asia, especially those that have been present in the region for some time.

We reached Radha Chadha in her Hong Kong offices to better understand the impact of the global economic downturn on the luxury boom in China and India and to get Radha’s views on which brands are best positioned to dominate the market there.

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