Cultural Reinvention: Design Marketing for Cultural Textile Products

Cultural products reflect a living culture and evolve despite being based on traditional forms and know-how. Also referred to as traditional cultural expression or expressions of folklore, cultural products derive from culture - the distinctive material, intellectuals, spiritual and emotional features that characterize a society or social group [1]. As cultural products can represent their own society and social group they can also fall into the category of cultural icons. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a cultural icon as ?a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol, especially of a culture or a movement; a person or an institution considered worthy of admiration or respect? More generally, cultural icons are exemplary symbols that people accept as a shorthand to represent important ideas [3]. For successful cultural products, an effective cultural strategy creates a storied product, that is, a product that has distinctive features through which customers experience identity myths [3]. Identity myths succeed when the product performs the right story, and is executed with an affective aesthetic. Fundamentally, the term ?cultural products? consists of culture and product. Culture means a symbol of a particular time and society for the meanings of culture [2, 4]. Consequently, cultural products can be thought of as artifacts produced by and for a specific cultural group. However, commercial needs and desires may and often do mean that although the form and style of the artifact may remain they might be produced by and further other cultural groupings. This working paper builds on an understanding of the term cultural reinvention through the historical and modern consideration of tartan as a case study. It the moves on to a taxonomy of traditional and cultural Korean textiles and identifieidentifies possible strategies for the cultural and commercial reinvention of certain of these textiles.