Original Hu Xiaoqi Fantong Dai Laoban
Following new york and London, Shanghai Fashion Week has become the most eye-catching fashion event in the world.
Shanghai Fashion Week in 2021 has jumped to the fourth place in the global fashion week vitality index. In the past two years, Shanghai Fashion Week took the lead in breaking the shadow of the epidemic, moved to the online fashion week, and then restarted the offline fashion week for the first time, attracting Dior, Versace and other big names to come to Shanghai for catwalks.
Since its birth, Fashion Week has been scrutinized by the most critical eyes in the world, and has gradually become an important standard to measure the maturity of fashion industry and national influence. Therefore, the change of fashion week pattern can directly reflect the change of fashion influence: Paris and Milan in the first echelon have a solid position, while London, new york and Shanghai are chasing after each other in the second echelon. Tokyo, which had high hopes, has gradually lost its position as the spokesman of Asian fashion.
For decades, similar stories have been repeated in the fashion circle. After World War II, the United States and Japan successively challenged the European fashion authority and became the focus of the fashion circle.
The course of fashion is not necessarily similar, but the result is expected. A country with a growing economy will inevitably breed an independent fashion aesthetic.
Today’s China is also in the historical process of establishing the right to speak about fashion. Since the fashion enlightenment in 1980s, China fashion has gradually found its own voice in these forty years.
The most famous alternation between the old and the new in fashion history begins with the Palace of Versailles in 1973.
In the early winter of this year, the French and Americans started a war in the name of fashion in the Palace of Versailles outside Paris. Among them, the French sent a delegation of designers headed by YSL, Givenchy and Pierre Cardin to Starlight Glimmer. The American delegation includes five designers including Oscarde la Renta and Halston, and 36 models. They are singing and dancing with great momentum, but they are insignificant in the eyes of the French.
Battle of Versailles
This famous contest on the same stage attracted celebrities all over the world. Under the stage, more than 600 celebrities, including Princess Grace Kelly of Morocco, Christina Onassis, the daughter of the Greek ship king, and artist Andy arhol, were all present, waiting for a result that could rewrite the history of fashion.
In the end, "Americans conquered everything by stepping on sewing machines" [1]. Although I have been a copy cat behind France for decades, on this night in Versailles, the newer and lighter American style is like a light that cuts through the night, which makes the hierarchical French fashion circle crazy.
After this battle, the United States got the "advanced fashion pass" issued by the French, and Halston, a symbol of sexiness and freedom, also became the spokesperson of the new American fashion forces. Eurocentrism, which dominated the fashion circle for centuries, began to collapse, and the United States, without aristocratic tradition, took the lead, which opened the curtain for American style to sweep the world.
However, the battle between the old and new forces in fashion is far from over, and the war soon spread from Versailles to the other side of the ocean.
In 1979, the people of China, who were still wearing blue shirts, suffered two fashion shock waves in the Great Wall. Once a French model danced in Pierre Cardin’s rainbow-colored dress, and once Halston and 27 Americans wearing sunglasses and fashionable sportswear visited here.
When visiting China for the first time, the French and Americans came prepared. Pierre Cardin brought 220 pieces of clothing and a fashion show that landed in Beijing National Culture Palace. Halston’s journey is aimed at promoting American fashion, starting from Los Angeles and passing through Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai and Paris. A group of people are carefully arranged migratory birds, who changed more than 500 sets of clothes in 24 days [2].
Halston and his party are at the Great Wall.
At this time of China, the spring breeze of reform and opening up has just blown away the days when men, women and children wear gray, blue and green. The people’s attitude towards fashion is hungry and crazy, and any new trend of fashion can quickly detonate the whole country.
In order to buy a 14-yuan dacron embroidered shirt, the girls willingly stood in line at the gate of Wangfujing Yimin Store for several hours. In 1978, the Japanese film Chasing was released, and men in China began to learn from Gao Cangjian, wearing the same trench coat, raising their collars, and walking straight into the streets.
Two years later, the first American drama "The Man from the Bottom of the Atlantic" was launched, and mike harris, the leading actor, became the most popular carrier in China. At that time, as long as you put on bell bottoms, flowered shirts, portable tape recorders, coupled with exaggerated light-colored frog glasses, and kept the sticker on the upper left corner of the lens, you could copy authentic American fashion with one click.
Fashion trendsetters dare to adopt early adopters, but for the vast majority of China people, fashion is still a careful test of each other. At first, the frog mirror was regarded as a smuggled product, which was first popular in the south, and then brought to the north by the profiteer, and then gradually entered the formal and legal state-owned stores.
In 1984, changchun film studio released the first fashion film "Red Skirt Popular in the Street". The heroine of the model worker who worked in the cotton mill put on a red sleeveless dress and was very excited. I didn’t expect the female colleague to persuade her with a dignified face. "There is too much exposure, and it is almost the same to put on a shirt."
Red skirt is popular in the street
A year later, YSL held a 25-year retrospective exhibition of personal works in China Art Museum, which was the first exhibition of luxury brands in China, attracting many Beijingers to pay for the exhibition. The students of the Academy of Fine Arts who participated in the exhibition also opened up the pattern: "A dress is actually worth millions of dollars!" [3]
It was Beijing in the 1980s, and it was a well-deserved fashion focus. The new fashion from overseas has greatly expanded people’s imagination of beauty, but it is still unattainable. People yearn for it, but they can’t easily own it.
Until the end of 1980, a group of "ghosts" spontaneously came to the overpass opposite the south gate of Sun Yat-sen University to set up stalls to sell wool. A whirlwind of fashion from Xiangjiang began to stir the fashion rivers and lakes all over the country.
These "ghosts" would not have thought that the small stall at the entrance of Zhongda University would gather more than 20,000 merchants and more than 100,000 people in the next 20 years, and form a huge market cluster with this as the center.
Riding the east wind of "three to one supplement", the vendors who set up stalls have become an important role in linking the upstream and downstream. This business circle, collectively known as "Zhongda Cloth Market", has gradually become the largest textile fabric trading center in the world, surrounded by more than 30,000 garment factories and shops, with an annual transaction volume exceeding 200 billion yuan [4].
Zhongda cloth market has provided a steady stream of fuel for garment production, which has fed back the rise of Guangzhou garment factory. By 2010, a complete garment assembly line has been formed in the nearby Kangle village, and tens of thousands of garment factories have gathered on the land of 0.46 square kilometers [5].
Kangle village now
In 2019, Kangle Village made the front page of Guangzhou with the news of per capita dividend of 240,000 [6], but in Guangzhou’s clothing industry chain, this village in the middle and lower reaches is not the most profitable one.
200 orders, each in 5.5 yuan, shipped the next morning. The workers in the garment room earned a daily salary of 1,000 yuan by staying up late, and the bosses were not easy. The low-threshold processing business was desperately involved, and it was normal to grab orders and workers. However, the monthly rent of stalls in Guangzhou International Textile City has risen from several thousand yuan to more than 200,000 yuan, and the monthly rent of stalls with good location is even as high as millions of yuan [4].
Garment factory owners have worked hard for many years before they suddenly realized that it is in the stalls that make money, not in the workshop. Starting from Guangzhou, the people at the stalls sent thousands of goods to Hanzheng Street in Wuhan and the wholesale market of Beijing Zoo, and then exported them to the vast counties and towns in China through distributors layer by layer, earning a lot of money.
In the final analysis, the stall owner has the ability to make the whole country wear the same Guangdong style, while the garment factory is only responsible for proofing and production. The clothing industry has always been a strong rule industry. Those who have the right to speak in the upstream grasp the fashion trend, which can not only manage production upwards, but also influence consumers downwards-from the stall owner to today’s SHEIN, they all earn the same money.
The lively clothing trade is a footnote to the surge of individual economy, and a large number of myths have been born in this wealth-making movement that swept across the country from Guangzhou. There is a story in Guangzhou’s major wholesale markets that "I went in a sack in the first year and came out in a BMW at the end of the year"; Ten years later, Guangzhou’s house price exceeded 4,000 yuan/square meter, which was nearly higher than that of Shanghai and 700 yuan, while the national per capita GDP was less than 1,000 dollars in the same year.
这些先富起来的中国人，也让一批奢侈品牌看到了中国高端消费的曙光。
1989年，距离天安门仅2.5公里、位于金鱼胡同8号的北京王府饭店落成，随后，王府饭店仿着香港半岛酒店的格局，将地下1、2层改造成了精品廊。奢侈行业的全球化起步于90年代，自然不会放过中国这片潜力巨大的市场。
两年后，Zegna、LV、爱马仕、Gucci、Chanel等奢侈品牌相继入驻王府饭店，这些藏在高端酒店地下的奢侈品牌的目标消费群体先是外国游客，随后变成了手握大哥大、腰包里塞满万元现钞的中国人。
90年代的中国时尚，正处于变革的前夜。此时，海外时尚的神话牢不可破，不甘于此的中国本土时尚也在悄悄萌芽。
1993年春天，首届国字头的服装服饰博览会CHIC在北京开幕。这场由纺织工业部牵头举办的盛会承担了“既要展形、又要示魂”的历史使命，也是中国服装工业从“看花”转变为自己“绣花”的关键节点[7]。
Externally, CHIC invited Pierre Cardin, who is familiar to the people of China, and two Italian designers, valentino and Gianfranco Ferre, and they were received by the top leaders, which triggered foreign media reports. Internally, during CHIC, the "Brothers Cup" International Youth Fashion Design Competition was officially launched. Later, Wu Haiyan and Kyle, who were called the first generation designers in China, emerged.
1993 China International Fashion Fair
The opening of China International Fashion Expo announced that China fashion was finally separated from clothing production, and clothing design stepped onto the front desk. Since then, a top-down fashion independent movement has begun.
In 1996, the recruitment of a fashion circle became a sensational social news: Zheng Yonggang hired Wang Xinyuan and Zhang Zhaoda as the chief designers of Shanshan, and offered a million-dollar annual salary that made people all over the country jealous. After that, Wang Xinyuan and Zhang Zhaoda created a high-end women’s clothing brand "Fahanshi" for Shanshan, and ran two domestic fashion tours in succession, and the "Northern King and Southern Zhang" of China fashion industry was formed.
Guo Pei, a designer who became a blockbuster with the red carpet "Dragon Robe" in Cannes, started his personal brand in 1997, creating a precedent for haute couture in China.
However, the effect of these China designers singing on stage is not satisfactory: from the limelight of "China’s first design brand" to the bleak prostitution, Fa Hanshi barely survived for six years; Known as the special dress for the Spring Festival Evening, Guo Pei’s name only circulated in the upper-class social circle for more than ten years after its creation.
During this period, China’s clothing supply chain has matured, and by 1994, China was the largest clothing exporter in the world. However, China is still in the early stage of exploration, and it has neither a fashionable discourse center nor a nationwide influence.
The next ambitious project of China fashion circle was born in the autumn of 2003.
At the end of October 2003, the eyes of clothing enterprises, designers and fashion lovers all over the country focused on Binjiang Avenue in Pudong.
The first Shanghai Fashion Week opened here, and six "international famous brands", Ferragamo, LANVIN, AIGNER, Vivienne Westwood, Vivienne Tam and Paul&Shark, all appeared, winning the news "Beautiful Angel Guest Model Walks the Cat Walk" for Angel on Paul&Shark platform [8].
At that time, Sina. com made a special report on Shanghai Fashion Week, and the front page was "Passion for British Fashion" in addition to "International Brand". In the survey of netizens, the four "biggest highlights of fashion week" listed are novel clothes, sexy models, brand-name clothes and others, and the internet image of fashion week can be imagined.
Unfortunately, despite the proposal to "base itself on the local area and have an international perspective", Shanghai Fashion Week rarely saw local fashion elements in the first few years of its establishment, and even the "international perspective" was preempted by fashion magazines.
The first issue of Fashion China Fashion
In 2001, China Fashion, which was in charge of China Textile Group, embraced Hearst Group’s thigh and successfully launched Fashion China Fashion. As the predecessor of Harper’s Bazaar, this magazine did not focus on the popular female lifestyle at that time, but discussed fashion as a serious culture and art.
Sha Xiaoli, executive publisher and editor-in-chief of Bazaar of Fashion, later recalled, "Su Mang and I formed a team in ten days, and we made the first magazine introducing high fashion culture!" [9]
Although Bazaar of Fashion has become the first important window for China people to spy on the fashion industry, China people’s vivid understanding of the fashion industry can be attributed to The Devil in Prada, which was shown in 2007.
This film reminds China people of Hathaway with heavy eyebrows and big eyes, and even remembers the cautionary words of Miranda, the white-haired devil: "You think this is your own choice, which has nothing to do with the fashion industry, but it is not the case". In a few words, Miranda outlined the core chain of the fashion industry-from the runway to the store and then to the consumers.
In the century-long history of fashion industry, runway is not only the source of water, but also the supreme power center. Designers of big brands announce new fashion rules to the whole world with their fashion releases twice a year. Stripes in and plaid out, every move about the runway affects the nerves of the fashion circle.
In 2007, the devil wears Prada didn’t come, but the designer "Lafayette" of FENDI came. Between the two beacon towers in Juyongguan section, this high-profile fashion idol invited about 500 stars, guests and media from all over the world, and they climbed the steep Great Wall on foot in their evening dresses [10]. In the cold wind of October, 88 models wore spring and summer clothes and high heels nearly 20 cm high, and walked carefully every step.
FENDI 2007 Great Wall Show
With the initiative of big brands and the help of fashion media that guide social aesthetics, China’s fashion began to share the same frequency with the world.
However, it is not these high-ranking media and brands that really promote the national fashion wave. Only when fashion goes down the catwalk and becomes a culture deeply rooted in the masses can it have the super influence of mass communication. Koreans who know this well have launched the vast cultural output first.
After the Millennium, Korean dramas such as "Winter Love Song" and "Romantic Room Full" became popular, and "Korean Wave" became a phenomenal vocabulary popular all over Asia. This kind of modern drama also provides an excellent model for the export of goods, and the consumption of the hero and heroine is magnified under the lens, triggering a frenzy of imitation by the whole people.
As a result, BAE Yong-jun and Song Hye Kyo became the traffic passwords for selling goods. Under this wave, Ma Hong from Chaoshan, who worked in Guangzhou clothing wholesale market for more than ten years, seized the opportunity and started a brand called "Trend Front".
Different from the peers who started as foundries, Trend Frontline did not set up factories, but instead focused on marketing and supply chain. It invited Song Hye Kyo and Nicholas Tse to endorse, used Korean logo and disguised as a Korean brand. Aiming at the sinking market where big names have not been touched, the front line of the trend has blossomed everywhere in the form of franchise stores. At its peak, it opened more than 2,000 stores in 30 provinces across the country, and it took only five years to send its parent company "Souyute" to A shares.
The clothing processing industry that flourished in the 1990s and the years of enlightenment of the fashion industry provided realistic soil for the barbaric growth of the "trend front". The trend information in the Internet era is readily available. Drawing on the trend elements from the Dongdaemun, the center of the Korean Wave, and then piecing together their own clothes, it has gradually evolved into the survival skills of some China fashion brands in the early stage of development. Unconsciously, the fashion aesthetics of a generation of young people in China have also been changed.
At the same time that the same paragraph in Dongdaemun was popular all over the network, the Chinese Internet entered the blog era, and a pair of twin sisters from Chongqing rushed out of the circle.
viviandan& miumiu
This pair of sisters, named "Bitter Pepper", quickly accumulated tens of millions of fans by posting on forums and blogs, and the average daily page views of their blogs exceeded 200,000. By 2008, Taobao was full of choking peppers. Two years later, choke pepper appeared in the July issue of Vogue Clothing and Beauty, and then editor-in-chief Zhang Yu praised them as IT girl in China. "Ordinary girls have excavated their own fashion style" [11].
At this time, people can’t help but exclaim, "Taobao has actually counterattacked the fashion circle!"
Fashion circles and Taobao did have a tense period.
Fashion has always been top-down. Early fashion was born among the court nobles, and it was further spread after the appearance of fashion magazines in the 19th century. High fashion is famous for its complicated crafts and historical traditions, and regards popularization as its natural enemy. Therefore, France, as the origin of fashion, has stood for hundreds of years in the global fashion circle, and even rich and powerful American designers want to win fame in the fashion circle, they can’t avoid France.
However, the rise of the Internet is a process of gradually disintegrating the traditional discourse system and decentralizing it. Behind "everyone can be famous for 15 minutes" is the possibility of establishing a personal brand. The popularity of choking peppers and the Taobao effect they created are enough to make the fashion circle cold.
At the same time, the prosperity of e-commerce has created low-threshold business opportunities for a large number of small and medium-sized entrepreneurs. For the fashion industry, this means that more creativity and design can be seen, and new fashion forces are taking a different approach and rising online.
Vogue Clothing and Beauty was first published in 2005, with a circulation of only 300,000 copies. In that year, Taobao just defeated eBay in China, with 13.9 million registered users and more than 100,000 stores [12]. Fifteen years later, the number of Taobao users reached 800 million, and the number of stores exceeded 9.5 million.
In the fifteen years of rapid development, the scepter of China fashion has been quietly handed over with the continuous evolution of platforms such as Taobao.
During the period of choking hot pepper, Taobao was still in the primary stage of e-commerce market education, and merchants and consumers explored each other on Taobao. Therefore, the verified explosions are the keys that merchants are competing to chase.
As the audience continues to gather online, diversified needs are gradually emerging, and the trend of selling explosions is gradually becoming a thing of the past.
Especially when a new generation of young consumers rise, they are no longer satisfied with repetitive and mediocre designs, but pursue personalized goods, and fashion consumption begins to further differentiate-sweet, sexy, dark, casual and high-grade, and each style points to thousands of more specific choices.
More and more businesses with a keen sense of smell have captured this trend. In the previous clothing industry, personalized design style seems to exist only in the unattainable fashion world. After all, the cultivation of designers and small-batch orders mean higher costs, which means that brands need to deliberately create a sense of atmosphere and achieve balance of payments through high premiums.
Designers need to be seen and find their own small audience. The traditional fashion industry chain can’t support all this.
A new model is coming out.
In 2010, Liu Min, who graduated from london college of fashion, quit his job in Ports and started selling original designs in Taobao. Her brand Ms MIN is an improvement of traditional Chinese style in style, focusing on tailoring and design. The price is more than 1,000 yuan, and winter down jackets and coats can be sold for 10,000 yuan.
Ms MIN
Liu Min does not think that e-commerce will damage the brand aesthetic and added value, but thinks it is a more effective way to talk with consumers [14]. With the word of mouth of Taobao, Ms MIN also started to go offline, holding exhibitions, stationed in Lane Crawford, and even opened stores in shanghai centre, adjacent to Miu Miu and Salvatore Ferragamo.
Liu Min, the manager of Babyghost, Huang Quietly, and Shangguan Zhe, a men’s wear designer, all gained hundreds of thousands of loyal fans because of Taobao. On the other hand, brands founded in Taobao, such as Anno Mundi and Guliang Jiji, appeared on the stage of Shanghai Fashion Week, and "Amoy Brand" began to win applause from the fashion world.
This means that Taobao is no longer just a low-threshold business platform, but also a fashion platform integrating design and sales. A prosperous online market will inevitably attract more and more designers to settle in. The data shows that there are more than 30,000 stores under the original design certification of iFashion of Taobao, just like a huge fashion buyer mall.
China market sells China designs, and now it’s at its best. The fundamental reason is that fashion is determined by market, productivity and discourse power, and they are all indispensable.
In China, the formation of the three elements of fashion has a clear order: in the 1980s, overseas fashion just enlightened a generation of China people, and the huge demand for fashion from the huge consumer population could not be met. Subsequently, with the rise of China’s garment processing industry, the fashion industry has the elements of productivity, but in the mixed market environment, it has not yet formed an independent fashion aesthetic.
Nowadays, under the shaping of the Internet platform, thousands of fashion ideas in Qian Qian have begun to flourish in China. People choose fashion independently and regard it as a personalized expression.
The formation of the right to speak in fashion has never happened overnight. From the historical experience, every time the national power rises, it is a remolding of the right to speak in fashion-Japan flourished in the fashion circle in the 1980s, and the "Big Three" of Issey Miyake, yohji yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo brought Japan into the spotlight.
However, Japanese fashion is gradually becoming boring: Uniqlo, the basic model of low price, is in the upper position, without the next Issey Miyake, Tokyo Fashion Week will not be a climate, and ZOZOTOWN, a local fashion e-commerce, will also sell herself miserably. Without abundant productive resources and low-threshold entrepreneurial environment, Japan, which has won fashion idols, has lost the source of mass fashion development in the Internet age.
On the contrary, China, who took advantage of the Internet to overtake in corners, quietly came to a new stage of fashion.
Not LV, nor ZARA, where will the future of China fashion be?
Luxury goods need historical stories and craft inheritance. Rather than consuming products, it is better to say that it is a filter for consuming this brand. Fast fashion is changing with each passing day, and the popularity of brands is decreasing marginally with the spread of brands, and it can’t keep up with the pace of consumers’ upgrading.
The younger generation votes with purchasing power and chooses clothes to express themselves, instead of becoming a vassal of the brand. The subdivided long tail demand can also make a big market. With the help of the Internet, "Sankeng" has become a tens of billions of clothing categories.
Pluralism, parity and individuality are becoming the new trend of China fashion.
Consumers in China don’t have to follow anyone or prove to anyone what fashion is. Just as the development of fashion has always been a process of breaking and rebuilding-Chanel broke the black prejudice and achieved an elegant little black dress; Jeans break the rigid uniform and reshape the energetic image.
This time, it is the millions of China consumers in Qian Qian who have regained the right of self-choice in a vast number of options, breaking the top-down stereotype in fashion. This is a victory for the people of China.
[1] WhatWas The Battle of Versailles Fashion Show? WWD
[2] TheHalstonettes,fitnyc
[3] Experience the first fashion exhibition in China in 1980s, Thousand Plateau-London Cultural Salon.
[4] Taking advantage of the trough, the fabric industry stepped up "make up lessons" and innovation, the first financial
[5] Twenty years of running a factory, lining and face of Guangzhou garment factory owner, Southern Weekend.
[6] Being richer than hunting for virtue, the per capita dividend is 240,000/year! Guangzhou "Hubei Village" has been opened, which is a matter of fact.
[7] China International Clothing Expo was founded, reference network.
[8] 2003 Shanghai Fashion Week beautiful Angel guest model catwalk, Sohu Entertainment.
[9] "Bazaar of Fashion" records China fashion for 30 years, Sohu fashion.
[10] From the Fendi Great Wall Show 12 years ago, what changes have taken place in the "China catwalk plan" of luxury goods? Interface news
[11] "choke hot pepper" boarded the "VOGUE" xinhuanet.
[12] Taobao announced the fourth quarter results with a total transaction volume of 3.03 billion, Sina
[13] How to make a successful designer brand from Taobao? MsMin did these things right, Curiosity Daily.
Original title: "Who is rewriting China fashion"
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