To say I need some persuasion to look at “fashion” except as a symptom of diseases, would be an understatement. China Fashion Week 2010, however, is an exception.
China is now proving it can design, as well as make, fashion, and do it with good production models.
So-called “high” fashion is really a matter of complexity, pretension, and markets, forming a sort of conceptual shanty town of transient excess.
What the Chinese have done with
China Fashion Week 2010 is to take the complexity, and turn it into something workable. The Chinese have used exceptionally good, cost-effective piece work and cloth production methods to achieve extremely ornate designs.
That, not coincidentally, was Yves St. Laurent’s stock in trade, and the Chinese have begun to take a few further steps from his concepts. (Unlike just about everybody else in the rag trade for the last few decades.) Although China Fashion Week 2010 has a few positively garish moments, the underlying theme is very highly competent design values. Cuts, weaves, and other fundamentals are done with a truly critical, practical, zeal.
The multi-colored tights in some of the pictures are a case in point about cost-effective design. Chinese production works on the toughest margins on Earth. Those tights, produced anywhere, would cost a lot. Done with the right production methods, they’re high value retail products at extremely low cost. The layers on the dresses are all machine or in one case hand cuts, a little simple, but you can see what can be done with them.
The real key to prices in fashion is cost efficiency, and whether the sweat shop guys like it or not, these fashions are the first indicators that they’re on the way out. Sweat shops simply can’t produce this stuff. This is industrial grade fashion, mass market, and the quality is excellent.
Materials haven’t exactly been overlooked, either. There’s a huge range of materials, from silk to synthetics. The same observations apply, in that there’s apparently no limit to cuts and forms. Some of the color palettes are also major achievements, creating a spectrum which is quite new in many cases.
The “young fashions” motifs are commendably wince-worthy for adults, guaranteed to drive parents up several walls, and therefore highly marketable.
Designs, like the Walking Dali Clocks effect, are ambitious, and if “costume” is the first impression, the second is that some actual great talent is working on creating these things. There’s even a pair of heels that look like skates, but much more solid.
Paris now has a real competitor. So does the rest of the global fashion industry, in terms of economic production capabilities. Chinese manufacturers and designers have thrown down a real gauntlet this time, let’s see who picks it up.
