California Apparel News

HONG KONG—Inside the cavernous halls packed with crisp cotton shirts, faded denim blue jeans and brightly decorated skirts, one simple piece of clothing captured just about every buyer’s attention at Hong Kong Fashion Week: the dress.

Dresses ruled supreme at the July 10–13 Spring/Summer 2008 show, housed inside the enormous Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre overlooking Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour.

But getting an affordable cotton dress out of China hasn’t been that easy. The oh-so-feminine garment has become so popular that quota prices on Chinese-made cotton dresses exported to Europe have mushroomed to $5 an item, adding a tidy little fee for retailers trying to squeeze more profit out of their margins.

Already European buyers have consumed half of this year’s cotton-dress quota, which expires at the end of the year. Many are afraid the quotas will max out before the end of the year. In the United States, there are quotas on 34 categories of Chinese-made clothing. But dresses are not on the list.

“A big issue right now for Europe is dresses,” said Priscilla Chow, marketing coordinator for Hong Kong–based Neo-Fantastic Fashions Inc., which makes women’s clothing in three Shanghai factories.

Dresses were influencing what Chinese manufacturers were making and where retailers were buying their merchandise.

Mouse Ji, a resourceful designer from Nanjing, China, shied away from producing dresses this year. Instead, the 800 workers at his Far East Fashion Co. are concentrating on contemporary cotton jackets, cropped pants and skirts that don’t have a quota issue. It has helped him build a successful business that exports exclusively to Europe. “Mango is my biggest European customer,” said Ji, who credits his knowledge of European fashion to studying in Italy for two years.

While China was working out its dress-quota problem, manufacturers in other countries were taking advantage of the style’s popularity. Dresses were fueling big orders for Sarabjeet Bedi, whose family owns Basant Exports in New Delhi, India, with 2,500 workers in six factories.

Not only were his wholesale prices low, hovering between $3.50 and $5 per dress, but no quota exists on Indian garments.

Inside Bedi’s small booth, crammed with cotton dresses arrayed in all colors and prints, buyers lined up to peruse the extensive collection designed by Bedi’s mother, Jyoti. “I’ve written 1 million euros [$1.36 million] of business,” said the enthusiastic and very Americanized Bedi, a 2000 graduate of the University of Michigan. “For us, that’s about 10 to 15 days of production.”

If dresses were the hottest items at the show, blue jeans were the cheapest.

There is such a glut of denim on the world market that wholesale prices for low- to mid-tier blue jeans have dipped to $5 to $8. Premium denim seems to be holding its price points.

Parkash Sujanani, owner of Hong Kong–based blue-jeans maker Parkash Impex Ltd., sells his garments to several vendors in downtown Los Angeles’ San Pedro Wholesale Mart. After seeing what blue jeans were selling for in the United States, he lowered his wholesale prices to $5 to $7.

“Last year we shipped 2 million pairs of jeans to the United States,” said Parkash’s son, Arun, the company’s managing director. “This year, we probably will ship only 1 million pairs.”

Tiglon Garment Textile Co. Ltd., located in China’s southern Guangdong province near Hong Kong, has lowered its wholesale price points to $6 to $9. “The competition is very severe,” said Adido Deng, an employee of the denim maker, which has 800 workers. The company sells 80 percent of its products to Canada, which has no quota on apparel items coming from China.

Missing in action

Although Hong Kong Fashion Week was started nearly 40 years ago, the July event has only been around for 14 years. The show is dominated by manufacturers from primarily Hong Kong and China.

While exhibitor participation this July was up 4 percent over last year with 1,147 booths, buyer attendance dropped an astounding 20 percent to 17,082. A showing of European buyers held fairly even, up 4.5 percent. But U.S. attendance dipped 11.5 percent to 399 buyers.

No one reason was given for the sharp drop-off in traffic. One factor could have been that the Shenzhen Apparel Fair in southern China, only a 45-minute bus ride from Hong Kong, started on July 12, two days after the Hong Kong fair. Last year it was held the last week of July.

But buyers wandering the three cavernous halls of exhibitors still had a good array of apparel that ranged from fashion accessories and shoes to childrenswear, menswear and womenswear.

Linda and Mahmoud Kharrat, who own four Pappagallo stores in the Dallas–Ft. Worth area, were making their first visit in years to the Hong Kong show.

“We wanted to see other vendors that we don’t have in the United States,” Linda said. “We wanted some newness in our selection of clothing, shoes and accessories.”

And they found it. After two and a half days at the show, they had ordered enough new items to freshen up the merchandise for their 20- to 55-year-old customers who like updated classics.