Global luxury brands like Louis Vuitton, Dior, are racing to grab a chunk of the Chinese market — and with good reason, considering the country is home to the third-largest population of millionaires and has become the second-largest consumer of luxury goods in the world. Meanwhile, however, hardly any of the luxury Chinese labels that showed have as strong a global brand recognition as their French counterparts. But that may change.

Angelica Cheung, editor-in-chief of China Vogue thinks it will happen, but not any time soon. “I feel that when everything else is ready — when people and the market are more mature, and people have more of an understanding of brands’ identity and individual style, and also the production side of the whole industry — basically, it takes maturity of the whole chain before that happens,” Cheung told website ARTINFO.

Only a decade ago, the term “Made in China” carried a negative connotation, often associated with cheap, poorly made goods. With more luxury goods being produced in the country, the meaning of that phrase is changing.

“A few years ago, people would hesitate before they used that expression,” said Cheung. “In Vogue China, we’ve had a column called ‘Made in China’ for the past five or six years. But it really means creativity out of China — what people were doing, what people created that was unique and interesting. These past few years, you just see a tremendous growth of young, homegrown talents. Every year the picture looks more promising and different.”

Many European high-end brands like Prada are replacing the “Made in Italy” label with “Made in China,” signaling a higher standard of quality (at a cheaper price) coming out of Chinese factories. “They understand more how these brands work, and they appreciate quality better than before,” said Chung.

But that doesn’t mean the Chinese luxury industry doesn’t face obstacles. “Where Chinese companies are lacking is quality control and product and image design,” said Eggers. “So far, China has not been able to produce a brand with a broad international appeal.”

Cheung cites many factors that affect the potential global success of a Chinese luxury label. “All these European brands, they succeeded for a big mixture of many reasons, so it’s not just about having a talented designer. It’s not just about having very skilled craftsmen,” said Cheung. “It’s many factors — generations of culture, skills, understanding of brands, understanding of quality, understanding of who you are, communication skills, business concepts, everything — understanding of markets. They’re all part and parcel of what makes a brand successful.”

Even though China’s luxury brands have yet to gain the global prestige that Prada, Gucci, Dior, and countless other designer labels have earned, perhaps it’s only a matter of few decades before they will be just as coveted.

Shang Xia will include ready-to-wear and decorative arts inspired by Chinese culture and traditions of craftsmanship. These are to be made using Chinese raw materials and artisanal know-how, Hermès said. Shang Xia’s creative director is Qiong-Er Jiang, daughter of a noted Chinese architect.

According to Patrick Thomas, President of Hermes International, the new brand will be tailored for the Chinese market where Hermes lags behind its competitors. The objective of this move is to offer cheaper products, as well as capitalising on the growth of the luxury market in the country in 2010. The brand will also be distributed in Paris in one of the large department store. This is the first time the fashion label will get in from the ground up, so it’ll be fascinating to see the results. Chinese luxury consumers don’t want to feel that China is the ”dumping ground” for cheaper or excess inventory.

The majority of China’s rich now live outside of the mega-cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, said a study published 16th April by the Hurun Report.

About 825,000 people in China have net personal wealth of more than 10 million yuan (1.47 million dollars), according to the magazine, which tracks China’s wealthiest. But about 52 percent live outside the three biggest traditional centres for wealth — Beijing, Shanghai and southern Guangdong province, which includes Guangzhou and Shenzhen. “People are always shocked when they go to the sticks — to the secondary, the third tier cities — and they realise ‘My goodness these places are booming like nobody’s business’,” Hurun’s publisher Rupert Hoogewerf said. “We’re seeing very clearly there’s a trend of the luxury brands moving into the secondary cities.”

Management consultants McKinsey also warned in a separate report published this month of the dangers companies face in focusing on Beijing and Shanghai while underestimating the importance of China’s smaller cities. “In Beijing, the biggest brand names often have several retail outlets, but many go unrepresented in Chengdu or Wenzhou, even though Chengdu has more wealthy households than Detroit, and Wenzhou as many as Atlanta,” McKinsey said.

The southwestern city of Chengdu, with a population of 10 million, and eastern Wenzhou, with 7.9 million residents, are only two examples of dozens of fast-developing cities with populations of more than five million. The number of households with annual incomes of more than 250,000 yuan (36,765 dollars) hit 1.6 million last year and is expected to rise to more than four million by 2015, McKinsey said. Three quarters of the growth in China’s wealthy consumer segment will come from people who currently live outside Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong, McKinsey said.

Another recent wealth study by China Merchants Bank and consultants Bain and Company reported similar findings. More than 20,000 people who held more than 10 million yuan each in private equity were in the eastern provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang alone, it said. Bain’s banking study said 320,000 people across China would have more than 100,000 yuan in investable assets by the end of this year, representing a pool of nine trillion yuan in assets.

Meanwhile, consumer confidence remains unusually high among the country’s rich, with 80 percent of Chinese millionaires saying the economic crisis had not hurt their lifestyle, Hurun said, citing 67 interviews done in February.

Copyright © 2009 AFP.

China’s Rich and Super-Rich Broken down by Region

* Excludes Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao
** Source: 2007 National Bureau of Statistics

As China sets out to rebuild its artistic heritage, support is coming from an unexpected source: the global luxury industry. The big brands have targeted China – both for exhibition displays and for collaborations with contemporary artists.

When the new 8,000 square meter, or 87,000 square foot, contemporary art and design museum is constructed next to the iconic “bird’s nest” Olympic stadium, its contents might include a portrait of Christian Dior, created in incense ash by the artist Zhang Huan.

Or, alongside the wine bottles in iron by Zheng Guogu, there may be a similar contemporary copper work re-creating Dior fragrances.

Those two objects will go on display next week as “Christian Dior & Chinese Artists” opens in an industrial space in Beijing, developed as an interior Chinese garden and displaying a capsule fashion history focusing on the founder Christian Dior and the current designer John Galliano.

Over the last two decades, there have been numerous collaborations between art and fashion. But it seems that the Chinese cannot get enough of fashion as art – and of their own artists at the epicenter of high fashion.

Two exhibitions have shown the heritage of European fashion houses to the Chinese. In March, Ferragamo held its 80th birthday celebrations in Shanghai, with an exhibition of Salvatore Ferragamo at the Museum of Contemporary Art; and with a fashion show staged at the new Shanghai Port International Cruise Terminal.

“The ‘Evolving Legend’ exhibition was inaugurated in Shanghai to celebrate the anniversary and our 15 years relationship with China,” said Michele Norsa, CEO of Ferragamo. He says that after the exhibition of the Florentine shoemaker’s work moved on to Milan’s Triennale, where it closed last week, there are now plans to take the show elsewhere in  Asia.

Ferragamo established itself in Asia in the early 1970s and its first Chinese art collaborations go back to 1992, when an exhibition of 11 Chinese artists in different disciplines was held in its New York store, along with a sponsorship of a Chinese video art and photography exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York.

MaxMara, another Italian design house, opened its traveling exhibition “Coats” last month at the Namoc Museum in Beijing with a fashion show and a dinner at the Tai Miao temple that was attended by internationally known Chinese celebrities. They included the actress Maggie Cheung, famous for the movie “In the Mood for Love,” and Guo Jingjing, a gold-medal-winning diver at the Beijing Olympics.

Louis Vuitton, whose roots in China go back to 1979, has seen its artistic collaborations flower. As well as sponsoring a Sovereign Asia Art Prize in 2007, Vuitton brought art this year to its two Hong Kong stores, with Zhan Wang creating a steel sculpture in the Central district, and the shop in the Tsim Sha Tsui area across Victoria Harbor displaying work from the famous Chinese actor and photographer Chow Yun Fat.

Earlier this year, Vuitton held in its Champs-Elysées flagship store in Paris an exhibition inspired by André Citroën’s epic journey down the “Silk Road” in 1931, including Chinese video artists and photographers.

For next week’s exhibition, Sidney Toledano, CEO of Dior, was determined to do more than sponsor an art show.

“It’s not about branding and marketing – it is about having a cultural impact,” Toledano says. “We could just have supported the artists, but the idea was to let them work a Dior theme, to see how they looked at Monsieur Dior himself and the Dior universe. When I saw the finished works, done over three months, I was impressed by their creativity. It was almost like watching a couture collection develop.”

The 21 artists whose works go on display from Nov. 16 at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing include some of China’s edgiest artists. Their work, as seen currently at the new Charles Saatchi Gallery in London, might raise a few eyebrows in a dialogue between art and fashion.

Zhang Huan’s personal and politicized sculptures and ash paintings will face off with the personage of Christian Dior; while Li Songsong is exchanging three paintings – of Boccaccio’s “The Decameron,” of the National People’s Congress and of the crumpled wings of a fallen airplane – for the ultimate fashion statement: a giant Lady Dior bag in neon lights.

It seems unlikely that Liu Wei’s sculpture of a turd will be redeveloped for Dior. But the hollow, robotic eyes of Zhang Xiaogang’s paintings will be viewed in a vision of Dior Homme, designed by Kris Van Assche; and Liu Wei’s extraordinary effects with dog chewings will be applied to Dior’s “Cocotte” dress.

Pearl Lam, the director of the Contrasts Gallery of Chinese contemporary art which opened in Hong Kong in 1992 and later in Shanghai and Beijing, says that the line between art and commerce has never been drawn in China, because traditionally “artists” and their work were not defined. Known as “literati,” they might paint, write calligraphy, compose poetry, literature and music, while at the same time designing with craftsmen anything from teapots to houses.

“In ancient times in China, art was not created for selling – only for self-cultivation,” says Lam, explaining that the artworks were given away to those who had been appreciative and the literati’s highest standing was to be qualified to join the imperial court.

Cut to the 21st century, and commercialism and consumerism have inevitably entered the equation, with the catalyst in the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami and his collaborations with Louis Vuitton.

“When a Chinese artist, like Zhang Huan, accepts a commission from Dior to create works about Dior, he is in fact pushing the boundaries to react to the Chinese traditional values of art and to question: what is art in the context of China’s 21st century,” says Lam, who claims that all artists understand the power of marketing by fashion houses and know that through fashion exposure, the artist’s name might become a brand.

It might sound like a collaboration between two hungry groups – the Chinese dignitaries, eager to find the home-grown art to fill a new architectural wonder; and Western brands trying to create a name and good will in China. But if commerce encourages art, whatever the motive, it seems a positive step. And with the Chinese, even in tough economic times, acting as suppliers of products to the world, is it surprising that the country’s art has become a marketable commodity?

By Suzy Menkes, International Herald Tribune

It seems that the creator knows well about the chinese culture, especially about our affection of the number “8″ and the color “Red”, “8-8-2008″ collection declines in 8 groups of accessories: watch, bicycle, toy Panda, leather goods, sports shoes, jewelry, and of course Mahjong (which we so called the traditional chinese “sport”.) WWD declares the special edition of the $1,415 I-Gucci digital watch to be the “collection’s icing” and will have worldwide sale. The rest of the collection is only available in China since January 2008.

Thing is “8″ & “red” are the symbols of traditional chinese culture seen by foreigners, however, in the eyes of most part of chinese, the “8″ stuff could be meretricious. I do not hope that these european historic luxury brands target simply on “8″ lovers of their asia market.

由创意总监Frida Giannini精心设计，Gucc将于2008年1月推出限量版”8-8-2008″北京奥运系列。设计主题围绕中国传统文化展开，设计师将中国人情有独钟的”8·发”及”喜气洋红”表现得淋漓尽致。此系列涵盖腕表、单车、熊猫玩具、旅行袋、侧背包、运动鞋、首饰及麻將8组商品。麻将配有经典La Pelle Guccissima皮质收纳盒，具有收藏价值。据WWD报道，售价为$1,415的I-Gucci腕表将成为Gucci奥运系列之“冰点”，表背有2008字样彰显纪念意义。

限量版”8-8-2008″系列除腕表款为全球发行外，其余商品仅在大陆及香港独家销售。
(右上图为由大陆影视新星黄晓明代言的宣传广告)