Milan: It has been called fashion's dirty little secret but according to Miuccia Prada, soon everybody will be doing it.
Made-in-China's just fine with Prada's supremo and a host of other influential industry figures. But for Chinese companies and designers seeking to become global style players, producing high-end clothing on home soil is complicated. Trade barriers, brand perception issues and the sourcing of certain fabrics combine to form an obstacle to them competing internationally with an exclusively homegrown product.
Uma Wang, China's best-known international designer, says the nature of her business dictates a 40 percent made-in-China, 60 percent made-in-Italy production model.
The creative work including production of samples is mostly done at Wang's headquarters in Shanghai. But she spends half the year in Milan overseeing production and dealing with suppliers. For Wang, whose sales are mostly outside China, import/export taxes are the key issue.
"An item produced in China, by the time it is sent to the shops, it adds an extra 30 percent to the price," Wang told AFP.
The add-on costs are even greater if high-tech fabrics, an area in which Italy is acknowledged as having an edge, have to be imported and subjected to China's textile tariffs. So for Wang, with 58 shops around the world but only six in China, sticking with Italy makes sense.
Even if the trade barriers were to be swept away, she could not easily move production closer to home.
"The quality, for making the clothes, the basic sewing, is no problem in China," she says.
"But for the fabric it is 100 percent from Italy. For the material I have to say that China is not yet at the level. "And now I'm really used to the switch -- two time zones, two cultures, the two foods! It's amazing."
Zhu Chongyun, another Chinese female fashion entrepreneur, has just begun to share Wang's two-continent lifestyle following her acquisition of venerable Italian house Krizia earlier this year. Shenzhen-based Zhu said she would retain Krizia's Italian identity.
"We don't want to mislead the public into thinking that because (Krizia) is now Chinese-owned it is going to have more of an Asian culture -- that is not what I want," Zhu told AFP.
