Taiwan Today

First there were night markets. You wanted a pair of jeans or a shirt, maybe even a suit, so you waited until after dark before going down to one of Taipei’s hot-and-noisy after-hours markets, and there you haggled with a variety of stall-owners until eventually you ended up with the togs you needed at a price you could afford. Whether or not they had labels inside was a matter of no consequence. The clothes were almost exclusively made in Taiwan Tariffs on imported textiles remained high, and there was little demand for foreign apparel. If by chance you were keen to have a foreign pair of slacks, your best chance was a so-called consignment store.

“Consignment stores used to carry a mix of brand-name clothes and accessories imported by the stall holders themselves or their relatives and friends,” says Simon Chiang (江松樺), president of Tasa Meng Enterprise Co., now an agent for several leading foreign labels. “They didn’t carry a full range of sizes or styles, and there was no after-sales serv­ice. Prices were outrageous.”

Then came the department stores. They were slow to get off the ground in Taiwan, but during the late seventies and early eight­ies they gradually grew to be part of the shopping scene.They stocked a wider range of clothing, although at first much of it was still manufactured on the island. Only the very rich could afford to patronize the small and exclusive number of shops or five-star hotel shopping malls that sold foreign fash­ions; but then the rich could afford to fly to Paris, Milan, and New York to shop at source. If they preferred not to travel so far afield, they could always go to Hong Kong, which was frequently the first place in Southeast Asia to obtain exclusive agency rights from an up-and-coming design house.

Finally came the nineties, and with them the Big Change. At the end of the eighties, Taiwan had cut tariffs on textile imports. The result was predictable. According to statistics supplied by the Tai­wan Textile Federation, in 1991 the total import value of apparel was US$251 mil­lion. By the end of 1995, that figure had risen to $766 million, with imports from Hong Kong and Italy taking the lead. The nineties were destined to see a wave of ex­pensive, designer-label clothing flooding into Taipei and other cities. That wave has revolutionized the way people dress, and the way they think about how they dress.

Su Ruei-hua (蘇瑞華) is deputy edi­tor-in-chief of Marie Claire’s Taiwan edition, and she has seen it all. She recalls how, twenty years ago, Taiwan people had absolutely no idea what fashion clothing even was. “We weren’t part of the interna­tional community then,” she says. “Things started to change about ten years ago, and we’ve been catching up ever since.”

Her own working lifestyle has altered significantly within the same period. She can easily remember a time when designer labels were still regarded as luxuries that the magazine’s middle-income readers could not afford, so what appeared in its pages were the less expensive local brands.

But now, imported clothing has cap­tured approximately 50 percent of the space in the fashion pages of Taiwan’s life­style magazines—not just Marie Claire. Nowadays, fashion magazines will splurge on overseas trips to hold the best shoots in the most expensive locations, and will not hesitate to ring up a major designer’s PR people and ask to borrow an entire collection. Su herself sometimes goes to Europe for the sole purpose of borrowing clothes and bringing them back to Taiwan for a shoot. She notes that all the leading international names now recognize Tai­wan as an important market and are keen to have their products promoted here. One consequence is that the magazines have much greater choice in what they cover. And what they choose to cover can have far-reaching consequences.

“My god,” Su groans. “You wouldn’t believe how many people call each time a new issue hits the stands. Most of them want to know where they can buy the clothes we’ve featured, and I’d say 90 per­cent of them are interested in the imported stuff. I sometimes feel we should be run­ning a mail-order business here. And the calls we get aren’t only from Taipei. That just happens to be the place where the clothes are available, but a lot of people call from down-island.”

Actually, although Taipei remains the major center, international designer labels are now available in all parts of Taiwan. Chanel has just opened its very own sec­tion in Kaohsiung’s Han Shin department store. Armani and Versace, which have been available in Taipei since the mid­ eighties, can now be found in Taichung’s department stores. A pattern is emerging—rising new international fashion stars will test the water in Taipei and then, if all goes well, open down south.

Closely allied to this geographical expansion is a demographic shift. High fash­ion is no longer the exclusive preserve of the rich and the old. Take the Italian label Prada, for example. When Prada first came to Tai­wan it was viewed as an extremely exclusive label. Now it is on the streets being worn by anyone with the cash to pay for it.

Younger people are also crazy for imported clothes, and they spend as much as their elders if not more. “When I was younger,” Su says, “if I earned a hundred bucks, I’d spend twenty on clothes. But nowadays a young person earning a hundred dollars will spend a hundred and twenty, using a credit card. Young people know a lot about what’s going on abroad, and they like internationally famous brands.”

This foreign influx has had an inevita­ble effect on the local design industry. Most of Taiwan’s current fashion designers were trained abroad, and they naturally brought home some quite revolutionary concepts. But the changes go further than that. Local manufacturers are now increasingly hiring foreign designers. They are also going to Paris or Milan to buy products and patterns, and adopting French, Italian, or American names for their own-brand designs.

There is also a noticeable, and increas­ing, tendency to use foreign models in catalogs. This is a highly profitable indus­try for the lucky few, many of whom travel a well-trodden circuit around Asia in search of work. An agent who takes a chance on bringing in a model (nearly always female) with the right face, and then scores a success with her first shoot, has a hot commodity on his hands. A model who would have no chance of hitting a catwalk in Paris can easily earn US$365 a day in Taipei and can work as many days as she chooses while staying in an apartment paid for by the agent.

All this did not come about overnight. The picture is of a slow but steady build in the impor­tance of foreign labels. The eighties belonged to the Italians—Armani, Versace, Ferre. Their elegant, simple designs, bereft of anything complicated or tricky, dominated the world scene, al­though they soon faced competition from America. Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, and Donna Karan were coming to the fore at that time, competing for a huge market catering to the modern career woman, and in Taipei this had instant appeal.

The fashion invasion of Taiwan was actually led by Japan, with Bigi, Scoop, and Vivayou all in the vanguard. But when Taiwan effected a significant reduction in the tariffs on textiles, and the island’s international transportation links im­proved, Europe began to sit up and take notice. At first, only the really big-time names came, and for most ordinary people their products were still out of reach. But with the nineties came less expensive, sec­ond-tier labels from countries such as Bel­gium and Spain. The world leaders soon caught on, and before long second lines, such as Emporio Armani and DKNY, were finding their way onto the racks.

The nineties’ fashion scene at times resembled a mishmash of styles drawn from the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Designers who had made their names in the late eighties—Comme des Garcons, Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake—had all been influenced by the hippie lifestyles of the sixties and street fashion, and they were keen to challenge traditional norms of couture. Some of their ideas struck observers as far out: coats with only one sleeve, for example, or asymmetrical clothes and vis­ible underwear. But deconstructionist as these concepts seemed, Taiwan’s fashion­ conscious women soon became as recep­tive to them as their sisters in other parts of the world.

And now? According to Su Ruei-hua, Taipei has everything. “We have apparel by major foreign designers, minor designers with potential, and all kinds of lesser brands,” she says. “You can find 200 to 300 labels at Joyce Boutique [an enor­mously successful chain based in Hong Kong] alone. What’s hot in the fashion capitals of the world is hot here. A major new collection by a star designer will appear here at the same time as it appears anywhere in the international market.”

Su recommends anyone who doubts her to take a look at the younger genera­tion, who in her view dress no differently from their counterparts in North America or Europe. “Go to any street in the [expen­sive] eastern part of Taipei,” she says, “and you’ll find people wearing the latest fash­ions: optical pattern shirts, one-piece white dresses, trumpet pants. Gucci and Prada are everywhere these days.”

Foreign labels have become big business. Simon Chiang has a long history of association with overseas designers and manufacturers, including Testoni, Gucci, and Celine. He is now, among other things, general manager of the Gucci label in Tai­wan, and he takes justifiable pride in the way the brand has performed. Within a decade it has expanded from being a one­ outlet name to a chain of nine stores with an annual turnover of around US$11 mil­lion. “The demand for Gucci products is just amazing,” he says. “Sometimes we get a new arrival, and just one week later cus­tomers are coming in and complaining that there’s nothing left. We used to order about 300 pairs of a new line of shoes; nowadays we have to order up to 5,000 pairs and we still can’t meet demand.”

Chiang’s achievement with Celine is no less impressive. Its annual turnover in Taiwan now exceeds US$7.2 million and it has eight outlets in major hotels and department stores. He attributes the suc­cess of these brands to two reasons. “The tariff on imported clothing used to be more than 50 percent, but now it’s down to around 10 percent,” he says. “This has en­couraged imports and brought down prices. Our prices are only about 15 per­cent higher than those in duty-free Hong Kong, and consumers no longer fly there to shop for brand names.”

And the other reason? “Brand names are priced more reasonably now,” Chiang says. “Foreign brands no longer want to be positioned so high they’re out of reach. They’re trying to break away from their image as luxuries. Yes, the goods cost more, but they last longer because of their quality and good design.” To illustrate his point he notes that prices for Celine women’s wear range between around US$110 for a basic item such as a T-shirt and $1,100 for a suit, which is on a par with prices charged by most local brand-name designers.

Nowadays, department stores play a big role in the fashion business. The Sun­rise department store in Taipei is a case in point. “When our company started out in 1985 it was just like any other department store in Taiwan,” says Ian Miao (苗延兆), manager of Sunrise’s planning depart­ment. “We mostly sold domestic fashions, but we always had our minds set on imported clothes.” In those days, popu­larly priced Japanese apparel dominated the imported fashion market in department stores. Sunrise was the first to sell topnotch European brands. It dedicated one small area of the store to selling European fash­ions and called it the Designers’ Gallery.

At the end of 1989 the company embarked on a renovation of the entire store, and it used this opportunity to switch its main focus to imported clothes. Over the last five years the annual growth in sales of imported clothing has ranged between 20 and 30 percent. Only fifteen out of a total of ninety counters sell domes­tic fashions, and imported fashions make up about 85 percent of the store’s annual turnover. Approximately 90 percent of the imports come from Italy and France, with the United States and Japan sharing the remaining market share.

In 1991, the company took a radical step. It turned its buying department into a separate entity, Chung Hseng Corp., and made it completely autonomous in matters of financing, managing, and marketing imported brands. Chung Hseng then went all out to win brand-name franchise rights. It now acts as agent for such famous names as Giorgio Armani, Emporio Amlani, Byblos, and Montana. In Taipei proper the company adheres to a policy of exclusiv­ity, and the foreign labels are sold only in Sunrise department store. But it has also opened a Giorgio Armani boutique and an Emporio Armani boutique in the fashion­able eastern area of the city, while establishing three other outlets in department stores in the central and southern parts of the island.

Miao believes that the introduction of foreign labels has had a positive impact on the local industry. The availability of clothes from abroad means that consum­ers can compare like with like, while at the same time giving them more choice. And of course, the imported labels put local designers under pressure to compete. “In the past,” he says, “a lot of people made money by copying out of fashion maga­zines. Before foreign competition came along, they could make a fortune. But now those factories are dying out. Newcomers have to design better and work much harder, simply to survive. In the long run, this is going to strengthen our garment industry.”

Sogo is the biggest department store in Taipei. Situated on bustling Chunghsiao East Road, this Taiwanese-Japanese joint venture opened in 1987 and has been thriving ever since. But at that time it was faced with the same tariff restrictions as every­body else, so it placed no particular empha­sis on internationally known designer labels. Once tariff barriers started coming down, however, it was quick to jump on the bandwagon, and now the store consist­ently carries a wide range of imported fashions. What is interesting about Sago is the way in which it has set out to create a popular and not-so-pricey image. It has done this by concentrating on reasonably priced, “young crowd” names such as Esprit and Colour 18 from Hong Kong, and Benetton and Sisley from Italy. Sogo’s main store has an annual turnover of NT$10.1 billion [US$367.3 million]. It attributes 35 percent of the profit it makes on that to imported goods, mostly fashions.

A couple of years ago, the store became aware of an increasing demand for foreign labels, and it immediately began to look into the possibility of representing certain foreign labels in Taiwan. James Wangkuo (汪郭鼎松) is manager of Sogo’s sales department. “We are looking for the kind of brand name or product that is on a par with famous second-line names, like D&G [for Dolce & Gabbana] and Mui Mui [for Prada],” he says. “They’re the so-called bridge lines, standing some­where between high-end brand names and the more popular brands. We’re targeting the eighteen to twenty-four age group.”

Sogo’s efforts have met with some suc­cess. Since the start of 1996, it has been rep­resenting two French labels, Agnes B. and Et Vous. Sogo provides each company with its own independent sales counter within the main store. It has also set up what it calls “The Express Shop,” retailing a combination of French, Italian, and Ameri­can young-fashion brands that as yet have not been sold in Taiwan by anyone else.

Two years ago, Sogo decided to expand by opening a new store on fashionable Tunhua South Road. The outlet is stocked exclusively with high-end imported labels and fashion accessories. It offers a variety of sales counters dedicated to individual labels, including Christian Dior, Cerruti, Givenchy, and Trussardi. “We’ve witnessed a growing market for high-end products,” Wangkuo says. “But most local department stores haven’t gone as far as we have in of­fering a one-stop service for such a wide range of products. By catching the wave, we hope to get a major share of this market.”

When Sogo’s new store opened, how­ever, the topnotch designer labels did not perform quite as well as expected. Wangkuo blames a two-year recession and the compe­tition resulting from the introduction of ever more foreign brand names. “Consumption fluctuates with the economic situation,” he says, “and consumption of high-end clothing is even more vulnerable because it doesn’t count as a necessity. But now that almost all the big names have entered the Taiwan market, tough competition will result in more reasonable pricing and lower profits for the supply end.”

Despite the dangers, he hopes to see the big international labels become even more popular in Taiwan.“People are al­ways striving after a better standard of liv­ing," he reasons.“And our new store is an attempt to create a new and higher standard of living. It offers an ideal lifestyle, a goal that most people hope to achieve sooner or later. We see ourselves as just catching up with a trend. We're meeting our customers' future demands today."