How Did a Building of 300 Tailor Shops Become Foreigners' "Haute Couture" in Shanghai?

A business model and prices unchanged for more than a decade hide a way of buying clothes that is about to disappear. Dongjiadu's problem: if the stream of foreign customers ever stops, how much longer can this place last?

Come up from Exit 3 of Nanpu Bridge station on Shanghai Metro Line 4 and you see ads for "made-to-measure" clothing and signs pointing to the "Shanghai South Bund Fabric Market." Foreigners thread through the street the whole way. Few carry maps, and none look uncertain: they walk in and out of this three-story mall as if they know it by heart.

Inside the building, hung with faded old advertising boards, 300 stalls make suits, shirts, qipao and Tang suits to order, and sell fabric and trimmings besides. The stalls are packed tight, with almost nothing you would call decoration, and the noise is a mix of shopkeepers calling out to passers-by and customers haggling with vendors in every accent imaginable.

On a Saturday afternoon in May, Yin Conggeng, who owns stall No. 140, stood in his doorway pulling in customers. He wore a suit he had made himself. He asks what you are looking for, then brings out fabric swatch books and sample pattern sheets. His wife, also a tailor, works in the shop, along with two young saleswomen who speak English. At the busiest moment, this shop of under 30 square meters held 13 foreign customers and four Chinese ones.

"I've been here since the mall opened. I've been a tailor for 30 years," Yin said. That kind of seniority is nothing unusual here. Most of the shops have run without a break since opening day, and many are husband-and-wife operations started by trained tailors. Yin stopped noticing the foreign customers long ago. He gave himself the English name Peter and hands new customers a bilingual business card without thinking about it. Still, when someone calls him by that name, it takes him a beat to answer.

"Everyone here takes a foreign name — it's easier for people to say. Foreigners like having clothes made. Sixty or 70 percent of the customers in our shop are foreign," Peter Yin Conggeng told QDaily.

Dongjiadu

The Shanghai South Bund Fabric Market goes by a better-known name: Dongjiadu. One of the oldest parts of the city, it held not only blocks of vendors' shops but folk theaters, a wholesale fruit-and-vegetable market and small handicraft workshops.

By the 1990s Dongjiadu was already a well-known textile market. Many shops worked "shop in front, factory behind" — finished clothes sold on the street side, workers sewing in the workshop at the back. The area also had a dense cluster of tailor shops, where a customer brought in a garment or a length of cloth, settled on a pattern, and had the piece made and adjusted.

Redevelopment of the South Bund began in 2002, and Dongjiadu was pulled down block by block. The fabric market opened in April 2006, and the tailor shops scattered along the streets, along with tailors working on their own, were moved into one building at a rent of 80,000 to 100,000 yuan a stall per year. The business changed too: now it is "labor and materials together." The stallholder is the boss, wholesaling cloth from Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and the customer picks the fabric in the shop and has clothes made from it.

More than a decade on, the model has barely changed, and neither have the prices. A suit or overcoat runs about 500 yuan and takes 10 hours to make; a shirt is about 120 yuan and three hours. This is closer to how the older generation had clothes made. Some people joke that the place is "haute couture." In fact a single suit on London's Savile Row takes 50 hours. Haute couture and what happens here are different things entirely.

Shops making suits, shirts and women's wear make up the great majority of the market; fewer than 50 sell linen, Chinese-style clothing and accessories of all kinds. Like Yin Conggeng, many stallholders have picked up an English name — Nita, Jean — speak a few simple phrases and have hired salespeople who speak English. Some shops print their old Dongjiadu stall numbers on their signs, to show how long they have been at it and how sound their craft is.

"We came over from Dongjiadu. I was a tailor before — people would bring me fabric — and then I opened this shop here." Wu Jinnü, who runs a second-floor shop that mostly makes shirts, says she has been a tailor for 30 years. Most shops in the market, she points out, belong to owners who hire tailors rather than to tailors themselves, and her own training gives her an edge in precision. Since opening, she has taken on more than 10 tailors to sew in her workshop while she measures and writes up orders in the shop. Every night after the market closes at 6 p.m., she goes over to brief them on the details of each garment and to help with the alterations, and she is busy until nearly midnight.

Making a garment here follows much the same course. The customer picks the color, pattern and weight of the fabric and the style to be cut (photos they have taken themselves are fine), and someone in the shop takes the measurements with a tape. A suit requires about 20 measurements, and all the way through the owner keeps checking lengths with the customer. After measuring come the details: the length and width of collar and cuffs, the number of pockets, the placement and style of the buttons.

In a bigger shop like Yin Conggeng's, customers can choose among more than 1,000 fabric patterns. Dozens of sample books are stacked inside, with fashion pictures clipped from magazines such as Harper's Bazaar and Femina tucked among them.

Because the length and width of a collar are hard to picture, staff bring out a board with sample styles glued to it for the customer to choose from, and make suggestions by gender and occasion. It is a little like playing a character-creation game.

An employee at one shop told us the crucial step is taking the measurements, and that this is where a stallholder trained as a tailor beats an ordinary salesperson. Even when the shop is full, Yin Conggeng does the measuring himself and leaves the rest of the talking to his sales staff; he will travel to a customer to measure. A tailor's level, the employee said, "usually you can't see just by looking. You see it when they measure. We measure more finely."

Foreigners

Foreigners are everywhere in the fabric market. There seem to be more of them than Chinese customers.

Wu Jinnü says 80 percent of her customers are foreign, and Yin Conggeng remembers the early days: "this place was a paradise for foreigners." But by the count of Manager Zhang of the market's management office, the market drew 8,000 visitors a day when it opened, of whom foreigners were 40 percent. Because they accounted for 70 percent of the spending, it looked like more.

"A group of Chinese customers comes in and orders one or two pieces between them, most of them just along for the walk. A foreigner comes in and orders a lot of pieces. You never come away empty-handed."

The tailors find that foreigners, for all the apparent language barrier, are often "easier to handle than Chinese aunties, Shanghai aunties especially" — a line of Shanghai dialect, not hard to decode, about how picky a customer is. Foreign customers rarely demand that a garment be made over, and they keep bringing friends in to buy clothes, turning into regulars.

Basti, a German exchange student at Tongji University, heard about the fabric market from a friend a month after arriving in Shanghai. He has come back every two weeks since, and has indeed brought in a good number of friends.

Chris T., an exchange student from France studying Chinese at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, is of Chinese descent, though his Chinese is no longer fluent. He was in Yin Conggeng's shop with two classmates, ordering clothes. Over half an hour of back-and-forth, the three of them each ordered a suit and a shirt. His cousin recommended the shop, Chris T. says, and he has been more than 10 times.

"My cousin has lived in Shanghai for five years, he knows the place. The prices here have never gone up. They all know me, and they still remember my cousin."

Emily Wells and her boyfriend teach English at a middle school in Nanjing and had just come over from there. "Our friends told us they bought suits here, so much cheaper than in America." All they had to go on was one business card, but finding the place was no trouble: on the way they ran into other foreigners headed there to have clothes made, who pointed them in. Emily hopes the clothes will be done by next week, a birthday present for her boyfriend. "Clothes in the US are all too baggy for us, and custom tailoring there is too expensive — an ordinary suit is at least 3,500 yuan, and here it's only 500."

Fit and price are the great advantages in foreign eyes, above all next to having clothes made at home. Some shops put "haute couture" on their signs as a slogan, hinting at the superiority of handwork. The owner of Maya Tailor, which has custom suit shops both on Maoming South Road in Shanghai and in Los Angeles, says a custom suit sells for about 4,000 yuan in Shanghai and, flown to Los Angeles, for at least US$3,600. "Abroad, tailoring is a respected trade, with higher standing than a designer's."

Foreign customers can still see plainly the difference between what is made here and actual "haute couture." "It depends on how much you spend. If you really spend a lot of money, that means good quality, but the prices here are for everybody," said a German woman who had come along with a friend; she was not having anything made.

Quality is a gamble. You do not know who the tailor is or how good, what the garment will look like when it is done, or how it will hold up after you have worn it a while. Stallholders will talk about their own history but offer no firm guarantee, because that would touch on "secrets."

The foreign customers QDaily interviewed had essentially never compared one shop with another. They trust a recommendation from someone they know, which is also how quality gets judged.

"I can tell the fabric is good. On the workmanship I'm just giving it a try; if it doesn't come out well this time I won't come back," said Chris T.'s classmate Yan Wei.

Chris T. has also noticed that you almost never see young Chinese people here. As exchange students, he and his friends hardly ever buy clothes in stores, because the same foreign brands cost twice as much in China. "H&M is about the same price and the quality isn't as good as here. And what's about the same in quality isn't custom-made." They also dislike clothes with a big brand logo across the chest or back. "It feels like advertising for them."

Alterations and Arguments

One delicate step in having clothes made is the alteration, which comes at the first fitting. Customers ask for changes in fit and length to get the effect they want — things hard to spell out at the measuring stage. If something is wrong, the stallholder will generally alter it once more, at no charge.

Curiously, most of the foreigners interviewed accept this sort of change. Local customers do not necessarily.

When Sabrina, a young German woman, first tried on a long-sleeved jacket, she thought it ran short from elbow to cuff. The stallholder offered to lengthen it and told her to come back for it the day after. "That really is cool, that they can alter exactly the spot you point to. That's amazing."

"Foreigners are happy however many times you alter it. As long as you alter it, it's fine. Some Shanghainese don't like that; they'll ask you to make it again," said Jin Fengfang, a stallholder who makes women's clothes. She has found that foreigners love putting outfits together, "from the collar to the lower half to the hem, working from several pieces." Plenty of women customers arrive with a picture on their phone, or a dress of their own, and ask for an exact copy. That folds the alteration into the making of the garment, part of customizing it yourself. But for some locals an alteration breaks the garment's original integrity, and leaves them "uncomfortable all over."

Jin Fengfang once ran into a hard case. A longtime customer brought in a dress that had lost its shape and demanded it be made again. The customer said she had only hand-washed and ironed it and it had still come up a centimeter short; Jin was sure it had shrunk from hot water. Jin offered to let it out a little instead, and the customer still insisted on a remake.

The argument turned petty, and both customer and owner wore out. At that point it was a question of who would give way.

"She's an old customer too. As long as I talk it through with her, she'll come back," Jin told us later.

In the end Jin agreed to make a second dress for another 100 yuan (the first had sold for 300), and the haggling over that figure went on for a while as well. The customer went on complaining that a remake still meant another trip, more of her time.

"It looks perfect to you, but she says it's uncomfortable. People think differently," Jin said, still sounding a little helpless about it.

Most people, once unhappy, say nothing. A German designer who goes by Black Horse and works at a design firm in Shanghai said he too had a garment made here that fell apart within a month, as did the friend who sent him to the shop. They put it down to poor quality and did not look into it or compare other shops.

On Dianping, TripAdvisor and similar sites you can readily find the same complaints. Some say the workmanship was careless and the quality low, and post a photo of the stallholder's business card, but it seems to have little effect on anyone else. Customers who come here to have clothes made figure that every shopping trip is its own case, and besides, one garment takes in the customer's idea, the owner's service and way of communicating, and the tailor's sewing and altering — it is hard to find where exactly it went wrong. Over the long run, though, it means customers lost.

Soon after the South Bund market opened, another fabric market called Shiliupu appeared near Shanghai's City God Temple, some of its traders having come over from South Bund or Dongjiadu.

Shiliupu has four floors and deals mainly in wholesale fabric; the scattering of English-speaking salespeople on the ground floor is enough to show that not many foreign customers come there to have clothes made. In 2014 another fabric market, Zhongfu, went up across from the South Bund market, and business has been dismal — by this year only the ground floor of what was a three-story mall is still trading. The South Bund stallholders speak of it with some contempt and do not count it as a competitor at all. That is not good news: it means the market as a whole is shrinking.

Wu Jinnü and the others can see business is bad. Last year the tailors could not keep up with the orders; this year is quiet. Manager Zhang puts it down to the economy and to fewer foreign tourists coming in, now only 20 percent of customers. "We haven't kept the numbers these past two years, because we've gone numb to it."

The other problem is the tailors. Hardly any young people are learning the trade. "Learning it properly from scratch takes at least 10 years, 16 hours a day, no holidays. Young people can't take that."

Nobody shows much worry, though. Prices cannot go up, but this is still the place with the heaviest foot traffic and the most orders. There are enough old tailors, so there is no fear of having nobody to sew. Manager Zhang says fewer than 5 percent of stalls give up their leases in a year, which shows how steady these shops are.

"We're not losing money. We just earn a bit less."

How to attract young locals is a question almost nobody has ever considered. They have never come anyway.

Photographs by Ma Ningyi