Coach Staged Its First Runway Show in China in 15 Years. What Was It Trying to Say?

China accounted for less than 15% of Coach's global revenue in 2018. The brand sees plenty of opportunity here — and even more challenges.

At 8 pm on December 8, several hundred people gathered outside the West Bund Art Center in Shanghai. The rectangular building, 10,800 square meters in all, began life in 1989 as the stamping shop of the state-owned Plant 5703. Renovated, it became one of the city's favorite venues for big exhibitions and cultural events, and Xuhui District treats it as the heart of the West Bund Cultural and Art Demonstration Zone.

Close to a hundred fans and photographers pressed against the barriers, waiting for the celebrities arriving one after another: Chloë Grace Moretz, Kiko Mizuhara, Xu Weizhou, Guan Xiaotong. On the other side, media and bloggers from around the country, along with the mall executives and brand agents known collectively as "the landlords," bunched up at the entrance and complained about the cold.

The New York brand Coach was staging its first big runway show in the 15 years since it entered China, unveiling the Coach 1941 pre-fall 2019 collection. That line first appeared on a fashion-week runway in the winter of 2015 with a more upscale, younger image — the first time the 77-year-old brand had shown a complete ready-to-wear collection, and seen at the time as an important step in its revival. Today the line no longer gets its own section in stores. "After a while we found there was no need — all our products have the same young, upbeat New York style, so there's no reason to single out one line," a salesperson at Coach's Hong Kong Plaza flagship store in Shanghai told QDaily.

But in the words of Coach brand CEO Joshua Schulman, on the runway Coach 1941 is still the thing that gives the brand its "halo effect" and makes people realize it is about more than handbags.

That night the venue was dressed as a 1970s New York street — brick red as the dominant color, a long concrete platform running down the middle and cutting the hall in two, with traffic lights, a mailbox and a phone booth standing on it. An ochre Buick sedan was parked on each of the two "roads." Guest seating ran down both sides, backed by paper ads for Coach handbags from the 1970s. At the end of the street hung shop signs outlined in neon tubing: cartoon elephants and eagles, and the names Owl Restaurant, Oyster Bar, Roseland.

Below the signs, a white LED screen flashed three lines of black type: "Coach Lights Up Shanghai." The same lettering turned up that same night at the door of the Hong Kong Plaza flagship, on the huge LED facade of the Aurora Building by the Bund, and on the invitations.

"XX Loves China" has become close to a fixed formula for fashion brands throwing large events in China these past two years. According to Bain & Company's 2018 annual report, Chinese consumers account for 33% of the global luxury market, a share that will rise to 45% by 2025. A joint report by McKinsey and the fashion trade publication BoF says that next year China will pass the United States to become the world's largest fashion market.

For Coach, the appeal of China is more concrete than that. Ten years ago it took control back from its distributors; today it has 190 stores across the country. Annual sales in China have gone from US$50 million in 2008 to US$600 million this year. Still, set against Coach's global revenue of US$4.2 billion, China is less than 15% — which means that, compared with many of its rivals, Coach has yet to fully work this market.

To prepare for the show, creative director Stuart Vevers spent a week in Shanghai. Victor Luis, president of Coach's parent company Tapestry, arrived three days early and worked through a list: government officials including the Shanghai Municipal Party Secretary, meetings with the local retail team, the "landlords," store visits. According to the brand's PR agency, he came to China more often over the past year than Coach CEO Joshua Schulman did.

This time he lingered at the Hong Kong Plaza flagship. Last October the store opened a "Craftsmanship Bar," where customers can have personalized hardware and monogramming added to selected products in 15 to 20 minutes, at 150 to 600 yuan. Two days before the show, a wall of accessories had gone up to the right of the main entrance, displaying lower-priced items such as scarves and charms, and Victor Luis wanted to know how customers were responding to it.

The show itself started at about 8:30 pm, to songs by the 1970s American rock singer Alice Cooper. The models came out in platform-soled heeled boots. The women wore rich but casual colored furs or patchwork leather jackets over floaty, semi-sheer printed dresses, some of the prints threaded with glinting gold. The men answered with leather trousers and patchwork leather jackets, plus mohair sweaters in painted patterns.

The handbags were still the main event. They had been shrunk further, hung at the back of the men's waists or swinging against the women's thighs. The dinosaur "Rexy" kept coming back, as a print or as a charm. This "female" Tyrannosaurus rex has nothing to do with Coach's heritage; she is simply a cartoon that creative director Stuart Vevers added when he launched Coach 1941 in 2015. Sales and social media since then have confirmed that she gave the bags — once covered in the Coach logo — some fun and freshness, and that she appeals to young people.

"Rexy" also gave Coach a handy way to stress localization. The graphic designer Guang Yu, the painter Zhu Jingyi, the sculptor Sui Jianguo and the music collective YETI OUT were invited to redraw Rexy in their own styles. All four designs ended up as prints, on sweaters, jackets, handbags and shoes.

Most of the audience probably did not notice these local touches. The "New York style" was far more obvious. The show ended 15 minutes after it began. More neon signs lit up at the end of the street. Waiters in black vests and white shirts pushed out carts of Brooklyn Lager, popcorn stamped "Coach Corn," and cheese fries and hot dogs printed with dinosaurs. A DJ started spinning, a giant silver disco ball threw countless spots of light across the ceiling, and the crowd surged toward the DJ booth and the neon.

Guang Yu did not push forward with them. He stood under a traffic-light pole and watched. For this collection he had combined Coach's initial "C" with the profile of Rexy's roaring open mouth to make a "C" with teeth. He was a little surprised Coach had come to him, but he did not ask why. "The collaboration was pretty shallow, really. I was there as an artist, not as a graphic designer. Designers care about whether they've made good work, but they also have to care about whether they have a bigger platform to speak from and be seen on. I think this time it was more the latter."

You could see how badly Coach wanted this show to cover everything a fashion brand in 2018 is supposed to think about: diversity among the models, with Black, white and Asian faces; the brand's "New York heritage" alongside its local presence in China; the full range from clothes to handbags to shoes; menswear as well as womenswear; and the social-media chatter that visiting bloggers and celebrities generate, balanced by the cultural weight of the collaborating artists.

Everything, that is, except sustainability. In late October Coach announced it would drop fur from its products altogether, so as to "present a better brand stance at the fall 2019 shows." It said at the time that going fur-free would not dent profits, since fur made up less than 1% of Coach's womenswear. Yet in the pre-fall collection shown in Shanghai, those brightly colored furs were still genuine "sheepskin."

Several members of the China Fur Association were also invited to the show. The association's main job is to help foreign brands follow changes in China's testing standards for fur products and the feedback from consumers.

One member told QDaily that Coach has been among the most active foreign brands in the past two years, regularly attending the association's exchange events and inviting its staff to tour the brand's lab in Dongguan. After all that contact, the association adjusted some of its own standards: handbag sizing was broken down more finely, from three sizes to six, and load capacity is now calculated by volume rather than by outer dimensions, closer to the American method.

In a group interview with reporters before the show, Joshua Schulman made no secret of Coach's ambitions in China. In menswear and in retail channels at least, there was still a lot the company planned to do.

Michael Kors, often mentioned in the same breath as Coach, and Hermès, once quite conservative about online shopping, have both opened online sales through WeChat or their own websites. Coach's digital expansion in China, by contrast, has been halting and slow. Its Tmall flagship store has opened twice: it first arrived at the end of 2011 and shut a month later; it returned in September 2015 and closed again a year after that.

Asked whether Coach would move onto third-party platforms, Joshua Schulman stayed noncommittal, saying only that Coach.com would be the brand's main route for online sales. He did point out that Coach works closely with WeChat — not to sell, but to stay in touch with customers who come into its stores and give them better service.

He was happier talking about physical stores than about online channels. Over the past year he has come to China more often, mostly to visit stores in second-tier cities beyond Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou: Changsha, Chengdu, Xiamen. The way young people dress in Changsha stuck with him. "Very fashionable, and they pick up the newest trends faster than other markets in Asia," Joshua Schulman told QDaily.

Coach has set itself the goal of lifting menswear revenue to US$1 billion within three years. In the roughly 600-square-meter Hong Kong Plaza flagship, menswear takes up nearly a third of one floor and sells the full range, from ready-to-wear to handbags to shoes.

Joshua Schulman thinks the casualization of luxury brands is what makes all of this possible. "The idea of modern luxury was born in that context," he said. "It has blurred the line between luxury and accessible luxury, and that gives us more opportunities."

Cover image and photos courtesy of Coach. Cover photo: © 2018 Alyssa Greenberg