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Rubbish in one era, vintage in another

By Zhao Xu (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-04-03 09:13

A young shopper tries on a "vintage" dress in a Shanghai store.

When Tian Li, a fashion design teacher, first bought second-hand clothes from Japan 20 years ago, she did it for both aesthetic and financial reasons.

"First of all, they were really cheap - you could get a woolen skirt for a couple of dozen kuai," she recalls. "Another reason, perhaps the more important one, was that you couldn't find such 'trendy' designs in shops back then."

In 1980s China, the dominant fashion aesthetic - if there were any - was still heavily influenced by the era of "cultural revolution" (1966-76) that preceded it. The sudden availability of imported clothes offered a break from the despotic era of black and gray, she says, referring to the daring palette of orange, purple and green turquoise that was typical of clothes made in Japan.

In the late '80s and '90s, Tian tirelessly amassed more than 100 pieces of such clothing - including dresses, suits and overcoats - from local "night bazaars" in Shenyang, northeastern China's Liaoning province, where she taught at a fashion school for two decades.

" I still wear some of these things today," she says, sounding slightly nostalgic about the days she bent over piles of clothes heaped on the ground, sometimes for hours, searching for pieces that would suit her personal style.

Tian recalls that at its peak, an entire outdoor square in Shenyang was taken over by sellers of second-hand Japanese clothes, similar to what was happening in many other Chinese cities, including Dalian, Qingdao and even Beijing.

All that ended abruptly in the early '90s, however, when the government decided that the deluge of such clothes, rumored to have been dumped in China by people who would actually have paid to get rid of the "unwanted rubbish", posed a serious sanitary problem.

"There was a nationwide 'anti-dumping' if you like, and all those clothes disappeared almost overnight," says Tian.

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