Try it… Just give it a try … Try to search for “wedding dress” on GOOGLE and you will be immediately directed to a plethora of sites that sell Chinese wedding dresses for less than a hundred euros. On the pictures, the cuts look perfect, the fabrics look precious and the colors, truer than life. You will even be able to record your measurements on these sites in a more or less precise way and you will have the impression that you are ordering a “taylor-made” dress.
The magic of the virtual economy reproduces itself every time we look for our future wedding dress on the internet. Our search engine invariably sends us back to the best referenced sites which are invariably … Chinese. No wonder: the textile market on the Net is dominated by manufacturers from the “Middle Kingdom”.
Is there such a thing as a “low-end” clientele?
Fewer and fewer fashion craftsmen boast and claim that there is no possible comparison between their creations and Asian productions, that the clientele is very different, and that, in any case, hand-made dresses are unaffordable for clients acustomed to “Chinese products”…
That’s far from being certain. First of all, because there is no specific clientele for so-called “low-end” productions: we all buy, at one time or another, clothes or other objects made in China even if we can afford to buy more expensive and much better quality products. Secondly, because a handmade wedding dress does not have a “standard” price and is not necessarily unaffordable : a price depends upon the design, the fabrics used and, most of all, the craftsman’s work. Simpler dresses with less precious materials can be offered at very affordable prices.
The 100% handcrafted productions are therefore also competing with manufacturers that advertise wedding dresses between 40 and 400 euros and that self-proclaim themselves as “world leader in online sales of wedding dresses“. Where are these clothes produced? This information is not immediately available. Opacity is the rule and all the salesman’s argument is in the price. At most, in the “Contact” page you will find the address of a small company in the United Kingdom or the Netherlands which operates as a “sales agent” in Europe.
If you are of a stubborn nature and you want to reveal the real structure of this type of multinational group you should read, at the very bottom of your screen, the page “General Conditions”: you are then discreetly informed that the company that offers “low-cost” wedding dresses, has its headquarters in Hong Kong, produces in the Republic of China and processes your payments in the United Kingdom. Phew! There is nothing shameful about distributing, at low prices, a mass production, so, why try to hide it?
The price-quality ratio
On the other hand, it is not particularely elegant to sell clothes “made in China” at the cost of hand-made couture or luxury ready-to-wear, yet this type of commercial practice is more and more frequent in the virtual market.
Even brands which, on the Internet, claim to draw inspiration from the know-how of Spanish or Italian workshops, have almost all of their wedding dresses produced in Asia. You will find these same products at street shops next to your home, but don’t be surprised if they require at least two months’delay before they receive the model of your choice : no way to cheat with delivery time!
A “Chinese” wedding dress sold at several thousand euros? Well, you will be paying for a well-advertized brand and a design, but if you take a closer look, what you will get won’t always be what you’ll see : at such price, retailers can afford to offer their customers a few touch-ups.
It is not mass production in itself which is to be condemned, provided that the selling prices are in line with those offered by Asian manufacturers and not with those practised by French craftsmen. The problem, most of the time, is the quality-price ratio.
Luxury accessible to all?
For some of us, a dress bought on the internet for several thousand euros would be considered as “luxury”, but “luxury” is not just a team of Western fashion-designers sketching models 10,000 miles away from the production sites. It is also, whenever possible, a commitment to produce locally with locally manufactured fabrics. Impossible? Let’s not forget that, unlike other designers, Karl Lagerfeld never agreed to have his clothes produced in China and, in order to ensure that French know-how did not disappear, the Chanel Group had even bought out some of its subcontractors (bootmakers, embroiderers, feather craftsmen, tailors) and preserved jobs.
Nowadays we are offered so-called luxury goods accessible to all, we dream of getting some “Lagerfeld” at “H&M’s” prices, we want to have our cake and eat it. Refusing to choose and expecting to get the best of all worlds is an illusion purposedly maintained by advertising, and fed by our “junk desires”.
Tinkerish desires
“Junk is better than nothing”. There is no contempt in this observation. The important thing is to know what you are actually buying and not to be fooled. Because the Internet is also a place of deception, a global marketplace where there are no more customs barriers, but also social, health or environmental barriers and where only search engines visibility matters.
I identify myself in a crowd of compulsive consumers unable to differenciate between the copy and the original, the ephemeral and the durable, goods which have a value and those which only have a price. In these difficult times, price has become the only real discriminating factor in our lives.
A tribute from vice to virtue
In a world as artificial as a movie set, craftwork appears as a “Cinderella” whereas it is, more often than not, the main source of inspiration for mass distribution. It is often the “Haute Couture” designers who are THE reference for the ready-to wear mass production and what is “Haute Couture” if not excellent craftsmanship that is both original and visionary?
Thus, even the least demanding Asian mass productions are inspired, without complexes or scruples, by the original craftsmen creations.
Eventually, mass production would be, as François de La Rochefoucauld, used to say: “the tribute that vice pays to virtue”.