HONG KONG: In the back of Henry Lau's Spy boutique in Soho - past the tux jackets, rhinestone-studded T-shirts and embroidered jeans - is a rack for fashion-show and photo-shoot cast-offs. A recent find there was as a long, red dress. Its color, length and high slits gave it the feel of a Chinese cheongsam. But its button-down front, pointed collar and matching necktie also made it look like a Western shirt-dress. It was part Suzie Wong, part woman banker, and totally Hong Kong. And it cost a fraction of what a dress would in one of the European designer-name boutiques in central Hong Kong.
A generation ago, it would have been hard to find this sort of one-of-a-kind piece from a local designer with his own couture line. Hong Kong spent decades on the bottom rung of the international fashion ladder as a low-cost manufacturing center for Western companies. The city excelled at the mass production, import-export and retailing of clothing from Europe and the United States. Meanwhile, newly rich Hong Kongers flocked to acquire the latest foreign status symbols. The result was a fashion-obsessed city that produced very few of its own fashion designers. Those who did make it, like Vivienne Tam, mostly did so overseas. But a new generation of local designers have begun to make a mark here. In the 1990s, newly graduated designers began showing their works in rented shoebox-size spaces in commercial districts like Causeway Bay and Tsim Sha Tsui. That is how Henry Lau began.
More recently, designers have begun opening signature shops in the adjoining areas of Sheung Wan, Soho and Noho (South of Hollywood and North of Hollywood, respectively), near the Central district. This year, neighborhood favorites like Cecilia Yau and Ranee K have moved to larger ateliers, while several other designers have opened new boutiques. Though works vary from designer to designer, a collective Hong Kong style has emerged. Fabrics are ultralight. Colors are bold and Asian, though the Chinese influence is often less blatant than, say, Shanghai Tang's, with its emphasis on traditional Chinese-themed clothes. Great attention is paid to details like cuts, folds, layers, embroidery and beading. That is a reflection of the city's long-standing tailoring tradition, as is the fact that most designers make only several custom-fit copies of each piece.
Ranee K showed up for her interview looking every inch like a working designer - in a ponytail, loose jeans and re-tailored dress-shirt. In May, she moved to a two-story atelier, called K, with a boutique and an upstairs workshop, where she has been finishing an evening wear collection for a fashion show at the end of this month. She has no other stores and makes only three copies of each design - one each in U.S. sizes 2, 4 and 6, although others can be tailored.
When Ranee K opened her first Hong Kong store in 2000, just after graduating from Parson's School of Design in New York, her style was limited to variations of the Chinese dress, the qipao - retro-chic frocks in florals, pastels and vintage Asian prints. She has since branched out. A recent visit turned up a floaty silk gown in misty blue and white, black minidresses decorated with pieces cut from vintage kimono obis, tube dresses with a bright Pop Art prints, separates, bikinis, bits of jewelry and other eclectica.
She credits her clientele for her evolution.
"I didn't expect this when I first opened a shop, but I have befriended many of my regular clients, and my designs have grown as they have," she said. "They started getting married, so I did evening wear. Then they got pregnant, so I added maternity pieces. Then they got better jobs, so I did office wear."
Had they also been invited to the Royal Ascot races? K is filled with hats that would belong at Harrod's had they not been paired with Chinese dresses, pink feather puffs, pillboxes with net blushers and big-brimmed sunhats.
"Well, maybe one of my guests will get invited to a garden wedding party in England," she said.
Cecilia Yau is in the process of opening a similar two-story atelier. Clients can browse her intricately hand-embroidered and beaded gowns downstairs; but the upstairs workshop will not be finished until autumn.
Yau, who attended the École de Mode Internationale in Paris, focuses on evening and bridal wear. She graduated in 1999 and launched her couture line in 2000. At the time, she did fittings in an upstairs workshop next to a pizza shop.
She is inspired by the era before Hong Kong became a manufacturing capital. "Our mothers' generation all used tailors when they were young, and my older clients are more confident about what fabrics and styles will look good on them," she said. "But Hong Kong girls don't know. They were brought up with off-the-rack, mass-produced clothes from the shop in the mall." The only manufactured, prêt-a-porter pieces Yau does are the ones she sends overseas - to selected shops in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Otherwise, she works closely with clients and treats the dresses in her shops as prototypes that can be altered.
Each finished product is made to measure. And after a design has been used about a dozen times, it is pulled off the rack.
As with Yau, it was affordable made-to-measure couture that made Henry Lau's career.
It started when he was a freshman at Hong Kong Polytechnic University in the mid-90s and got a job as a concert design assistant - and a foot in the door by sewing outlandish costumes for pop acts.
By the time he opened his first branded boutique in 1998, he was already known for dressing local celebrities. He and a few assistants still do custom design, embroidery, tailoring, and even millinery, themselves, offering the type of work that has become all-but-unaffordable for most European shoppers.
Lau also has a more casual line of jackets, trousers and shirts that are produced on a larger scale and sold at outlets around Asia and the Middle East. But he's not trying to become Hong Kong's answer to The Gap. His daring, sometimes surreal vision is evident in even the most mundane items - embroidered bugs crawl up the sides of jeans, skulls dance across the front of a T-shirt and rainbow-hued patterns adorn a three-pack of men's briefs.
Two other local designers, Peter Lau and Nio Lam, joined forces in spring to open The New Shop.
Peter Lau's summer collection is a blast of hot-pink florals and other girly prints. Not unlike an Asian Vivienne Westwood, he exaggerates the silhouette with tightly ribbed corset tops, push-up bustiers and bustles. Fishnets and stilettos complete the mix.
Lam's works, which will not be available until the autumn, are softer. He uses earth tones, layers of loose fabrics and inspirations from nature.
His "bird dress" is made of tiny laser-cut silk and acetate "feathers" that fade from a burnt orange to a golden hue, and shimmer and shimmy as the wearer moves.
Change comes quickly in Hong Kong. Ranee K's old space has already been renamed Fang Fong and taken over by a lesser-known designer called Laifan Wu.
Mabel Li, who splits her time between Hong Kong and Britain, has opened Present, which was so new in early August that half of its furniture and stock had not arrived. It sells silk nightgowns and camisoles, which, during this very hot summer, women have been wearing as tops over denim shorts or miniskirts.
Nearby is one of the smallest stores I have ever seen, with a rack of qipao dresses by a local designer I had never heard of, mixed in with some other brands.
It might have been humble, but the sign over its door could almost be read as a snub to the established brands that occupy Hong Kong's prime retail spaces. "Crochet," it said in an old-fashioned cursive font. "Since 2007."
