如果每天都是在穿fast fashion，我會覺得我的身體有點營養不良。
　我的意思是，身體好像有一種被養壞掉的感覺。身體可以培養？當然可以。我指的是身體本身的一種本能美學機制，不，我不覺得它是一種腦袋的意識，而是絕對身體的。你可以每天換穿時髦但是不太具有美學養份的衣服，你也可以一直穿著Yohji。你餵給身體fast fashion，你的身體就只會變成H＆M的樣子，你餵給身體另一種美學想像，你的身體就會變成詩人或是藝術品。

　在百分之九十九的人生裡，我們的身體都不是屬於我們的，我們的身體是資本主義的身體，是時尚編輯的身體，是辦公室OA家俱的身體，是電視購物頻道的身體，是凱特摩絲奧森姊妹花蔡依林的身體……，久而久之，你的身體喪失一種quality，你的身體失去了表達自我的能力，你的身體被流行體系馴服，你的身體終究變成了複製人的其中之一，你的胳臂只會知道A Bathing Ape，你的雙腳只會知道Nike和Jimmy Choo，你的眼睛只會看見ZARA，你的大腿只會知道窄管褲。

　你的眼睛與身體似乎在盡責地為流行工廠打工，流行成了一種義務;你的眼睛會很快地判斷何者是in，何者是out，你不會覺得雲南的繡花鞋很美，你只會對那些虐待腳趾的當季designer鞋款流口水;你不需要欣賞中世紀的武士鎧甲，你只需要想盡辦法擠進XXS尺碼;你覺得敦煌石窟壁畫太遙遠，你只需要販賣紐約當紅炸子包的店址；你不會需要一塊絲綢布料，你只需要成為I.T.的pre-sale 貴賓名單。

　那麼，當有一天你遇見一件挑戰你的身體的衣服的時候，你才發現身體變得僵硬而無法感應，眼睛變得遲鈍而失去辨別能力，你才發現你得到的是一個被fast fashion徹底污染的身體，一個被宣告得到流行癌的身體。

　現代消費生活就是一種被大量同質的潮流文化包圍的生活，時尚趨勢、Must Have必買清單、各類潮人推薦、名牌排行榜、百貨公司、精品商店……人們少掉感受其他世界的能力，探索力也變得遲鈍，對大眾流行的上癮像是一種漸凍症，它會破壞人們自體的感受能力和欣賞差異的敏感能力。我總是覺得，任何一個產生某種工業規模的事物，都令我高度懷疑。

　相較名牌設計師，我更熱愛那些開發身體可能性的小眾設計師。建築線條的身體，偏食的身體，死亡的身體，不節制的身體，白色的身體，潔癖的身體，少女的身體，無歷史感的身體，民俗的身體，發育不良的身體，安靜的身體。在莎拉潔西卡派克成為時裝設計師，卡爾拉格斐成為電玩代言人的時代，那些回到衣服的本質去做哲學與視覺探索的設計師，Gareth Pugh、高橋盾、宮下貴裕、Rick Owens、Marios Schwab……，他們讓你明白流行世界的瘋狂不過是一種普通的瘋狂。

   ON A rainy weekend this month 10,000 businessmen, hobby traders and “netheads” gathered in Hangzhou, a pretty Chinese city near Shanghai, to talk about e-commerce. Most went to meet and swap tips with other online traders. All came to the “Alifest” to sit at the feet of Jack Ma, a pixie-sized, boyish 42-year-old who is the founder of Alibaba, an e-commerce firm, and is regarded as the godfather of the internet in China. In a country where businessmen are viewed with suspicion, his popularity is unusual. When he was invited recently to speak in Beijing's Great Hall of the People, Mr Ma needed six bodyguards to escape a mob of online traders waiting outside to give him a hug.

    Mr Ma's rock-star status reflects how he has enabled thousands of his countrymen to become their own bosses, build businesses and make money—a dream ingrained in Chinese culture but repressed by decades of Communist antipathy to private enterprise. Alibaba has become the world's largest online business-to-business (B2B) marketplace, Asia's most popular online auction site and, as a result of its acquisition of Yahoo! China, the 12th most popular website in the world. That combination makes Alibaba one of the few credible challengers to the global online elite of Google, eBay, Yahoo! and Amazon.

  Alibaba is far from being just a Chinese knock-off of these American giants. Indeed, they have borrowed ideas from him. “Jack is not just a Chinese visionary, but a global one. Western companies are taking pages from the Alibaba book,” says Bob Peck, an analyst at Bear Stearns. At Alibaba's heart sit two B2B websites (alibaba.com and china.alibaba.com), one a marketplace for firms from across the world to trade in English, the other a domestic Chinese service. Rival e-commerce outfits, such as America's Ariba and Commerce One, sought to cut multinationals' procurement costs. In contrast, Alibaba's intention was to build markets for China's vast number of small and medium-sized enterprises, which make everything from cufflinks to motorcycles, by allowing them to trade with each other and linking them to global supply chains. Today, traders in America buy from Alibaba and resell on eBay.

  Mr Ma has also led the charge into online communities and social networking, both now booming areas. In 2003 he added a consumer auction site, Taobao, that allowed instant-messaging—a feature later added to his business sites. In contrast with eBay's relative anonymity, Taobao lets buyers and sellers get chummy through messaging and voicemail, and by posting photographs and personal details on the site. Turning e-commerce into a community of “friends” has been critical in a country beset by a lack of trust. And with 70% of China's web users aged under 30, Taobao's informal, blog-like format struck a chord—attracting more than 20m users. Many have now gone professional, buying goods wholesale on Alibaba and reselling them on Taobao. The story goes that, shortly after visiting Alibaba's offices and seeing Taobao, Meg Whitman, eBay's boss, bought Skype, an internet-telephony start-up, for its instant-messaging.

  Alibaba has also outflanked the opposition in online payments. Aware that most Chinese do not have credit cards, Mr Ma introduced AliPay, a system that keeps cash in escrow until goods arrive. That trick for getting round settlement risk was later adopted in China by eBay. China's powerful banking regulator has a hawkish eye on AliPay, which is, in effect, an online bank with thousands of credit histories (something mainland banks crave). Taobao's success has been startling. Its market share jumped from 8% to 59% between 2003 and 2005, while eBay China's slid from 79% to 36%. Mr Ma trumpets that it is “game over” for eBay China. Many industry watchers expect eBay to retreat and sell out to a local outfit such as Tencent (a rising star in auctions) or Alibaba itself—as Yahoo! China did.

  Mr Ma is also at the forefront of the trend to integrate paid search with e-commerce. Alibaba's takeover of Yahoo! China last October gave the firm a search engine just as Google was demonstrating the huge potential of paid search, and the deal anticipated eBay's link-ups with portals (Yahoo! in America, and Google elsewhere). Baidu, China's main search engine, is a strong rival. But online advertising is surging in China and small firms are the biggest users of paid search, giving Alibaba an edge.

Keep It Simple

  Mr Ma seldom mentions technology. Whereas most internet entrepreneurs are geeks (think of Yahoo!'s or Google's founders), Mr Ma first touched a computer in 1995 on a trip to Seattle. “Someone as dumb as me should be able to use technology,” he says. He insists on simplicity. A new feature is rejected unless he can understand and use it. Mr Ma's approach to running the company is similarly independent. He reads neither business books nor case studies, and ascribes Alibaba's survival and success to the fact that he “knew nothing about technology, we didn't have a plan and we didn't have any money.” In truth, Mr Ma had powerful backers early on, including Goldman Sachs and Softbank. Yahoo!'s Jerry Yang—who joined Mr Ma at the Alifest—is also a longtime friend. In any case, he has money aplenty today: as part of its takeover by Alibaba, Yahoo! paid $1 billion for a 40% stake in the company.

  Only one thing is missing: profits. As the boss of a private company in no rush to join the stockmarket, Mr Ma is relaxed. Revenues should double to more than $200m this year. But Alibaba has so far pursued market share rather than revenue. The global business site charges its users, but Taobao does not; an attempt to do so this year failed. Mr Ma says it is too early: only 30m of China's 120m online users have bought anything online. He wants to help the market grow—creating 1m jobs in China in the next three years—not stifle it with charges. He will have to tackle profitability if he is really to call the tune.

 

Sep 21st 2006
From The Economist print edition

The Chinese are starting to travel abroad. But getting them to spend is difficult

CHINA'S citizens do not only export goods; increasingly they export themselves. The concept of tourism—going abroad for pleasure rather than for business—is less than a decade old in China. Yet since the Chinese government sanctioned overseas leisure trips in 1997, tourism has grown hugely. Last year more than 31m Chinese travelled outside mainland China and the World Tourism Organisation expects this number to grow to 50m by 2010 and 100m by 2020. Across the world, hotels, shops, restaurants and travel agents are salivating at the prospect.

Although there is money to be made, profits will be harder to come by than the headline numbers suggest. For a start, of those 31m, some 21m only made it as far as Hong Kong and Macau. Half of the rest were “border tourists”, on day trips to Russia, Vietnam or Laos to trade or gamble in casinos, which are illegal in China. Only 5m-6m Chinese could be called international tourists and most chose Asian destinations such as Thailand and Malaysia. Just 1m visited Europe and only a handful made it to America and Canada, which still restrict Chinese visitors.

Nor are the Chinese likely to resemble the free-spending Japanese visitors who lifted global tourism revenues in the 1980s. Most first-time travellers from the mainland are deeply frugal. Typically, a Chinese tour group will choose the cheapest hotel—even if it is 50km (30 miles) outside a city—travel by bus and eat only Chinese food, says Wolfgang Georg Arlt, a professor of tourism at Stralsund University in Germany and author of a new book on China's outbound tourism. They visit only the most famous attractions and even these often get only a cursory glance.

Those who return for a second or third visit will often spend more. But return visitors will be a minority for a long time to come—and so posh hotels, resorts and restaurants will have to wait for their Chinese windfall. At a recent conference organised by the European Tour Operators' Association, hotel owners complained that the Chinese were pushing down room prices.

Hard beds and cold noodles

Chinese tourists are willing to put up with hard beds and cold noodles for a reason: they are champion shoppers who prefer to concentrate their spending on luxury branded goods, which are cheaper than back home and guaranteed not to be fakes. In 2005 they spent more on shopping, per day and per trip, than travellers from Europe, Japan or America.

The biggest winners of the Chinese tourist boom are therefore likely to be international retailers and luxury-goods manufacturers. In Germany the second most visited place by Chinese tourists after Berlin is Metzingen, a small town in the Black Forest unknown to most Germans, but home to a giant Hugo Boss discount store—since joined by another 20-odd factory outlets for designer labels. Big, diversified luxury-goods groups—including LVMH, Richemont and Swatch—which are present in duty-free outlets and big cities worldwide and have established brands in China itself, should also do well. Antoine Colonna, an analyst at Merrill Lynch in Paris, reckons that the Chinese account for around 11% of the €97 billion ($121 billion) annual revenues of the luxury-goods industry today and that this will rise to 24% by 2009, surpassing the Americans, Japanese and Europeans.

Those that do best, though, understand that Chinese shoppers can be tough customers, says Mr Arlt. “Compared with the Japanese, Chinese mainland tourists coming to Europe for the first time are ruder, louder and more demanding,” he says, citing a tendency to smoke under “no smoking” signs, haggle over prices and rip off packaging at the checkout to be sure that everything is in the box. “All that makes sense in China, but European salespeople think it is very rude,” says Mr Arlt.

A growing number of organisations are, however, more than happy to cater to the Chinese. Galeries Lafayette, a famous department store in Paris, celebrated China's “Year of the Dog” this February with decorations of red and gold pooches, New Year messages in Chinese wishing happiness, prosperity and longevity together with greeters fluent in Mandarin, a Sichuan restaurant and deep discounts on its designer goods. Small wonder, then, that the Chinese spend more in the shop than any other group of foreign visitors do.

Accor, a French hotel group, has adapted 56 hotels (the bulk are its mid-range Mercure and Novotel hotels) in Europe for Chinese tourists, offering noodles for breakfast, Chinese TV channels and Mandarin-speaking staff. Rosita Yiu, who oversees the effort, says Accor will open another 50 this year and perhaps 50 more next year.

Tourist authorities are also trying harder. Switzerland's has a website with local attractions explained in Mandarin. Berlin's city tourist authority has opened its own German-themed shops, partly aimed at the Chinese, and selling, among other things, cuckoo clocks and Swiss army knives—considered German by some in China.

Tactics like these will pay off as more Chinese travel. Mr Arlt estimates that by 2020 there will be 30m “genuine” international tourists from China. They will demand more sophisticated service and new experiences, and will also be increasingly willing to pay for them. Accor's Ms Yiu says that Chinese tourists making return trips to Europe want to stay in nicer, four- and five-star hotels. The western tourism industry will need to adapt quickly and intelligently to the demands of Chinese visitors—but the prize is huge for those who can manage it.

 

Jun 22nd 2006 | HONG KONG
From The Economist print edition

 

 

The urge to scrimp and splurge

“MORE of the good stuff. For less.” So proclaims the new advertising campaign for Whole Foods Market, a hugely successful retailer of organic produce that, until now, has shown no interest whatsoever in being seen as a value-for-money proposition. Indeed, the firm has been nicknamed “Whole Paycheck Market”. But the new ads, launched in New York, carefully draw attention to a private-label range of produce with the frugal-sounding brand name “365 Everyday Value”.

Last month Mars, a big food company that owns the premium Whiskas and Pedigree pet-food brands, agreed to buy Doane Pet Care Enterprises, the largest supplier of private-label pet food to giant Wal-Mart. Days earlier Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia announced a deal to sell a new “Martha Stewart Collection” of home furnishings in Macy's department stores. The firm, resurgent since its eponymous founder's release from jail last year, already sells a “Martha Stewart Everyday” range exclusively in the downmarket K-Mart retail chain.

Each of these companies is trying to profit from what are arguably now the two most noteworthy trends among the swelling ranks of middle-class consumers around the world—trends that appear to be, at first glance, at odds with each other. These are the tendencies for consumers to be more cost-conscious; but simultaneously more willing to splurge money on luxury items.

Until the 1990s, broadly speaking, shopping choices tended to reflect spending power. The rich bought expensive things, and accounted for most luxury-goods sales. The poor tended to buy cheap, low-quality stuff. And the middle classes stuck to the mid-market.

Today, however, middle-class shoppers around the world are not content to be marooned in mediocrity. Instead, these consumers, who earn between $50,000-150,000, are “trading up and trading down” both at the same time. This change is described in great detail in “Treasure Hunt: Inside the Mind of the New Consumer”, a new book by Michael Silverstein and John Butman. In an earlier book, “Trading Up”, Mr Silverstein had explored one half of the change, the phenomenon of the middle-class occasionally treating themselves to luxuries that they would once have regarded as unaffordable. “Treasure Hunt” reports on the other side of that coin, the popularity of trading down—hunting for basic goods at bargain prices, not least to generate the savings that can be lavished on the occasional luxury.

Sales both at the top and bottom of the consumer market are rapidly growing while sales are being squeezed hard in the middle, though it is still the largest market segment in rich countries. Trading-up sales—those in which a middle-class consumer pays a premium of 50-200% over mid-priced alternatives—were around $300 billion in America in 2002, and are now around $500 billion (out of total consumer spending of $3.7 trillion). This is similar to Europe, where trading up is also in vogue. The trading-down market, in which middle-class shoppers pay less than the mid-market price, is far bigger, at around $1 trillion in America, Mr Silverstein calculates, up from $700 billion three years ago. This trend is also strong in Japan and Europe, especially in Germany.

But trading down is, in fact, a misleading term. One reason why this change has taken place is that the discount retailers have raised the quality of their products. A second development is the rapid increase in transparency in consumer markets, thanks not least to the internet, points out Don Tapscott, author of “The Naked Corporation”. When price comparisons on Froogle are only a click away, it has become a sign of sophistication to get the best price. There is status in getting a deal.

Not everyone thinks this is a good thing, however. Americans, in particular, “have become addicted to the deal, which is leading them to do irrational things”, argues Kate Newlin, author of another new book, “Shopportunity! How to be a Retail Revolutionary”. One consequence is that people buy lots of stuff they do not need—a pack of 600 cookies, a gallon of pickles—chiefly because it seems to be a bargain. With so much unwanted stuff, often bought on credit, it is hardly surprising that storage is one of today's fastest-growing industries, says Ms Newlin.

Death in the middle

For companies that have made their money supplying mid-market products, times are getting harsher. At least some of the woes of General Motors, an archetypal mid-market firm, stem from the fact that in 1994-2004 the trading-up segment of the car market grew by eight percentage points, the trading-down segment grew by four, and the middle shrunk by 12.

In this bifurcated market, firms in the middle need to move either up- or downmarket, argues Mr Silverstein. He laments that such firms instead typically opt for cost-cutting, rather than taking the risk of developing new products for the consumer trading up. Often the cost-cutting is ineffective, as it reduces quality, too, whereas trading up may create opportunities. Kraft, owner of various cheese brands and other mid-market brands such as Maxwell House coffee, is a good example of a firm stuck in the middle. A few years ago, believing that the market for coffee was in long-term decline, it missed the trading-up opportunity later taken by Starbucks—one of the outstanding practitioners of the art of getting self-pampering consumers to part with their money.

Some bold firms are trying to tap both the trading-up and trading-down markets at once, which would have been unthinkable when shoppers never strayed out of their single, income-related price band. This is what lies behind Martha Stewart's move upmarket into Macy's, and Whole Foods Market's scheme to tout its cheaper range, reckons Mr Silverstein.

But neither approach is straightforward. Opinions differ over the value of creating an “affordable luxury” Martha Stewart brand in a department store. Negotiations to launch the collection at Sears, a department store that shares an owner with K-Mart, broke down in early April, apparently because Eddie Lampert, the private-equity investor who is the controlling shareholder, did not share the domestic diva's valuation of the initiative.

As for Whole Foods, its new focus on value may be a defensive response to Wal-Mart's decision to start selling organic produce at prices only 10% above its non-organic alternatives. Perhaps Whole Foods could be savaged from below, just as Tesco savaged Sainsbury—a British retailer with an eerily similar ad slogan, “Good Food Costs Less”. Companies that get stuck in the mid-market may be doomed. But as businesses trading up clash with those trading down, some of them may end up as losers, too.

May 18th 2006 | NEW YORK
From The Economist print edition