MVN - Most Valuable Network

Tennis and Exercise - Beijing Style: Part II

photos by joe landsberger

On a busy street in Beijing I discovered a tennis shop stocked with Wilson and Prince racquets. Since I didn’t have time to ask the sales staff much, it’s unclear how knowledgeable they were. But you don’t need very experienced staff if your clientele aren’t sophisticated. The prices were about full US retail plus maybe 30%, and I didn’t see any smaller companies represented. I also didn’t see anyone buying. Whether all the merchandise was genuine, I can’t say, either – there lots of counterfeits coming out of China, as with other brand name goods, reportedly from people stealing official racquet molds from Chinese factories and making knockoffs; the shape may be the same – otherwise there are numerous differences in materials, weight, balance, durability, even cosmetics, etc.

There are large street malls with foreign brands of sports apparel - Nike, Converse, Adidas, Fila - side by side, with lots of shoes (made in China, of course). I never saw customers buying anything; these are mainly product showcases. The prices were not discounted – think full US retail plus about 30%, still out of the range of most Chinese, and the designs look about 5 years old; nothing too revealing, radical, or spandexy. I didn’t even see any sports bras, or any tops with built-in bras. Still mainly polos, for both men and women. The stuff we like here probably wouldn’t sell too well over there – although after the Olympics, the sight of all those buff sporty bodies capering about in all their athletic glory might start to change the country’s tastes and send scores of underexercised citizens to the gym (those magnificent delts on the swimmers, those incredible thighs on the sprinters, the manly chests on the boxers, and wow, those tennis players sure have nice legs…you get the idea).

While window shopping I took special note of sports apparel. Aside from teens, the Chinese are generally conservative and understated in their dress, favoring darker colors and avoiding clothes that are too tight, revealing, or unusual. Even the teens rarely wear shorts and sleeveless garments; despite their slight build, they don’t like to show much skin, unlike Westerners, many of whom tend to show too much when maybe they shouldn’t. The Chinese are known for their intellectual abilities, not their physical prowess or muscle mass. But everywhere there were large posters and billboards with Olympic themes. The official souvenir shops have been up and running for a while now. The country is hungry for athletic glory, and the pressure on their athletes is unimaginable (think of the honor of your country, your family, your ancestors, your present and future progeny, and yourself, more or less in that order).

At present, the only Chinese sports apparel company trying to compete at the international level is Li Ning, named after the 1984 gold medal gymnast, who is chairman of the board. The only notable pro tennis player wearing Li Ning to date is Ivan Ljubicic, whom they signed up last year. I saw a lot of Li Ning clothes and shoes – their designs look about 10 years old, not just 5. Frankly, a lot of their stuff I’m not sure you could give away here. The fabrics looked and felt like polyester doubleknit from way back when. I’m not sure what fabrics they have Ivan wearing – would he wear the stuff I saw?? None of the top Chinese female pros wear Li Ning. They prefer Nike. But the Chinese girls aren’t built like the strapping, stilt-legged Amazons from here or Russia, and they certainly don’t have the same fashion sense of say, Jelena Jankovic. So often they end up looking like they’re wearing someone else’s clothes – and in a sense, that’s true. A 5’4” girl with a short torso and heavy hips in the current Adidas skirt with a huge white horizontal stripe across the bottom? Instant way to look 25% shorter and fatter. Not even Justine, slim as she is, carries that off too well. Few women would pick that look by choice. What were those designers thinking?? Answer: They weren’t. But Adidas is hardly the only famous sports name that keeps managing to put out a few vomit-inducing styles. Stella McCartney seems to be inspired by balloon drapery and Nike has a truly unfortunate line of summer dresses. Heavy-looking, layered skirts, also with horizontal detailing. The Nike lilac and black number dress is what Sharapova is wearing now - a dress with a skirt that looks like a shower curtain with liner. Stick a ball under it and it looks about a foot wider.

I also couldn’t help noticing local teens on the streets wearing an odd mishmash of styles, inspired by already strange styles from here, like variations of dresses worn over jeans. Repeat: they end up looking like they’re wearing someone else’s clothes, designed for someone else’s body. The Chinese are extremely brand-conscious and assign more status to foreign brands than their own, even if the merchandise is made in China. They aren’t inspired to knock off their own brands; they think them lower quality, and often that’s true. Quality control and regulation still lags (in some ways the economy is like the wild West in America); it’s not only foreigners that suffer from product adulteration or contamination of Chinese exports; Chinese people are always warning each other about bad stuff, especially unclean food at certain restaurants and street vendors. It’s not just because they want a good price that they look over merchandise very carefully before buying. Something to keep in mind when thinking about the quality of building construction in Chengdu, after the earthquake.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 2:23 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.