On the weekend in Shanghai, whether you are in Wangfujing shopping street right next to the Tian An Men Square Beijing or Plaza 66 located in West Nanjing Road Shanghai you’ll see the XXL posters of topless masculine men tangling with appealing biondas from Dolce & Gabbana, delicate and dazzling jewelries showing off their extravagant rays inside the comptoires of Cartier and getting-everyone-insatiable handbags from Hèrmes. For them, the showcase is already enough to let us stop by and WASTE a day browsing in the boutiques.

 

We may have this confusion that luxury can’t be sold on the internet if we think that customers concerned about quality and size. However, if you go to those brands’ official websites, you’ll always end up seeing ‘online store’ on many of them. This is a new trend, not just fashionable but also unstoppable.

 

Emporio Armani led the way in China. It opened online sales last week on its official website through Chinese internet which has been growing enormously fast for luxury brands.

 

The designer of Armani’s website in China- Federico Marchetti, said at a news conference that this is a strategic move that will open up luxury to the entire nation. He also revealed that they plan to open up more Chinese sites for three or four clients whose names he didn’t mention. Dolce & Gabbana, Ermenegildo Zegna and Valentino are among the e-commerce company’s 23 clients. Meanwhile, Italian fashion brand Gucci, British Burberry Group and Italian shoemaker Tod’s also have plans to invest in China’s intense population of internet shoppers.

 

Since the Chinese economy is booming, the Chinese consumers changed both the way of consuming and the way of wearing. Young Chinese girls could be easily spotted wearing a plain white blouse with a dark-blue short dress, yet today, they all probably have watched too much Devil Wears Prada that made them all go flashy; Boys, on the other hand, also changed dramatically, though not in Price-Charming-Fairytale way. Before boys looked nerdy with a dark cardigan with jeans, today if they still pursuit being nerdy but also look for fashionable sense, they wear gray, navy and dark brown cardigans and thick collars giving an air of Steve McQueen-style, which shifts them from a nerdy alumni to an adorable garçon.

 

Therefore, the high-end fashion brands have seen through Chinese customers’, they all plan to sell their handbags, polish shoes and apparels directly to them by internet, which drives the customers to redefine themselves by spending on luxury labels.

 

Luxury has been a two-sided word. For one thing, complicated Chinese import tariffs let down the costumers from buying via overseas websites; for another, Chinese webs offered a series of brands usually through a middleman. Western sites are available to Chinese shoppers merely to a limited degree.

 

Fashion brands have stridden their ways to open more boutiques in Chinese western cities, such as Hohhot in Inner Mongolia and Kunming in Yunnan, in which few retailers dare to step up. As competition between luxury retailers in Eastern metropolises like Beijing and Shanghai is intensified, it seems a right choice to open more boutiques in central and western cities where people are getting richer and richer.

 

China is the world’s second-biggest luxury market and will overtake Japan (#1) in a few years, according to consulting company Bain & Co. Chinese sales of luxury products surged 20 % to $12.1 USD last year. What’s more, Chinese customers have been stuck on the internet. E-commerce sales in China jumped to 134.2 billion RMB in the third quarter, doubling from one year earlier.

 

The confusion mentioned above is quite understandable, lots of luxury brands are fearful of terrible quality control and complex after-sales service. Meanwhile, the fashion labels are afraid that their fame will be devalued if selling to an internet market where customers usually seek discounted goods. China’s largest e-commerce site Taobao.com says that it drew $ 30 billion in transactions last year, largely by undercutting on prices.

 

The opportunities e-commerce brings in China are too tremendous to ignore. An estimated 80% of online shoppers are less than 45 years old, compared to 30 % in the US.

 

Yuval Atsmon, an associate principal at consultant McKinsey & Co. in Shanghai, said that the web offers major opportunities but also comes with big risks for this sector, that many have been reluctant to rush in.

 

After Armani’s online store opening, I browsed some blogs and viewed some comments from Chinese internet users, some disapproved the way luxury products sold; while there are still a number of people supporting the move, saying that they will have more choices and get more information about the products. Few expect discount since Armani and other companies have announced that they will sell their products at full price.

 

China’s internet users are expanding, the number of online users is 300 million, luxury also comes to Chinese people’s lives despite the expensive price. Nowadays, being savvy and sensible on fashion has become part of our daily routine, it is quite clear that not only can a human wear Prada but a website can as well.