These Designers Prove “Made in China” is Anything But Cheap
“When people hear ‘Made in China’,” says Beijing-born, New York-based designer Aviva Jifei Xue, “they immediately picture mass-production factories or compromised quality.” Asked if she ever encounters that negative stereotype herself, she doesn’t hesitate: “Yes, of course. We occasionally sense a subtle judgment from buyers, and even get direct inquiries from customers saying, ‘I love this piece, but why is it made in China?’”
Xue is at the forefront of a new generation of Chinese designers who, through a small-scale, artisanal approach, are redefining what it means to produce clothes in China. Whereas the "Made In China" label may have once reflected cut-rate quality, it now is affixed to some of the world's finest clothes. In fact, “What my peers and I are showing,” says Wynn Yuen of MORIN KHUUR, a Shanghai-based label focusing on traditional Chinese crafts, “is that Western perceptions lag decades behind.” Zoey Zhou of Hangzhou-based ZAMX goes one step further: “’Made in China’ as ‘poor quality’ or ‘cheap’ is a thing of the past. I know for a fact it’s becoming increasingly expensive to produce here every year, and that’s mostly because Chinese manufacturers boast high standards.” (Case in point: Mass-market brands like Nike and GAP have reduced production in China for exactly that reason.)
It’s not just designers from China saying this. Despite what he calls the sporadic “knee-jerk reaction,” Carter Altman, founder and designer of New Americana label Carter Young, feels confident about producing tailoring in China. “Other countries have robust made-to-measure supply chains, but not many manufacturers allow for the level of customization — in finishing and attention to detail — that we’ve found with our current Chinese partner,” he says. Altman, who regularly dresses A-listers like Paul Mescal and Ethan Hawke, takes an agnostic stance on the “Made in China” label stigma. “For me it’s less a choice about country of origin and more about who can achieve the highest level of execution on the finished product.”
The increasing visibility of thoughtful makers producing quality clothing in China offers a more deliberate alternative to China’s sprawling factory lines and the broader ethical concerns they carry. They favor collaborations with small manufacturers and skilled artisans, whom they often know personally, for everything from fabrics and dyeing to ribbing and buttons. These are “garment cultures,” as Janny Jingyi Ye of London-based label seventyfive calls them, “that even many people in China haven’t seen, mostly because Western outsourcing shaped how garment making is imagined there today.”
Xue, for instance, works with a 10-person sewing atelier in Beijing that’s “nothing like what people imagine when they hear ‘factory in China.’ They often bring me vegetables they grow in their backyard and during the holidays my parents send them gifts,” she says. Her natural-fiber, earthy-hued clothing is currently stocked in around 30 stores of which about 10 are in China, including Anchoret Boutique in Beijing and Ink Clothing in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, Yuen regularly collaborates with a group of craftsmen from the Dong community in Guizhou Province, producing handwoven fabrics on the region’s traditional looms.
This new generation of designers, preceded by established artisanal names like Ziggy Chen and Uma Wang, draws on a traditional Chinese aesthetic both real and imagined. MORIN KHUUR, ZAMX and like-minded labels are often grouped under “xinzhongshi” — or “neo-Chinese style” — a shorthand for historical silhouettes and palettes reworked into something contemporary, with an awareness of China’s multi-ethnic character. For instance, Hunger Ren, a one-person label based in Hangzhou, creates gown-like coats from mud-dyed wool-silk — a historic Chinese treatment — and vests from antique Chinese silk dyed with four types of Chinese tea. ZAMX, through handwork, plant-based dyes, and buttons made from cattle bones, shells and pearls, explores what Zhou calls “a return to Eastern naturalism, focused on the spiritual inspiration that nature provides, much like it did before the Industrial Age.”
For others, including Chinese-born designers living and working abroad, the influence feels less direct. “It’s more than an aesthetic engagement with China or Chineseness,” says Ye, who was born and raised in China but has spent her adult life in Canada and the UK, hand-making garments from her London studio like the “Pipa Vest,” based on a traditional Manchurian vest from the Qing Dynasty and formed from an intricate blend of Pima cotton, yak, silk and mohair. “It’s about imagining what an alternative history of Chinese aesthetics might be,” she adds. “I may start with a vintage fabric, a painting of a market from the 1890s or a photo of food from the 1910s, and picture what the world might be like today if that moment had continued in that form.”
Many of these smaller Chinese labels aren’t known or stocked outside China. The reasons come down to a simple yet telling fact: they don’t have to be. “This scene has built its own ecosystem,” says Xue, and it’s “already self-sufficient in China,” Ye adds. A domestic market of customers valuing home-grown independent designers sustains them, while platforms like Red Note (“Xiaohongshu”) and Taobao — China’s equivalents of Instagram and Amazon — provide visibility beyond the reach of audiences outside the country.
“Don’t forget that Beijing has a population of about 20 million people,” says Daniel Gu of MotivMfg, a Beijing-based label combining technical workwear with elements of bespoke tailoring. “It means that, in principle, it would be possible for us to just do business here.” It’s not far from reality: MotivMfg has about 25 stockists worldwide, but its six retailers in China account for roughly 50 percent of its sales. Three of these are effectively its own stores, with co-founder Samuel Wei — a pioneer of the heritage market in China — also behind the retail platform Radiance Blue.
ZAMX, founded in 2003 by Qin Xiao and now run by her daughter Zoey Zhou, has no international stockists and doesn’t ship outside China. Yet domestically, it operates two flagship stores and has around 30 stockists in cities across the country. Designed by Lin Youzhu, a former design assistant at Uma Wang, the label employs over 70 people, including 30 in-house garment makers. Like MotivMfg, ZAMX produces all its collections in China, from sample to finished product, and mostly in-house. “I still remember Nigel Cabourn visiting our studio,” says Gu. “He was like, ‘You guys are living the dream!’” That dream exists because China has a complete domestic supply-chain and is globally connected, even for labels far removed from mass production.
There’s room for improvement, even beyond the issues of mass-scale manufacturing. “More and more smaller brands and factories led by young people are striving for originality,” says Zhou, “yet plagiarism remains prevalent.” While not always necessary, it can be hard for labels to connect with audiences overseas (“chuhai”) — whether buyers or customers — due to media limitations, high costs and the unfamiliarity of the global market. “Some Chinese labels show at Paris Fashion Week just to boost sales in China,” says Ye. “For others, friends of mine, showing in Paris genuinely aligns with what they want to do. But after one season, they find out it’s extremely competitive too, so they return to China and stay there.”
