Lingerie revolution takes shape for China's women

QINGDAO, China — Sun Yianxiang took her daughter to buy her first bra in a department store when the teenager was in high school. There were plenty of choices. Sun, however, didn't even know what a real bra looked like until she was almost 40.

It wasn't until 1993 that she saw a lacy contraption with bright colors and underwire support during a business trip to the trend-setting southern city of Shenzhen, among the first areas to open to foreign influence.

"I'd never seen anything like it before," Sun said. "I just had to buy it."

In the West, some see hemlines as an indicator of how the economy is doing — the higher the hem, the better the times. In China, it's the brassiere drawer.

"Underwear development in China went hand in hand with our country's economic development," said Song Yuhui, the new product development manager for Aimer, China's biggest domestic bra maker. "Before, the only thing on the market were simple bras made of thin white cotton. Women accepted it because they didn't know any better.

"Today, as people's purchasing power grew, women are accepting the idea that underwear can match outfits, different colors are good for different seasons, what you wear to a party could be different from what you wear to bed," she said. "But it took us some time to get to this point."

Until a recent trade dispute between the United States and China ignited what the Western media dubbed the Battle of the Bras, few outside the industry had noticed that, like so many other things these days, the bulk of the world's production of women's underwear had moved to China. But even as sparks fly over whether to use lingerie quotas to address the more than $110 billion trade surplus China enjoys over the United States, another Chinese cultural revolution is quietly taking shape.

Within years, China has gone from being a source of cheap labor for foreign lingerie companies to a formidable consumer of its own feminine creations. A burgeoning bra industry has moved with dazzling speed to remove the bandagelike cotton straps from the national wardrobe and replace them with Victoria's Secret wannabes that are changing the way Chinese women dress — and look.

The first to take advantage of the fancy new undergarments were working urban women with thickening pocketbooks. But with prices for intimate wear ranging from less than a dollar in curbside markets to more than $40 in fancy boutiques, just about any woman now can afford to indulge.

The idea of the shapely modern brassiere entered the Chinese consciousness in the 1930s through Hollywood movies. Until then, the Chinese were used to women concealing their curves. The first bras sold in China came from France. Then Russian immigrants in Shanghai built a reputation by popularizing made-to-order styles.

But soon after the communist revolution in 1949, lacy underwear, along with silk stockings and permed hair, was banished as part of a forbidden lifestyle associated with bourgeois materialism.

The collapse of old taboos has fueled a multibillion-dollar industry that is growing by 20 percent a year. According to one Chinese study, there are more than 5,000 underwear producers around the country, with a combined annual revenue of about $6 billion.

A decade ago, when China's first domestic bra maker began business, even the idea of shopping for underwear turned most women off. Simple as they were, bras were usually stocked like all other consumer goods, under glass counters guarded by sales clerks who cared little about service. There was no reliable sizing system and no way to try the garments on.

Sometimes women ran into uncomfortable situations when clerks tried to be helpful. One store in Shanghai allowed sales ladies to grab the customer's breast to help determine size.

Today, women can try on bras in private fitting rooms without unwanted touching.

Zhuang Fei has never seen a Victoria's Secret catalog or opened a newspaper filled with Maidenform ads. For most of her life, the worker at the Qingdao Nannan factory here on China's bustling east coast had no idea that the cloth covering a women's chest could come in so many sizes, styles and colors. Now, thousands of brassieres go through her hands every week before they are shipped out of the country and sold overseas.

"We've made push-up bras with thick padding good for women with very small busts, and we've made extra-large ones that are bigger than my head. It's really very funny," said Zhuang, 23, looking up from a heap of pink seamless Maidenforms.

The top brands at her factory, where she inspects products for stitching irregularities, are Maidenform, Victoria's Secret and Target brands. They are much more likely to end up on supermodel Tyra Banks than on a Chinese seamstress who makes about $3 a day.

"Nobody I know can afford this kind of quality," said Zhang Feng, 21, another assembly-line worker at Qingdao Nannan, as she zipped through a pile of apple-green bras with her sewing machine. "Anything that looks like this would cost at least $2.50 each. What I buy costs me only 60 cents."