If you see anyone wearing a mandarin-style jacket - the very latest in Oriental chic - the chances are that it was acquired not in the East but in the West, more precisely in Shanghai Tang's of Madison Avenue, the chic new fashion store created by cigar-smoking Hong Kong entrepreneur, David Tang.
The opening of Shanghai Tang's earlier this month has caused a flurry of rather pretentious sermons about East meeting West, or as Newsweek put it: "How a New Fusion is Shaping Global, Culture and Finance." The magazine Luxe enthused that "When histories are written that consider the new role of China in so utterly changed a world, some will look back and see events like this as having a symbolism far greater than was imagined at the time."
But to imagine that the Dragon is about to conquer the planet style-wise, or seriously infiltrate the world of haute couture, is stretching things a bit. Shanghai Tang's is timely no doubt; there is a fad now in the US and Europe for Chinese styles.
Mr Tang has persuaded people, with the help of fashionable friends such as the Duchess of York, that it is the smart thing to drape oneself in mandarin suits and jackets and brocade Chinese dresses fashioned in a style which borrows from the Imperial court and the decadence of pre-war Shanghai. His Mao watches with minute hands waving to the masses also have a communist-kitsch attraction, though they can be bought for a fraction of the price in any Chinese street market. But the appeal has its limitations. The "dress-Chinese" day in Hong Kong in August was observed hardly at all outside top hotels like the Conrad, where violinist, Vanessa Mae, Canto-Pop singer, Andy Lau, and actor, Anthony Wong, slipped into cheongsams and traditional Chinese suits. "It's nothing that's going to last," said a Western fashion expert. "It's the party dress for this year and is just the fashion for now. Oriental styles in any event tend to suit only petite young people." Shanghai Tang is in fact something of a marketing coup.
"This is not about retail so much as creating a brand," Tang said recently. "What's American? McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Marlboro. What's French? Yves St Laurent, Hermes. What's Italian? Ferrari. But what's Chinese? There is no Chinese brand. It seems crazy." Tang's achievement is in creating a fashion lifestyle brand, using posters of the actress, Gong Li, in silk jacquards posing beside big porcelain vases to emphasise the Chinese-ness of the product. Globalism in fashion (Westernisation is a misleading word) is so firmly entrenched across the world that it is hard for Chinese styles to catch on in China.
The customers at Shanghai Tang's in Hong Kong are mostly expatriates or Western tourists. The high-class clothes shops of the orient, in Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing or Tokyo, carry the same lines in sophistication as boutiques in Paris, Rome, Dublin or New York. The collective Chinese leadership have just shed their Mao suits in the course of a single generation and swopped them for suits and ties, and they are unlikely to start appearing in quilted silk jackets (except perhaps when Beijing hosts a world summit and all the leaders have to wear the trendy national style for a photo-op - remember Canada's choice of leather jackets at the recent APEC summit in Vancouver).
The mandarin suit is as likely to become global fashion as the Japanese kimono or Indian sari. The trend is so much in the opposite direction, i.e. West to East, that in Chinese department stores all the tailor's dummies are job-lot imitations of Madison Avenue models, even including politically-correct African Americans. Gong Li advertises L'Oreal in Beijing. Gunagzhou businessmen dress in suits indistinguishable from those worn by their corporate look-alikes in Atlanta or Osaka. Japanese schoolgirls dress like their English counterparts, and the Japanese imperial family affects the gear of high-class Edwardians. In his Hong Kong store David Tang himself can be found in pin-stripes So only the West, it seems, is keen on the East's exoticism. The Paris courtiers show of spring 1997 featured hand-painted dragons and Chinese embroidered fabrics. John Galliano has introduced a Chinese Christian Dior collection.
"The climate is right for a violent design reaction," said David Wolfe of the Donegar Group, who has been charting Chinese influence on design and fashion since 1995 and forecasts that the Shanghai Tang look should begin to catch on in mainstream America this winter. "Ethnic things are always easily accepted," he told Time magazine. "They're vibrant and exciting without being vulgar, because of their spiritual significance." The last two years have reportedly seen a growing interest in authentic Chinese styles in the home furnishings industries in the US. By Wolfe's reckoning, the trend may last two or three years.
The East has, of course, been influencing the West for centuries. The fusion of the races has been going on the old fashioned way since Marco Polo made his journey along the Silk Road. The latest celluloid example if this is Gong Li and Jeremy Irons in Chinese Box, a film about a bar girl who gets involved with a British journalist during the Hong Kong handover. China introduced us to paper, printing, bureaucracy, gunpowder, the compass, silks, wallpaper, and Chinese food.
Chippendale home furnishings were heavily influenced by Chinese styles, as were women's fashions of the 1920s. And house buyers now look for good feng shui. The smartest example of wise feng shui - or marketing sense - is Shanghai Tang's placement in Madison Avenue at the end of 1997 with its doors facing the monied elite.