Five Chinese high street fashion brands to watch as they go global, and displace the likes of Zara, H&M in China

Bosideng, Urban Revivo, Peacebird, Ochirly, Me & City – soon they could be familiar sights on high streets in the West as China’s fashion industry looks abroad

Labels that largely cut their teeth in price-conscious lower-tier cities, they could gain strength from Gen Z interest in Chinese brands as they grow in West

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Published: 1:00pm, 14 Jul 2019Updated: 8:23am, 16 Jul 2019

For every Topshop in the West, with its racks of ultra-hip dresses and crop tops, there’s an Urban Revivo in China peddling wide-legged summer pants and playful florals. For every H&M limited-edition collection in a tie-up with luxury designers, there’s a Peacebird collaboration with a rising Chinese fashion designer.

With China poised to become the world’s largest fashion market in 2019, home-grown high-street brands are well placed to cash in. They’ve long occupied space in lower-tier cities barely penetrated by foreign affordable-clothing brands such as Zara, H&M and Uniqlo, and recently they’ve been taking their collections to the international stage.

Peacebird and Bosideng, for example, have both featured in Chinese retailing website Tmall’s “China Day” at New York Fashion Week, and have embarked on numerous design collaborations and capsule collections of global relevance. (Tmall is operated by Alibaba Group, which owns the South China Morning Post.)

It remains to be seen how much these Chinese brands will affect the sales in China of their Western counterparts, several of which have been facing headwinds. Last year, British high-street brands Topshop and New Look pulled out of China, and US counterpart Forever 21 followed this year. China accounted for just 5 per cent of Swedish chain H&M’s global sales in 2018, when it launched its Tmall store to match the e-commerce presence of China’s domestic fashion retailers.

An ad for Peacebird, one of several Chinese high street fashion brands looking to attract Western consumers.

Making your brand accessible through e-commerce isn’t the only thing that’s important to win over young shoppers. “With younger Chinese consumers becoming more attracted to made-in-China brands, this is shifting how they approach high-street fashion,” trends writer and researcher Sandy Chu told the Post.