Day 10: Cheap clothes from China

6/9/2024

Day 10: Cheap clothes from China

Two decades before I decided to wear only a small selection of Shein clothes to test whether fast fashion really is disposable, I first encountered cheap clothes from China in large volumes when I went to work in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan in the early 2000s.

Before that, I hadn’t paid much attention to where my clothes were made. I vaguely remember a dollshouse dressing table stamped with ‘Made in Taiwan’ and other toys bearing ‘Made in Japan’ labels, but I don’t remember studying the tags in my clothes. Even when I was buying my own clothes and doing my own laundry, decisions were based on ‘does it look good?’ And ‘can I afford it?’ rather than considerations of quality or source.

But when I started working on a local English language newspaper catering to Bishkek’s expat community in 2003 — five years before Shein was founded — my new colleagues and other acquaintances were enthusing about the massive out of town bazaar, Dordoi, where they assured me I would find an endless supply of cheap clothes from China.

Kyrgyzstan, by the way, is a small Central Asian country bordering China. As both countries were part of the WTO, huge amounts of clothes and consumer goods used to the trucked across the border, through the mountains and into the bazaar at Drodoi to be sold to local people or sold on to other bazaars and shops across the Central Asian region.

I entered Central Asia’s largest bazaar under a rainbow-painted arch bearing the words ‘Welcome to Dordoi’. Everywhere there were cars and people carrying bags, pulling handcarts, buying, selling, spitting, smoking and shouting.

Clutching my bag to my side, I followed the press of people pushing to get into the bazaar. Inside, under the tarpaulin roof that cast a bluish shade onto every face, were stall after stall on either side of the alleyways, crammed with merchandise – electrical goods, nail varnish, hair things, cassettes – and then alley after alley of clothes.

Swept along by the tide of shoppers, I was pushed past bulging bales of scarves, t-shirts dangling from their hangers, and men pulling carts along the narrow lanes. When it started to seem like the rows of clothing stalls would go on for ever, I suddenly emerged into daylight, and saw ten or more stores full of black rubber galoshes pegged onto clotheslines, interspersed with people selling radios and headphones, sunglasses, embroidered velvet coats, wigs, mops, kalpaks, pills from India, DVD players from China, and an old Russian lady with four skinned pigs’ trotters.

I was too bemused to buy anything on that first trip, but over the next few months trips to Dordoi became a regular event, usually after payday. Even if I didn’t buy anything I would amuse myself by seeing how many cheap polyester versions of the latest fashions (micro trends I suppose, though the phrase wasn’t in use then) I could find there — the coloured gloves, the mini kilts, and so on.

My first major purchase was a pair of winter boots. I went with a fellow west European working on the magazine as neither of us were prepared for the central Asian winter and one of our local colleagues.

She took us to an area where rack after rack on stall after stall was lined up with plastic boots. She demonstrated that we needed to buy a pair with a fleece lining — the fleece was uniformly grey polyester. Without inquiring as to the materials, the difference between these and the leather boots I’d worn at home was very obvious to sight and feel. Still, we had an interesting morning trying on boots and each came away with a pair with three-inch stiletto heels — which my colleague said would act a bit like crampons on the icy streets — and pointed toes.

I wore them through the winter, and the initial chemical smell from the plastic boot and lining gave way to a wet dog aroma as they started to leak as the crisp January snow gave way to melting slush towards the end of February. I trekked round the food bazaar carrying bags of potatoes, stood around at press conferences, ran for the bus, danced in nightclubs… by the end of the winter one of the heels had broken off twice and been mended by my local cobbler, and I was glad to toss them into the communal rubbish bins outside our block of Soviet-era flats, where a carelessly discarded cigarette most likely incinerated them. Burning bins releasing a toxic fug from packaging waste (and broken boots) were a daily feature of life in Bishkek.

I did stints working in Central Asia on and off until 2014, paying multiple visits to Dordoi as well as to the similarly huge Baraholka bazaar in Almaty, Panshanje bazaar in Khujend, Tajikistan, and many other smaller markets across Central Asia and the Caucasus.

One vendor at the Baraholka explained the hierarchy of source countries. She described a t-shirt as ‘Turkish quality’. Seeing I was puzzled, she explained that ‘European quality’ was the best quality, akin to what you would find in the European chains like Zara and MNG that opened in Kazakhstan during the late noughties and early 2010s. Turkish quality was somewhere in the middle, and Chinese quality was rock bottom (but very cheap).

Still I went on buying Chinese quality clothes and accessories. I bought colourful tops and t-shirts — my favourite had the slogan ‘Sorry but I’m the queen’ and a diamante crown, I still have it even though it doesn’t fit me any more. I bought a black sequinned mini skirt for clubbing, and a pair of shorts for hiking in the Ala-Too mountains. I bought plastic shoes that looked good, but cracked after a few wears. I paid pennies for pendants and earrings, which mostly tarnished or fell apart.

Those cheap Chinese clothes and accessories aren’t only for sale in Central Asia. In the Balkans, I found similar products at the Bloc 70 market in the outskirts of Belgrade, Serbia, as well as many smaller (but just as intriguing) shops selling cheap things from China inside the city. I happened on one in Naples, Italy too, and in other unexpected places.

Many Chinese factories, and those elsewhere in the far East, are set up to produce goods to that ‘European standard’ described by the vendor, mainly those produced for sale in Western markets. But the ones that find their way into the bazaars of Central Asia don’t have to meet those standards. They’re lots of fun to browse and buy, fun to wear a few times, but they aren’t made to last. And they don’t.

What I’m wearing today