SHANGHAI — Like many Western cultural exports, gala award shows are proliferating in China.
Most of them, such as the MTV Style Gala here last month, are less about recognizing achievements than putting celebrities on the red carpet and filling China’s expanding television universe.
The one specific to the fashion industry is the China Fashion Awards, which were Nov. 5 at the Pudong Shangri-La. First held in 2001 as the Lycra In Style Fashion Awards, the event this year expanded its scope and changed its name to the China Fashion Awards, or CFA.
The CFA’s purpose is to “serve as a platform for the China Fashion Industry as a whole,” said Melvin Chua, who has co-organized the awards since their inception. He is founder and president of Ink Pak Communication Group, which handles publicity for the majority of fashion brand events in China.
“The show also serves as a platform to launch and promote local talents,” Chua added. “Each year, we honor top local Chinese designers, fashion models, artists and individuals. The show…with over 400 million viewers, publicity and marketing programs, helps these local Chinese talents achieve much-needed exposure and recognition.”
Lycra launched the In Style Awards in 2001 as a brand communication strategy, said China-Hong Kong brand director Lisa Qi. “Four years ago, Lycra’s brand awareness was very low, at 10 percent. It’s a product you can’t see, so we couldn’t leverage traditional communication tools.” The company decided to do “something big on the consumer and trade level, showing why to pay more for Lycra, that the brand houses would identify with. Fashion awards were not that fresh of an idea, even four years ago, just no one was willing to execute them.”
In the first year, Lycra worked with “Mei yi shou ge” (“Every Song”), a weekly program on CCTV (China Central Television) with the highest ratings at the time, to organize the show. For 2002, they partnered with MTV, and since 2003, Lycra joined with Channel Young, a station of Shanghai Television, which has taken over as the CFA’s sole chief organizer.
“We decided to downgrade to co-sponsor this year…because we thought it was important to limit the event’s commercialization, and to try to make it as independent as possible,” said Qi. Plus. “For the brand, all expectations were met and beyond for Lycra In Style. It was a three-to-five-year proposal for us.”
Related Articles
You May Also Like
The company, which launched its China operations in 1997, and whose parent, Invista, maintains an office staff of 200 in the country, is focusing on a television program called “Lycra My Show.” The 15-episode program was organized in cooperation with Universal Music and described by Qi as “a bit like ‘American Idol.'” Now in its second year, the show runs on Dragon TV. “Lycra In Style gave us the top niche of the fashion pyramid, while ‘Lycra My Show’ reaches a much younger, middle-income customer.”
Channel Young, the CFA’s new organizer, promotes itself as “the only fashion television channel in China,” although its concept of fashion is fairly broadly defined. While celebrities and international apparel brands dominate, its programming includes entertainment, nightlife and consumer goods.
One show was recently devoted to introducing a sporty scooter from Hyundai. Li Young, vice president of Young Media, said Channel Young has about six to eight hours of original content per daily broadcast of 18 to 20 hours.
He said the most popular show is the daily “Style Today,” about global and local fashion trends. Segments include makeup tutorials, a monthly celebrity the audience is encouraged to imitate and coverage of parties. Other fashion-related programs include “World Fashion Frontier,” which profiles brands and shows international catwalks, “Modern Style,” which showcases consumer trends and modeling competition “Super Model.”
Young Media, which runs Channel Young, is a subsidiary of Shanghai Media Group, or SMG, the state-owned conglomerate that controls STV as well as much of the other media in the city. Young Media also started publishing a China edition, with 20 percent original content and 200,000 copies printed weekly, of the tabloid OK, and plans to expand into real estate. The company, headquartered in Shanghai, has a staff of 130 and bureaus in Beijing, Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Seoul, with Tokyo opening in March.
On STV, Channel Young reaches two to three million households in Shanghai, and its cable channel reaches about 600,000 households in 40 Chinese cities. Channel Young sells its programming to more than 100 other television stations in 70 cities.
Channel Young was launched in January 2002, said Li Yong, “because China was developing fast, and it needed the lifestyle to develop with it, creating a new market opportunity. We originally were more about daily life, family relations and clothing, but felt the target audience was too general and low-income. For Channel Young, we wanted the higher market of urban white-collar youth.”
To justify their cosponsorship and coverage of Channel’s August gala on the Pudong Maglev, Li explained, “In Shanghai, international brand awareness means people know the names, but don’t understand what they mean, or that fashion is about global culture, not just brands. Our job is to explain, for example, what the Channel spirit means.”
Taking the reins of the China Fashion Awards, along with cosponsoring events like Shanghai Fashion Week and the Shanghai Tourism Festival, is part of Channel Young’s ambition to raise the fashion awareness of viewers.
“The purpose is to have an event that is a brand on the China market, and to do it big so it becomes important. Next year, we want to have it be even bigger, to include all of Asia,” Li said. The CFA cost $1 million to organize, and was only slightly in the black, he added.
The 2005 Shanghai Fashion Awards gave out 35 honors and lasted six hours. Escada won the Channel Young International Brand Achievement Award, and Calvin Klein got the International Brand Image Award. Only 13 awards were actually fashion-related. Luo Zheng won the Harper’s Bazaar China Designer of the Year, and the Chanel Maglev party received the Fashion Event of the Year. Trends Magazine Group founder Wu Hong won the Lycra In Style Achievement Award, and Xu Liwen and Wu Diwen were respectively declared the female and male Chinese models of the year. Photographer Sarah Moon was honored with the International Fashion Legend Award, distinguished from the International Fashion Icon Award given to Lauren Hutton.
American designer Vera Wang was recognized as the Channel Young International Designer of the Year, and traveled here to receive the honor and launch her first outlet in Shanghai, The Perfect Wedding boutique in the Pudong Shangri-La. It was Wang’s second visit to China, and she was enthusiastic about the experience.
“It’s astonishing, I never thought I’d come to China,” she said. “What girls did in the 1970s and 1960s was Europe and the classics. Now my daughters are taking Chinese. China is no longer a mystery.”
“There was an irony last night,” Wang continued, speaking at her store’s launch on Nov. 6, “that I couldn’t come to China before, it was closed to me, and being Chinese. Now I come to win an award for fashion, which is frivolous compared to Communism, but now it’s considered significant, which is a miracle. I can come home, and I never knew this would be possible.”
The Perfect Wedding is run by the Singapore-based The Link, which operates several home, wedding and fashion boutiques in Singapore and Jakarta. President Tina Tan-Leo acknowledged the irony of a Chinese-American selling Western wedding traditions to China, but thought the idea of buying the dress as a heirloom would catch on.
Most Chinese brides only pose in borrowed Western wedding dresses, often safety-pin closed and worn over sneakers, as one of the many costumes worn for studio wedding portraits. Some will also rent a Western wedding dress as one of several outfits during the ceremony and dinner. Nonetheless, according to Sun Min, editor of Modern Bride China, The Perfect Wedding should find a market as it is the only shop of its kind in China.
Channel Young’s Li Yong said Wang was chosen for the award because, “There aren’t many overseas Chinese designers, just Vera Wang, Vivienne Tam and Anna Sui, and we thought Vera Wang has been doing the most interesting things lately.” While some categories were competitive, voted on by Channel Young’s viewers, he added, most were selected by a panel of the organizers. “The public is not interested in people they don’t know, but they only know a few people, so we tried to find a middle ground.”
Nonetheless, the lack of a consistent competitive process detracts from the CFA’s value, while its lack of fashion focus makes it barely distinguishable from all the other award galas in China. Sixteen of the awards were devoted to entertainment, including seven to pop singers. Additional categories included sporting event, entrepreneur and athlete of the year, and the opening of Hong Kong Disneyland won the Tourism Event of the Year.
Organizers defended the expanded scope of the awards, however, saying they wanted the event to be more representative of “fashion’s place in the larger world.”
“We intend to further extend the scope of the award,” said Ink Pak’s Melvin Chua, “and to make it truly a world class award show that not only honors great local talent, but also allows a vehicle to introduce outstanding international stars of style to China. Names like Alber Elbaz, Vera Wang, Paolo Roversi, Sarah Moon, Philip Treacy and Alec Wek [were] launch[ed] in China through the CFA. I think this is what makes the China Fashion Award unique to others organized in other parts of the world. It is this spirit of local and international, of sharing and exchange.”