A whirlwind luxury and fashion tour through the sights and sounds of a quickly expanding and friendly Shanghai city center. The fortunate few with the arm strength (and wallet power) to open the heavy iron doors of old world luxury stores have the desire to allow authentic, european fashion brands to succeed here. The nouveau riche core luxury targets, in general, are much younger (30-45 years old) and willing to pay upwards of 30-40% local price premiums compared to European standards. Interestingly, at the Culture Chanel exhibition at MoCa, the aspirers wishing to enter the world of luxury brands were on average between 20 and 30 years old. The key now is for newly entering brands to make "explosive" entries also into secondary inner cities, while established brands find it challenging to maintain european standards of service at retail stores. But they will eventually get there.
Casual and youth fashion stores like Novo Me also remain open until 10pm allowing hard working people to still make purchases after work.
In preparation for any trip to China I highly recommend Investire in Cina (in Italian) for a simple and thorough read into the history, culture and business customs of modern China.
Perhaps the most emblematic chinese moment presented itself to me when a young child enthousiastically ran up to me in People's Square Park. He was part of a special course in foreign language studies and in his best english asked me where i was from, what was my name and if i would exchange my personal card with him. That's the future enthousiasm and openness which we can expect from these proud people in the future.
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