The rows of expensive cars look out of place parked in the working-class Paris suburb — but this is Aubervilliers, Europe’s made-in-China clothing capital where traders recently opened the continent’s biggest garment center.
A vast range of clothing is on offer in the area, where generations of Chinese have settled.
Shoppers can pick up a smart ready-to-wear suit for 40 euros (US$45) in a central store or a pack of cheap socks in the supermarket, while a stall-holder on the street offers sneakers.
Customers and porters squeeze between double-parked vans as they head in and out of shops with flashing signs and, at times, whimsical names such as Glam Couture, Bisou’s Project, La Bottine Souriante (The Smiling Bootee) and Miss Baby Hot Bottom.
When the new Fashion Center — expected to generate more jobs — officially opened at the end of March, it became the largest market of its kind in Europe, overtaking a similar one in Duesseldorf, Germany.
“Aubervilliers has become one of the most important places for business and exchange with China in all of Europe,” Aubervilliers Mayor Pascal Beaudet said. “So we needed to organize accordingly and that’s what we did.”
Hundreds of wholesalers offer an endless choice of textiles, colors and patterns in this vast district between the Paris beltway and the national sports stadium, Stade de France.
In the maze of alleys and dead ends, almost all of the family businesses are run by people from the region of Wenzhou, a town in southeast China where emigration is a deep-rooted tradition.
There was a snowball effect after the first Chinese wholesalers starting setting up in Aubervilliers in about 2000, Beaudet said.
The area today has about 1,200 Chinese traders — not including workers and other employees like Min, and Aubervilliers has become the main commercial junction between France and China.
“There is a new generation of businessmen who have arrived, who are French of Chinese origin and who speak French,” Baudet said. “And so I know, in terms of hiring, that there are non-Chinese who work in the stores. It’s a new reality and of course it’s interesting for the city and its residents.”
The pioneers actually arrived in France years earlier, Chinese community in Paris specialist Richard Beraha said.
One of them, Hsueh Sheng Wang (黃學勝), built a clothing empire and amassed such a fortune that he has become known as “the king of Aubervilliers.”
He owns dozens of shops in the town but made a bigger name in 2011 when he bought a large share in the northern French port of Le Havre, the country’s hub for ocean-borne trade with Asia.
Wang and seven fellow investors of Chinese descent are also behind the new Fashion Center, now Europe’s biggest wholesale textile market with 310 shops over 55,000m2 in the heart of Aubervilliers.
The center aims to to draw buyers from across Europe and make the textile import-export trade more efficient by consolidating business in one location, Wang said.
The Fashion Center would create “about 2,000 jobs... and not only for Chinese people,” said Victor Hu, 47, one of Wang’s partners, who traded in the uniform of the French Foreign Legion for a suit and tie after a spell in the service entitled him to French citizenship.
“We have made a small path,” Wang said. “The new generation will build a highway.
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