Clothes in Beijing

[matuda13]

Hi,

I am new to this forum, tried to search for topics of clothes in china, but couldn't find one, so please forgive me if this is question is repeated.

I am going to Beijing to study at a circus school for 1 year. Before that I am going to India for 3 months for the whole summer.

Because i am not going to be working for 1.5 years at all, i was planning to take most of the clothes with me - autumn, winter, so i don't have to spend much.

But that means taking 2 big bags with me, and when traveling in India i don't want to take so much...

Everyone keeps telling me that in Beijing you can buy clothes that are both trendy, cheap and good quality so no need to take anything with me, as i will be able to afford to buy all of them there.

So i guess i am just looking for an advice of people living in Beijing - what is is your opinion on this? What is an average price of clothing in Beijing?

Thanks a lot!!!

[imron]

trendy, cheap and good quality

Haha, well, one out of three ain't bad

Seriously though, the longer you're going to be travelling, the less stuff you should take with you. You'll only end up ditching half of it because it's too much to always be carrying around. A good rule of thumb is to reduce your luggage to everything but the stuff you absolutely can't leave behind, and then take half of that.

[cdn_in_bj]

in Beijing you can buy clothes that are both trendy, cheap and good quality

I find that these tend to be mutually exclusive... or maybe my fashion sense is really off.

[Lu]

Bring clothes for the first three months or so (summer clothes if you arrive in the summer, etc). You can put some stuff in boxes and ask parents or friends to send it up to you when you have an address, if you don't want to buy new things.

Clothes in China are cheap (when I was living there five years ago, things were about four times as cheap as back in Holland). Trendy is a relative thing. And I did buy some things of good quality, that I could still wear years after I left. Not all is of made in China-quality.

[acupuncter]

If you can find places that are selling true factory overruns, those are clothes that have been made over the amount a foreign buyer asks for, just in case there are flawed goods in the run, you can get some crazy deals. Be careful not to get the flawed goods though.

[cdn_in_bj]

If you can find places that are selling true factory overruns

And where might these places be?

I have come across authentic name-brand dress shirts being sold through non-official outlets only once or twice during my time here. Some vendors at Silk Street claim to carry overstock items, but I have my doubts. Though I would love to be proven wrong.

I've noticed that the "Hotwind" chain of discount clothes and shoes carries what appears to be name-brand articles. They actually iron their own label on top of the original label, but sometimes if you look on the backside of the label you can tell what brand it originally was. But even here I suspect that most of their stuff is fake.

[acupuncter]

You really have to look. I could give you address in Shanghai but it has been more than 10 years since I lived in BJ. The thing is with true overruns there is no question that they are real. You can tell from the quality. The crap that the other guys sell is just that. They've been doing that in Hong Kong since before there were any private shops in BJ. Trust me, I can remember when there were only 200 taxis in BJ (thats's right 200) and 150 of those were for cadres.