Tariffs hurting US wedding dress industry
IT is said that every girl has a wedding dress dream but that dream of American girls is under threat as tariffs cast a pall on the wedding dress industry that relies heavily on the skills of Chinese embroiderers.
Most wedding dresses in the world come from China, especially high-end hand-sewn wedding gowns.
Additional tariffs on Chinese exports will put US retailers under financial stress and drive the prices of quality wedding dresses even higher for American brides.
Tariffs won’t attract wedding dressmakers to the United States. They will only decimate American retailers and make American brides bear the cost, said Steve Lang, president of the American Bridal and Prom Industry Association.
“We love to produce our top product in the United States but we can’t find qualified staff,” Lang said.
Some luxury wedding dresses have as many as 100,000 handsewn beads and crystals. Making these dresses is a daunting task that only extremely hardworking and skilled sewers can accomplish.
“Have you ever met any American who grew up in college and wound up sitting behind a sewing machine? (It is) Not going to happen. People here do not want to be sewers,” Lang added.
Wei Jingming, 48, and her cousin are sewing glittering paillettes onto a piece of silky cloth, while her daughter-inlaw is juggling with threads of 20 different colors to embroider lifelike three-dimensional roses.
Most women in Tahou, an idyllic village of Chaozhou City in Guangdong Province, are sitting outdoors, busy doing needlework as the sun sets.
Wei, like other villagers, is sewing for wedding dress exporters. Someday somewhere in the US, a bride will proudly wear Wei’s work at her wedding.
More than 200,000 people work for 800 wedding dress manufacturers in Chaozhou. The embroiderers are the main reason why China is the world’s top wedding dress exporter.
Thousand years tradition
“If we move our factories outside China, American brides would have to wear white blouses for their wedding,” said Yu Yuanyu, head of the Chaozhou Wedding Dress Industry Association.
Needlework is the second personality for a girl in Chaozhou. In local tradition, a girl makes her own wedding dress so that her future husband and guests to the wedding can see her talent and character from what she wears on the big day.
A tradition that dates back to the Tang Dynasty (618-907), the Chao Embroidery has evolved for over a thousand years, developing a system of more than 200 hand-sewing stitches, which come in handy in making complex and extravagant dresses like prom and wedding gowns.
She Keyan, the official heir to the national heritage of Chao Embroidery, learnt sewing from her mother.
In a workshop named after her mother Kang Huifang, she leads some 40 seasoned embroiderers in making luxury wedding dresses for brands such as Allure, Blush, Morilee and Alyce Designs.
Some of the world’s most luxurious wedding dresses on display along Paris’ ChampsElysees and New York’s 5th avenue are from here.
Lang has testified in several public hearings that the tariffs would put his whole industry in danger, threatening the livelihood of thousands of American families.
Making wedding dresses involves so many fabrics and beads of different types, colors and texture.
“None of these materials exist outside China. So it would be a logistical nightmare to move all that production outside China,” Lang said.
“China is a very large factory for the world. You can not just say ‘no more China.’ It’s ineffectual and artificial to assume that you can just walk away from China,” he added.
(Xinhua)