To the sound of trip-hop and disco, a hungry press pack fought to photograph Beijing's rich and famous as they sashayed down the red carpet at a recent party to mark the opening of
a flagship Louis Vuitton store in a downtown shopping mall. Buoyed by free-flowing Veuve Clicquot champagne and chocolate nibbles, the 1,500 party-goers at the China World Trade Centre chatted and flirted exuberantly. In one corner was a famous general's granddaughter, dressed in a black-sequined ballgown with a black feather boa; in another, a well-known model giggled and twirled in Louis Vuitton. The guest of honour was Tony Li Dongtian, the mainland's stylist to the stars and arbiter of fashion and beauty. Reflecting on the night, Dongtian says, 'It was both chill and grand.'
Mocked for decades as frumpy and socially awkward, the mainland is exuding a new sense of confidence. Gone are the days when parties consisted of a few carefully selected guests who chatted self-consciously, the women in poorly tailored skirt suits, the men clutching man-bags and primed to exit as soon as politeness allowed. Today, Beijingers are relaxed, playful and party with the best. And driving that confidence is a fast-changing sense of what it now means to be beautiful in China.
'More and more Chinese appreciate the beauty world because the story of China has not been one of beauty in the past,' says Paolo Gasparrini, president of L'Oreal China, one of the mainland's biggest beauty products companies, with sales last year of 2.9 billion yuan.
Denied from the 1950s to the 80s by communist puritanism and sheer poverty, a thirst for glamour and beauty has been growing since the mid-90s, when 15 years of strong growth that began with the 1978 Open Door economic liberalisation policy started to have an impact on a broad sector of the population. 'So when they were allowed to discover beauty, fashion, cosmetics and colour, they showed how much they liked it,' says Gasparrini, whose company launched on the mainland in 1997.
The mainland beauty market is estimated to be worth 60 billion yuan a year, with an annual growth rate of 15-20 per cent. In the first half of this year, make-up sales alone - excluding hair- and skin-care products, and perfumes - surged by 26.7 per cent to 4.54 billion yuan, according to International Cosmetic News. L'Oreal's sales rose by 58 per cent in 2004, buoyed by the acquisition of the Yue Sai and Mininurse lines.