The narrow streets of the French capital's fastest-growing and most controversial garment district buzz with activity. Truck drivers lean on their horns as they vie for space in front of wholesale stores. Young Chinese men, most of them in jackets too thin for the cold weather, wheel piles of overstuffed cartons into the shops.
Buyers from Spain, Russia and the Paris suburbs wander from shop to shop, studying this week's fashion offering of flouncy skirts and wide-belted jackets, hauling their plaid nylon shopping bags behind them on the sidewalks.
Neighbourhood mothers ploughing through with baby strollers mutter a few curses, but it's nothing as pungent as the abuse shouted from the stalled cars blocked by double-parked trucks disgorging ever more boxes of clothes. Business is booming in the Sedaine-Popincourt neighbourhood in eastern Paris.
But the concentration of Chinese-run wholesale clothing stores in this densely populated pocket has not only upset the people living above the shops, it has also prompted a fierce backlash from City Hall.
'The residents, and for good cause, feel that they have been dispossessed of their neighbourhood,' says Georges Sarre, a veteran Socialist politician who is the mayor of the 11th arrondissement, or district. 'In the span of a few years, this mono-activity of wholesalers has totally disrupted local life.'
The city must take the neighbourhood back from the Chinese, he says, lease by lease, property by property and, if necessary, by decree.