How China’s first lady, Tencent and Alibaba empower a home grown luxury fashion industry

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Mar-a-Lago meeting with his US counterpart Donald Trump generated a buzz over their glamorous wives – one a former singing star and the other a supermodel. But it wasn’t the first time Chinese first lady Peng Liyuan has dazzled international audiences with her signature chic, yet conservative attire embellished with Chinese motifs, which subtly lends cachet to the country’s burgeoning fashion industry.

As part of the“Peng Liyuan effect”, China’s otherwise Western bling-obsessed consumers were swift to seek out the non-conspicuous-luxury labels that tailored her suits, qipaos and jackets in public appearances, emptying their shelves and pushing the low-key designers – all Chinese – into the limelight.

Now, in market disruptive manner,Tencent’s WeChat and Alibaba’s Taobao have given a vital boost to the country’s indigenous luxury brands as tech-savvy millennial shoppers embrace social media and online marketplaces by the hundreds of millions. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

And that is perhaps what a relatively lesser-known Western label would find it hard to achieve with the help of eBay and Whatsapp, even though they might have Michelle Obama and Kate Middleton as spokeswomen to catapult them to world fame, as what happened with America’s J Crew and Britain’s L.K. Bennett.