Fashion-Incubator

The cool thing about Hong Kong's MTR system is that the exits have letters, and knowing your exit gets you much closer to your destination. For example, my hotel is at exit F of the Admiralty Station. Exit G of the Central Station gets you to the Landmark Shopping Center (where Harvey Nichols is). It's also pretty close to Marks & Spencer. Exit D1 of Central gets you to Bua Hom Thai Massage on D’Aguila Street (which still took me thirty minutes of walking in circles to find, despite knowing the exit, but now I know it’s by Ben & Jerry’s and Haagen Dazs). Anyhow, Exit D of Prince Edward Station. It takes you to the cross of Yu Chau and Portland streets which is one tail end of the fabric district in Sham Shui Po.

I never used that map. Closer to my trip, I used google blog search to see if I can find anything about Sham Shui Po and I found Crabby Rangoon’s blog (Sorry, Erika, for referring to you as Crabby), which was about the closest I could get to having any kind of clue what Sham Shui Po is like.

I wasn’t expecting this. From my earlier post:

What I expected was an area with different fabric showrooms. At best, I thought there would be a couple dozen companies in this area, selling fabric. I expected to only find a few good leads as I expected most to cater to larger manufacturers.

Sham Shui Po is overwhelming. I could spend a week here, easily. There are streets after streets of fabric places. I took a few photos. I thought of taking a lot of photos, only it would feel redundant (to me at least). There is no way to give you an idea of what the place is like, because I only show you a few places, and there are many, many more, spanning many, many blocks. What I like most about the area is that it’s for people like us. It’s for people who buy yardage by the tens or maybe a couple hundred, not by the thousands. The shops cater to people like us, often cutting sample yardage right there (for those that have the fabrics on hand). For some of the others, you can just pay the sample yardage surcharge to use for your smaller production runs.

They have headers many allow you to freely take headers. Some have prices marked (in HKD), some have fiber content market, some do not have fiber content marked on the headers, but it will be posted on a sign in the store. It’s not incredibly complicated, though, because it’s mostly cotton, rayon, poly, nylon, etc. Not a whole lot of fancy schmancy. The area has “districts”, for example, I realized immediately once I was in the PU district because, well, the signs declared it so. You find that shops selling the same types of fabrics seem to be clustered together. They have fabrics from China, Korea, Japan, Australia, all over. And, you find designers, from all over the world, literally running from shop to shop matching up fabrics and trims.

My photos show my wheelie full of headers and I probably didn’t even visit one eight of the shops there.

The most amazing part about my headers is that while they look numerous, I only pulled headers for fabrics that I could or would use. In other words, I didn’t go overboard and grab everything. There were many fabrics that I just didn’t get headers for because I know my usage is far enough out that it’s likely I’ll be back before then. There is some redundancy in fabrics, you see a lot of poly prints and you start to recognize some, there are a lot of places carrying highly similar shirting fabrics, cottons and solid and striped knits. But even with that, there are just too many places to go. You get to an intersection and the streets splinter off, with even more shops. I emailed Erika (Crabby Rangoon) to ask her where the trims were because I was too exhausted to even try to find it. I barely, only fortunately, made it back to the MTR station because for a while, I was truly lost, but luckily I ended up back where I started, exit D. I should have pulled out my map, but I was tired, hot, sticky, sweaty, I think it rained on me and I was hungry. I wasn’t thinking clearly.

With Ericka’s help, I will go back to Sham Shui Po and try and find the trims. I already planned on purchasing another piece of luggage while here ;) I’ll probably write more about Sham Shui Po after I go back. I’ll probably take more photographs of the area.