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Luxury kids' shopping: More Chinese parents choose to shop for kids at stores selling expensive clothes like Dior in Plaza 66. [Gao Erqiang / Shanghai Star]

Young celebrities

Back at Ralph Lauren, a sales clerk draws Chen's attention to a red velvet jacket priced 3,000 yuan ($490) that, since the airing of a reality TV show featuring famous dads and their young offspring, has gained the cachet of celebrity status.

"It's the jacket Angela Wang wore on TV," says the shop assistant, referencing a widely-viewed Ralph Lauren fashion show for kids.

Angela Wang, a.k.a. Wang Shiling, shot to fame in 2013 at the age of four while participating in the hit reality parenting program Dad! Where Are We Going? with her father, director Wang Yuelun. Her mother is television host Li Xiang.

Hunan TV acquired the rights to the popular Korean show of the same name and Wang subsequently became well-known for wearing outlandishly priced outfits in excess of 10,000 yuan, both on- and off - air.

Now China's one-child policy and growing ranks of high-net-worth individuals are dovetailing in just the right direction for the purveyors of kiddies' catwalk fashion.

"I used to buy a Birkin bag (Hermes) every year as a gift for myself," says Fang Jinqi, a 30-year-old mother of a two-year-old boy from Shanghai. "Now I spend half of that (about 100,000 yuan) on myself, and the other half buying luxury clothes for my son."

Numbers for this niche market are hard to come by – several brands declined to discuss their revenue and growth in China – but market players may need to be savvier in the future to keep up the tempo.

Financial results from Burberry show that children's products made up just 4 percent of its revenue in the yearlong period ending March 2012, making this the smallest contributor among its product lines. However, this line of revenue jumped 287 percent from 2006 to 2012.

"Differentiation and relevance are key challenges for luxury brands in the Chinese market in general, and in the kids' market in particular," says Calvar.

According to Zhou Ting, director of the Fortune Character Research Center, which covers the luxury industry, this segment will follow the broader pattern of quality coming to match prestige as the key yardstick.

"The high-end kid's market will get larger in the future, with more luxury items being produced for their functional and applicable advantages at an acceptable price," he says. "This will also open the door for newly launched domestic kids' brands."

Back at Plaza 66, one shopkeeper at French brand Bonpoint says, "We don't see huge traffic, but our customer base is more selective. Almost everyone who comes in buys something."

Some, like Fang, are drawn by the trophy-like nature of designer clothes, others by their inescapable cutesiness or Lord Fauntleroy-like regality. Few seem put off by the three-to-six-month lifespan. Safety is another consideration.

"Those well-known brands seem to be more reliable, of better quality and softer for a child's skin," says Sun Jia from Jiaxing in neighboring Zhejiang, who was shopping for her three-year-old granddaughter.

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