Tariffs to upend American brides' wedding dress dreams
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E-mail Xinhua, August 15, 2019
It is said that every girl has a wedding dress dream, but that dream of American girls is under threat as tariffs cast a pall on the wedding dress industry that relies heavily on the skills of Chinese embroiderers.
Most wedding dresses in the world come from China, especially high-end hand-sewn wedding gowns. Additional tariffs on Chinese exports will put U.S. retailers under financial stress, and drive the prices of quality wedding dresses even higher for American brides.
Tariffs won't attract wedding dress makers into the United States. They will only decimate American retailers and make American brides bear the cost, said Steve Lang, president of the American Bridal and Prom Industry Association.
"We love to produce our top product in the United States, but we can't find qualified staff," Lang said.
Some luxury wedding dresses have as many as 100,000 hand-sewn beads and crystals. Making these dresses is a daunting task that only extremely hardworking and skilled sewers can accomplish.
"Have you ever met any American who grew up in college and wound up sitting behind a sewing machine? (It is) Not gonna happen. People here do not want to be sewers," Lang added.
Talent pool
Wei Jingming, 48, and her cousin are sewing glittering paillettes onto a piece of silky cloth, while her daughter-in-law is juggling with threads of 20 different colors to embroider lifelike three-dimensional roses.
Most women in Tahou are sitting outdoors, busy doing needlework as the sun sets at the idyllic village of south China's Chaozhou. Wei, like other villagers, is sewing for wedding dress exporters. Someday somewhere in the United States, a bride will proudly wear Wei's work in her wedding.
Almost every family in Chaozhou has a skilled sewer, who spends her free time doing fine embroidery for wedding dress makers. For decades, manufacturers have been pooling their talents by assigning parts of wedding dresses to different families.
More than 200,000 people work for 800 wedding dress manufacturers in Chaozhou, a place with so many skilled embroiderers which is hard to come by. The embroiderers are the main reason why China is the world's top wedding dress exporter.
"If we move our factories outside China, American brides would have to wear white blouses for their wedding," said Yu Yuanyu, head of the Chaozhou Wedding Dress Industry Association.
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