Labels…

Sarah Hoyt put a post up last Friday that reminded me of something I did back in the late 80s…

As Sarah said, there are ‘many’ who care more about the labels on the clothes to show their status within their peer group, than the actual clothes themselves. It was either September or October of ’88, and I got stuck with a trip to South Korea to coordinate some exercise stuff with them.

Now at the time, we all knew about the ‘good deal’ buys around Seoul for various things from clothes to sweaters to shoes (Reebock and Adidas come to mind). At the time these weren’t knock off’s per se, but ‘overruns’ from orders made by middlemen in the US for various cooperations…

Since the kids were little, they tended to go through things like sweaters, jackets and shoes in a BIG hurry. They either wore them out, or outgrew them in what seemed like a matter of days…

Anyhoo, I got to talking with a ROK Navy Commander, and asked him where he would recommend I go. Since we were off the next day, he offered to take me to a few places. I gratefully accepted and EARLY (like 0600 early), he picked me up and off we went. He drove for probably close to an hour, and we finally pulled up in front of a large unmarked building somewhere south of Seoul.

Getting out, he escorted me into a shabby office on one corner of the building, and after a good five minutes of back and forth in Korean, with the occasional question to me about sizes (I was trying to buy the size the girls were, and the next larger size too), which apparently confused the hell out of them.

I was finally led to a storage room and pointed to a table with probably 100 sweaters laid out on it, and told to pick the ones I wanted. Since the girls didn’t like the same colors, I was able to finally pick two designs, and brought them over to the manager. He rattled off some directions to an assistant, and within a couple of minutes, two of each sweater showed up.

I figured it was a done deal at that point, and asked the CDR how much I owed for the four sweaters. He had another back and forth, and I was led to another room filled with women and sewing machines. He opened a sample book, and it was full of labels!

Sears, Pennys, Lord & Taylor, Macy’s, Neiman Marcus, etc! Being from the southwest, I went with Neiman Marcus labels just for the hell of it. A few minutes later, the sweaters were brought back, now with the ‘correct’ labels sewn in.

If I remember correctly, I paid $32 for all four sweaters.

The CDR next took me to a warehouse that had Reebock tennis shoes, and I bought four pairs of leather tennis shoes for the kids, and paid around $16 for them. (I remember I had around $60 on me, and I came back with money).

Fast forward to Christmas, I got curious and hit some of the stores in SFO looking for the sweaters.  I found them in every store!!! With prices ranging from the low $30 range in Sears and Pennys, to $125 or so in Macy’s and Lord & Taylor. I never did find out what Neiman Marcus sold theirs for, but I’d guess something over $150!

For the SAME sweaters I’d paid $8 for in Korea!!! My ex was deathly afraid the sweaters would get stolen after one of the other mothers apparently asked how the girls could afford Neiman Marcus… So I think they maybe got to wear them 5-6 times before they outgrew them…

Sigh…

The next year I got Icelandic wool sweaters, with no labels… And the kids wore the hell out of them without a question ever being asked…

Comments

Labels… — 16 Comments

  1. Just a few years ago, one of my daughters was in middleschool and came home begging for Aeropostale clothing. I took her to a consignment shop and let her go, telling her I had one criteria – she could not pick an item that had the company name blazoned across the outside. I was not paying money to advertise their company. She got that, and picked out a cute sweater, and that was enough to make her happy. I couldn’t afford it new, but it wasn’t the new she needed, she just needed to fit in a bit.

  2. I’ve done the same thing in China, in that big six story building right across from the train station in Shenzhen – on the border with Hong Kong. The knock offs were so good that even my daughter’s sharp eye’d friends couldn’t tell the purses and things that I bought for $8.00 from the real things that sold in the US for hundreds of dollars.

  3. I was on a OIML standard committee that had a meeting in the US.
    The Warsaw Pac countries that were allowed to attend spent their entire free time buying blue jeans and t-shirts to bootleg back home. I think they through out their own close to make room for more Levis.

    • When my Dad went to Russia on vacation in the early ’90s, the customs authorities there made a list of all the clothes in his suitcase – makes, colours, and sizes.

      He had to present the list when he left the country, and the contents of his case were compared to what he had when he arrived – any discrepancy would have been a major issue.

  4. Cedar- Not the first time I’ve heard that, or dealt with that… Glad it worked out for you!

    LL- Heard about that place, never got there!

    Gerry- Oh yeah, a pair of Levis with the tags still on them were worth $100s of dollars!!!

  5. Its amazing the way the american shopper gets scammed. Just like buying generic food vs name brands. It is all packaged in the same place, just depends on which label conveyor belt that food goes down to determine if you pay .50 a can or 2.98

    Awesome shopping in Korea though, I would have been all on top of that like white on rice.

  6. Johor Bahru. You go to the watch place and pick out the watch you want from a picture book. 2 days later it shows up. Also, DVDs of first run movies on the day they are released in the states.

    Seoul. Visited the large department stores near Itaewon. There is one floor with all the real designer stuff. But if you go up a few floors, they have the knock offs all in the same building.

  7. Sendarius- Yep, that was the ‘norm’, as opposed to the party apparatchiks, who routinely flouted the rules… sigh

    JUGM- Exactly!!! 🙂

    PE- Yep, that must have been after I was there, but I heard stories… And you were hard pressed to tell the difference!

  8. Osan for 2 years in the 80s, spanning the no-dogs olympics. Required to bring family, so 2 sons with us. 6 months before rotation we began buying future sizes like crazy and new luggage to put it in. Excellent decision. Being the wing senior enlisted advisor with a few contacts didn’t hurt, either. 🙂

  9. Lucky to have boys. Three pairs of black Wranglers (must be Wranglers), a pair of Dr Martin boots, and a few metal T shirts was good for the school year.

  10. Almost all of my clothing is “thrifted”. I’ve kind of worked out which labels wear no better then Walmart brands, and which ones always look good and last for years. They tend to be all the same price at the goodwill store.
    I just mention it because sometimes still the name on the label still means something in terms of quality.
    I once stumbled upon a Bally shoe outlet store that was having a clearance/closing down sale. They had only two pair left in my size, both a cap-toe oxford. One was bright lime green, the other ivory. I bought the Ivory pair for $15, eventually after using brown or black polish each time they were brown. I wore them for about 10 years before they weren’t presentable for work, and then wore them another 5 for gardening before the seams split open. At one point I thought to myself “these are pretty good, I should get another pair” and discovered to my shock that normal price was $380 — probably less then I would have paid in aggregate lfor the far greater number of Timberlands I would have worn through in the same amount of time, but still more than I would pay without knowing *for sure* that they would be shoes to last for a decade.

  11. WSF- LOL, not fair!!! 🙂

    Douglas- Nothing wrong with that, and yes Bally’s are EXPENSIVE! I couldn’t afford them even when I was working full time!

  12. A pair of Levis and a case of Coca-Cola in the trunk of a car going through Checkpoint Charlie assured temporary blindness on the part of East Germans.

  13. Going the other way, most of my wife’s family lives in Hong Kong. But whenever they visit us here, they love to hit the US outlet malls. One brother-in-law in particular loves brands like Polo and Timberland, and says they are hard to get there (at least in his size – he’s 5’10 or so, ~240 lbs).

    Mind you, the no-name knock-offs (and probably just as well made) are *very* cheap in Hong Kong, but “authentic” designer labels from the US are still a prestige item.