Bishkek/Almaty, Kazakhstan - 'No way. ... Where'd you
get it?' shrieked the fashionable young woman, shifting her Gucci
purse over crossed and heeled legs to lean over and finger the dress
flaunted before Kazakh girlfriends at an upscale joint in Almaty.
It was a scene repeated in Moscow where a girl reached
incredulously below the hem for the tag: 'Made in Kg.'
'I thought all that strip of land (Kyrgyzstan) was good for was
as a throughway for Chinese stuff,' she exclaimed.
But an abandoned-looking Soviet high rise in the capital Bishkek
is one of the sites where Kyrgyz women work shifts at the precious
sewing machines, churning out the fashions happily being snapped up
by their oil-rich neighbours. Ninety five per cent of what's sewn
here goes to export.
The prices are enviable - smuggled out on the black market from
one of Central Asia's largest bazaars.
Ayosov, 33, started one of the five sewing shops squatting in the
building's doorless cement halls with six sewing machines last year.
'We used to work at night, but I don't let my girls anymore. It's
eight to eight when there is work,' she said, standing under a mess
of electric wires strung from room to room.
'There are huge factories where all the girls change into
uniforms and they have pharmacies and produce their own designs. We
only sew the patterns brought to us. There is no perspective in
that,' Ayosov said.
When the Soviet bloc fell apart, about 300,000 women lost their
jobs filling orders from Moscow from the swathes of cotton shipped
from neighbouring Uzbekistan.
Kyrgyzstan, spectacular with jagged - but resource poor and non-
arable - peaks, reverted to a bazaar economy in the early 1990s,
trading goods from Turkey, India, the United Arab Emirates and China,
at the hub of Central Asia along the old silk route.
But last year the small landlocked country's textile industry
grew by 125 per cent, despite the global economic downturn, the
Kyrgyz Association of Light Industry said.
In the best months, Ayosov earns double her worker's 400 dollars,
off sporadic orders. In a country where the average salary is 50
dollars a month, this is a healthy living.
'The whole city sews! Ten thousand sewing machines were sold in
Bishkek last year,' the head of the business lobby Sapar Asanov said.
'If your grandmother sits at home with nothing to do, you buy her a
machine and orders are delivered in the morning, picked up at night.'
Locally-sewn goods have pushed up to 60 per cent of Bishkek's
sprawling Dordoi bazaar.
'We don't have oil so we work with our heads, hearts and our
hands, we must,' Kyrgyzstan's leading fashion designer Dilbar
Ashimbayeva said.
'The phenomenon of the brand made in Kyrgyzstan has sprung up
without government help - even despite it.'
'Now the brains of Kyrgyzstan are dressing all of Kazakhstan, and
Russia!' she pointed out.
Asanov, who founded his lobby in 2003 to help legalize the
industry, estimates that 2,500 sewing factories now operate in
Bishkek.
'Officially the industry makes up 8 per cent of our GDP, but who
knows how much is made off contraband,' he said. 'We don't know
anything about it if someone works within Dordoi market.'
Dordoi's director estimates that 150 million dollars is earned per
month in the 50-acre maze of the bazaar, where Chloe and Dior hang
from metal doors and ladders of the stacked shipping containers that
serve as market stalls.
Some containers, newly upgraded with window fronts, feature
eye-popping Bishkek-designer wedding and prom gowns modeled by
manikins with 80s-style hairdos, while neighbouring vendors sell
Kazakh national dress, tailoring to their export market.
The trade arena is busy through dusk on Mondays when other
Central Asian bazaars are shut, and as the afternoon heat breaks an
endless line of Soviet cars fume and stall at the Kazakh border en
route back to Almaty, three hours north of Bishkek.
Luxury jeeps with million dollar slogan plates are waved passed
the traffic on one side, while migrant traders walk through border
controls, but the bulk of goods are smuggled across elsewhere.
'For 200 dollars I can show you where you can cross the border,'
an enterprising taxi driver suggested, before he was shushed by
Kyrgyz traders only too happy to explain their racket.
Nocturnal purchases are packed at 10 am into trafficking taxis
waiting outside Dordoi, who charge a standard fee to deliver tight
60x70-centimetre bundles straight to traders' stalls.
'They answer for all the bribes,' said Shumkar, who makes the run
weekly to buy stock. Selling in bulk, she turns a profit of just over
a dollar per item. 'Kazakhs buy them at four times the price in shops
afterwards.'
But if official statistics are to be believed, all of 150 items
were imported to Kazakhstan last year, the head of a Kazakh industry
lobby Lubov Khudova noted.
'Really, is that even possible?' she laughed. Industry insiders
say as much as 20 to 25 thousand goods each day cross the border.
'Just imagine the turnover in illegal imports!' Khudova marveled.
Local politician Samarbek Zhaparakunov explained that Bishkek-
made clothes are in demand because they matched Turkish ones in
quality, but are cheaper than their Chinese counterparts.
'Not everybody can afford to buy themselves a 1,000 dollar
dress,'he said. 'There are such dresses, right?' he asked as an
afterthought.
In Russia, 'Made in Kg' clothes easily sell at ten times their
cost, more if they are re-branded along the way, one handler shipping
to 8 Russian cities said.
People have a residual perception left over from the USSR that
anything from 'outside' is better.
'My friend bought a 300 dollar suit in Almaty, but called me up
disgusted when he found out it was made in Bishkek. I told him,
'What? it's the same quality. You would have paid 600 dollars for
that same suit made in Turkey,' Zhaparakunov said delightedly.
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