"Made in Kyrgyzstan" - "Made in where?" (Feature)

By Alissa de Carbonnel Jul 15, 2008, 2:08 GMT

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.