Illusions on Sale in Shanghai

"I'm just bored," said Xu, who works at the jeans boutique Diesel.

At Fendi, black-suited clerks yawned as they propped themselves against counters. At the palatial Louis Vuitton shop next door, a 7-foot-tall plasma television played to no one.

In this populous city of fanatical shoppers, Plaza 66 is what some locals call a gui gouwu zhongxin -- a ghost mall.

The prices are so high that no one buys much. But then, no one really cares.

Just as Stalin erected Potemkin villages to display the glories of communism to outsiders, Shanghai is creating its own illusion of prosperity out of the world's most luxurious brands.

Offering cut-rate rents to top-tier fashion houses, this city of about 18 million is determined to make itself look like a world capital of high fashion.

And the Burberrys, Hermes and Chanels are all too happy to join in the charade.

"Most leading luxury brands will need to have a flagship store in Shanghai if only to put Shanghai along with London, Paris, Milan on their bags," said Paul French, founder and China chief of Access Asia, a marketing research firm in Shanghai.

The illusion is so thin that some stores don't bother to carry much stock. Others may have lots of clothes on the racks, but they carry just one size: medium, which is too big for most Shanghai women.

Some shops "don't ring up a single sale for days," Xu said.

Before World War II and the communist takeover in 1949, Shanghai was often called the Paris of the East -- a fashionable cosmopolitan city, the place to be.

At its height in the 1930s, the city was an international trading center and money flowed in from everywhere. Tens of thousands of British, French, Germans, Russians and Americans had settled in the city -- a legacy of the first Opium War, when Shanghai was carved up into concessions. The foreigners brought to this onetime farming village elegant Art Deco architecture, haute couture, posh restaurants, dance clubs, brothels, everything to satisfy the whims of the rich.