ALTER

ALTER — the name is short for alternative — opened in Shanghai in 2009 with a clearly polemical mission statement: bring to mainland China the kind of avant-garde and emerging international designer labels that the dominant luxury-mall buyers were ignoring in favour of Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Prada. The store currently sits inside Xintiandi Style II at 245 Madang Lu, in the Xintiandi shopping district of Huangpu, and has operated continuously through the post-2010 reshuffle of Chinese multi-brand retail that closed many of its contemporaries. The buyer position has always favoured designers with a strong conceptual or craft signature and a smaller commercial footprint in China: J.W. Anderson, Simone Rocha, MSGM, Y/Project, Marine Serre and Charles Jeffrey Loverboy are recurring fixtures, alongside emerging South Korean labels (Hyein Seo and others), and a curated set of Chinese independents. The store has a particular reputation for picking designers before they break into Chinese-market awareness — Y/Project and Marine Serre were on the floor at ALTER well before either had a mass mainland following — which has made the store a watching point for Chinese fashion-press editors trying to read where the local buyer's eye is moving. ALTER's role in the Shanghai retail conversation is the avant-garde counterweight: where DOE and JUICE anchored streetwear, Dong Liang anchored Chinese independents and HBX/Looknow scaled the Korean-and-international contemporary segment, ALTER kept the lights on for the European avant-garde and the experimental Asian designers in the same category. The Xintiandi Style location is small relative to the malls around it, but the store's enduring buyer is one of the more consistent in Chinese multi-brand retail.