Pingan Avenue: Helsinki Greens Beijing
Daniel designs for Finnish and Italian sportswear companies, so he gets to visit Helsinki frequently, where he picked up these incredible green leather shoes. I ran into him on Pingan Avenue, which is fast becoming one of the more stylish streets in the city. That’s a good trend since Pingan Avenue goes straight through some of the older parts of the city with the most interesting architecture. Most of the nicest hutongs, including Nanluoguxiang, are all off of Pingan Avenue.
great colors & layers.
[...] Daniel Sui is the designer for Kappa, an Italian sportswear brand, in China and he appeared here before. The IHT had an interesting story on the public offering of Dongxiang, which has exclusive rights to the Kappa brand in China. As the existence of Daniel’s job proves, they not only sell this Italian brand in China, but also design it here. The article speaks of over 20% annual growth in sportswear here. [...]
Ping’an Avenue used to be a much narrower street, so was many hutongs in Beijing. It has been years since the government’s first effort to birng business to the avenue. They built some ancient looking two-story shops but many business inside of them failed. I have noticed some tiny shops selling rather cheap stuff having enough customers these days. But overall Ping’an Avenue is not a customer friendly place as Dongsi/Xisi Dajie, the traditional market streets. One reason is it is too hard to cross the road.