Brazilian Koreans: a Force in Fashion

The sounds of Brazil drifted from one shop to the next in downtown Los Angeles’ fashion district--Brazil with a distinctly Korean twist.

In Amber Clothing Co., his new manufacturing and wholesaling shop, Alberto Chi chewed on Korean rice cakes while talking to his younger brother in Portuguese--the language of their native Sao Paulo in Brazil. He picked up the phone and spoke in Korean, then switched to English as he thumbed through samples with a textile salesman.

“For me, I always wanted to do this,” said Chi, 27, who arrived with his parents eight years ago. “I didn’t care about medicine or engineering. I was always into clothing. It’s in my blood.”

Chi and his relatives operate nearly 20 apparel manufacturing and wholesaling shops in the fashion district--an area that is being remade by hundreds of Korean garment clans from Brazil.

With their hard-earned fortunes from South America and a cohesiveness that irks some other Korean immigrants, they have carved out new markets in Southern California’s fashion world. By opening scores of storefronts with names such as Zoompy and Fina, Fina that reflect their Brazilian heritage, they have hired hundreds of workers, lured apparel buyers back to downtown and helped turn rundown buildings into boutiques that are as pricey to rent as those in Beverly Hills.

“It’s just incredible what’s happened there,” said Bill Teneblatt, president of Antex Knitting Mills, one of the region’s largest textile companies. “They’re growing and growing, just like mushrooms.”

For the Chis and many others, the passage from Korea to South America to Los Angeles began nearly four decades ago. Tens of thousands of largely middle-class Koreans--many from the north--sailed for Brazil and Argentina to escape high unemployment and antipathy in the impoverished south. With no money or language facility, they sold the clothes in their trunks and eventually became garment entrepreneurs, replacing the Jewish and Armenian immigrants who had dominated the apparel trade in Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires.

But in recent years, thousands of Koreans have packed up for the United States, driven away by Latin America’s hyperinflation, rising crime and concerns for their children’s education. Most Koreans from Argentina settled in New York. They started greengroceries as well as garment businesses, but struggled to crack New York City’s stratified apparel industry.

Brazilian Koreans favored Los Angeles, drawn by the comparable climate and what they saw as Southern California’s more dynamic, wide-open garment trade. Many Koreans from Sao Paulo also had family ties in this area’s large Korean American community.

A Love of the Business

Nak Bum Sung, an ex-military officer in South Korea who left for Brazil in 1971, was among the first to arrive in the United States. Not long after he moved here in 1980, he set up a shop called Hot & the Gang. Now 58, Sung said he does brisk business designing and selling denim, mainly to small chain stores and wholesale buyers around the nation and in Latin America.

“He’s kicking butt like you wouldn’t believe,” said his 32-year-old son, Paul Sung, who is doing even better.

A couple of miles away, in a shop 10 times the size of his father’s, Paul runs a $12-million apparel design and manufacturing company. His customers include Nordstrom, Macy’s and other retailers his father could only dream about. As a boy growing up in Sao Paulo, he remembers earning a nickel for every buttonhole he put in garments that his parents designed and stitched together.

“My whole family’s in garment,” Paul Sung said, explaining why he passed up USC Law School a few years ago to start his own business, Baxis Inc. He said his father pushed him to choose the garment trade over law. “It was an easy decision. What else do I know?”

The Paulistas, as the people of Sao Paulo are called, are among the latest of the Korean immigrants who have come to control sectors of the garment business and the fashion district, where Yiddish and Farsi once were dominant languages. But unlike many Koreans straight from Korea, who entered the garment business with no particular background in--or excitement for--the trade, those from Brazil love the industry and generally regard it as highly as they do other businesses.

Koreans from Brazil already account for a majority of the 700 or so Korean American garment manufacturers who occupy the fashion district, said Michael Kang, vice president of the Korean Garment Wholesaler Assn., whose president is a former Paulista.

Kang, who came from Seoul in 1975 and has been running his own manufacturing shop since 1982, thinks his compatriots from Brazil do better here because they have succeeded once before, typically start with more money and have an intimate knowledge of the industry. They also speak the language of many of the Latino production workers and buyers.

Combination of Cultures

Influenced as much by Latin American culture as Confucianism, the Koreans from Brazil are as apt to peck each other on the cheek when they meet as they are to bow. They mix naturally with Latinos, and interact more easily with customers and suppliers.

“Experience and capital make better odds,” Kang said. Korean immigrants like Kang show no resentment toward compatriots from South America.

But other Korean garment operators, more privately, complain that they feel shut out from the Brazilians, who are wont to talk among themselves in Portuguese and have different business styles and beliefs.

The Brazilians prize business ownership, whereas traditional Koreans often look down on merchants. And although the Koreans from Brazil share their homeland’s sunrise-to-sundown work ethic, they appear much more laid back.

Customers notice the difference.

“The Koreans coming from Brazil tend to be more friendly,” said Kash Vaswani, a Northridge clothing buyer for wholesalers who has shopped here for 20 years. About three years ago, Vaswani quit making shopping forays in the East Coast because of the growth of the fashion district. “They are more experienced in their business. They by and large know how to convince a customer and clinch a deal.”

“I think we’re more relaxed,” said Chang Hee Kim, owner of Oro Fashions and president of the U.S. Paulista Assn., a close-knit group whose members play golf together and help each other with business information.

Kim, 52, arrived in Los Angeles in 1984. He said he came for the sake of his children’s education and after he was held at gunpoint by a robber at his shop in Sao Paulo. Kim lives in Palos Verdes with his mother, wife and three teenage sons.

“Most of us who came made it in Brazil,” said Kim, who still owns a garment business in Sao Paulo.

Traditionally, immigrants in apparel--from Korea and elsewhere--have started out as tiny sewing contractors or designers. But not the Brazilian Koreans, who almost without exception set up more vertically integrated operations, including designing and wholesaling, that reflect the way they did business in Sao Paulo, where Koreans in the apparel trade have a rich and storied history.

Koreans en masse first immigrated to Brazil in 1962, after officials of the two countries struck a deal intended to ease unemployment in South Korea and develop farmlands in Brazil. Some of the immigrants did start out farming, but others saw no future in that and hit the streets as garment peddlers, drawing attention by clapping and gesturing outside friendly Sao Paulo neighborhoods, said UCLA anthropology professor Kyeyoung Park, who has written about Korean immigrants in South America.

Today, Park and others estimate, about 90% of the 50,000 Korean immigrants still in Brazil work in the garment trade, their design and wholesaling stores packing the narrow streets of Bom Retiro and Bras, Sao Paulo’s two main garment districts. Smaller numbers of Koreans also live and work in the apparel business in Argentina and Paraguay, although not in such overwhelming proportions.

“Many of these people are amazing,” Park said especially of the earlier sojourners to South America, who succeeded despite immense economic and language barriers and virtually no contact with their homeland. “They are the last people who will be defeated by any obstacles.”

Christina Kim, 29, recalls only vaguely her parents’ struggles in Sao Paulo; all she remembers is that she grew up in a garment world, often staying up until midnight after school helping her parents press and pack homemade dresses.

When she arrived in Los Angeles in 1988 with her parents and two sisters, Kim headed for the Fashion Institute of Design. Afterward, she and her husband, Dwight Kim, opened Gloria Fashion on Wall Street near 11th.

On a recent morning, as the sun’s rays and the drone of Korean street vendors filtered through the storefront’s windows, Dwight Kim sat behind the counter taking orders and paying bills. In a loft up a winding staircase, a pattern maker was busily cutting fabric while Christina Kim moved from a computer to the design table. She creates half a dozen evening dresses a week.

Around the corner on 11th Street, her older sister does the same thing at her own shop, and next door to that, their mother operates a new store that produces two-piece suits for young women. Christina’s younger sister attends Otis School of Fashion Design.

“I’ve been sewing ever since I can remember,” Christina said in Korean, one of four languages she uses to converse with workers, customers and family.

Korean immigration from Brazil to Los Angeles has slowed since peaking in the mid- and late 1980s, but the immigrants continue to trickle here and open apparel and textile shops in the fashion district and elsewhere in the Southland. Some set up businesses for their children, many now in their 20s and early 30s. A few have ascended into the ranks of major manufacturers. Others are grooming the second generation to take over family businesses--a transition that is generally smooth because they are eager to follow their parents into the business.

“My dream is to have a private label,” said Paul Han, 24, whose family store, Pop Star, produces active wear for teenage girls. “That would be the ultimate,” said Han, his hair slicked back and dressed in a sky-blue knit shirt and sleek black pants.

Pop Star and most other garment manufacturers in Los Angeles employ only a handful of people, often including relatives. But they add up to significant numbers.

In the past few years, Korean Americans and others in Southern California started dozens of apparel production firms every month. “They’ve been a huge factor, as employers and workers,” said Ilse Metchek, executive director of the California Fashion Assn., a leading trade group in Los Angeles.

Ability to Cope With Problems

The Koreans from Brazil are right at home in Los Angeles’ fashion district because it has much in common with Sao Paulo’s. Both specialize in many styles, small quantities with quick turnaround at competitive prices.

But these days, Korean garment makers of all backgrounds share a common worry: that the area is oversaturated. They say that NAFTA and El Nino have slashed the number of buyers from Latin America. Moreover, retailers of all sizes, although buying more frequently from the fashion district, are putting more pressure on manufacturers to come up with more designs and turn around items even faster.

Most Korean manufacturers and wholesalers in the fashion district anticipate tastes and create designs by visiting department stores and poring over fashion magazines, and then try to get a jump on rivals by turning around those styles quickly. It is a big gamble that often leaves garment shops with leftover inventory that can only be sold at a loss. Koreans from Brazil have no special edge in this regard, although their deeper pockets help them meet the big overhead, which can include rents of $5,000 to $6,000 a month for a 2,000-square-foot storefront.

“It’s much harder to do business here than Brazil. Everything is so much more expensive,” said Ana Cho, owner of Forom Colors Pandemonium on 11th Street.

Cho recently helped her oldest son, Alberto Chi, launch the family’s third generation of garment businesses with the opening of Amber Clothing.

Cho, 50, was on the first boat that left South Korea for Brazil in December 1962. Her father was a military officer and came from a wealthy family. Cho said her grandfather pushed her father to leave, saying, “There’s no future for you here.”

When the boat arrived 55 days later in southern Brazil, Cho recalled how her mother confided in her that the family had $100 left. Her parents found work at a farm owned by a family from Japan, a country that had sent immigrants to Brazil many decades earlier. In those early years, Cho said, they underwent “indescribable hardship.” Her father, who is 72 and still lives in Sao Paulo, had never worked hard. “His hands did not open,” she said, using a Korean expression to describe how difficult it was for him to stoop to manual labor.

After two years, her parents began selling trinkets before entering the garment business. Cho and her Korean-born husband found success, acquiring a big house and an apparel building.

In late 1989, she and her family left for Los Angeles. She said it seemed the right move, especially for their three sons, all of whom want to enter the family business.

Talking about the tough competitive conditions, she worries that her boys will struggle. But recalling her own tough times, she said, “Maybe it’s for the better. Then they will know what it takes to succeed.”