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Asia, China, Beijing, 07.05.2012, a model has her make-up done backstage. Guo Pei, is China's answer to haute couture. ||When she started out 15 years ago, there was no fashion in China. Since then though about everything in China has changed. Many more people are able to afford luxury products, and Chinese women, at least those who can afford it, follow international fashion trends. What makes Guo Pei different is what she puts on a runway. She employs 300 people in a workroom two hours from Beijing. She had to train them, but it?s also true that her creative freedom is tethered to relatively cheap labor. One dress alone, made entirely of golden panels, took 50,000 hours to embroider. (KEYSTONE/LAIF/Katharina Hesse/laif)