Luxury kids' shopping: More Chinese parents choose to shop for kids at stores selling expensive clothes like Dior in Plaza 66. Gao Erqiang / Shanghai Star

Young celebrities

Back at Ralph Lauren, a sales clerk draws Chen's attention to a red velvet jacket priced 3,000 yuan ($490) that, since the airing of a reality TV show featuring famous dads and their young offspring, has gained the cachet of celebrity status.

"It's the jacket Angela Wang wore on TV," says the shop assistant, referencing a widely-viewed Ralph Lauren fashion show for kids.

Angela Wang, a.k.a. Wang Shiling, shot to fame in 2013 at the age of four while participating in the hit reality parenting program Dad! Where Are We Going? with her father, director Wang Yuelun. Her mother is television host Li Xiang.

Hunan TV acquired the rights to the popular Korean show of the same name and Wang subsequently became well-known for wearing outlandishly priced outfits in excess of 10,000 yuan, both on- and off - air.

Now China's one-child policy and growing ranks of high-net-worth individuals are dovetailing in just the right direction for the purveyors of kiddies' catwalk fashion.

"I used to buy a Birkin bag (Hermes) every year as a gift for myself," says Fang Jinqi, a 30-year-old mother of a two-year-old boy from Shanghai. "Now I spend half of that (about 100,000 yuan) on myself, and the other half buying luxury clothes for my son."