Newly Public Hong Kong Dressmaker Unruffled by Skeptical Stockbrokers : Couture: Joyce Ma’s evening gowns sell like hot cakes at $13,000 each. But shares in her company may be another story.

Hong Kong’s queen of high fashion, Joyce Ma, who recently took her company public, sells $13,000 evening gowns that captivate the colony’s wealthy women. Her glossy black shopping bags have become status symbols.

But financial analysts are less enthusiastic about her prospects.

Despite Ma’s success and an initial surge in the price of her company’s stock, brokers believe that the luxury market may be heading for weakness and that the shares are overpriced.

“We’ve advised our clients not to take up the shares,” one analyst said. “But Joyce is a nice lady. I hope, for her sake, the stock goes well.”

Some took exception to Ma and other stockholders using more than half the money raised from the stock issue to effectively repay themselves a loan of $5 million.

“The share issue is tiny, the luxury market is depressed and the company is using less than half the money for expansion,” one analyst said. “What kind of company is that? It’s a case of Joyce (Ma) wanting to get out at the top.”

Ma, whose family went to Hong Kong from Shanghai in the 1960s, remains enthusiastic about the firm’s prospects.

“You really need more than one evening dress in Hong Kong,” she said. “Here, the charity ball season is so long, and the community so restricted, you can’t really get by wearing the same dress. Even if you put it away for a few years, people notice.”

Ma first brought designer clothing to the British colony nearly 20 years ago, when most tai-tais, as wives of wealthy local businessmen are known, still wore tight traditional Chinese dresses with Mandarin collars and slit sides.

“When we brought ready-to-wear over from Europe, it was very readily accepted,” Ma said.

An uncle asked her to open her first fashion boutique.

Ma soon found that she had tapped a rich seam. In Hong Kong, wealthy women strut daytime clothes that shout “Cash!” Their evening wear screams it.

Her initial 850 square feet of retail space, opened with help from her family--one of the wealthiest in Hong Kong--have grown to 40,000 square feet throughout the colony. The space includes single-designer boutiques selling creations by American Donna Karan and Italian Romeo Gigli.

Anyone with a sense of occasion--and the cash to act on that sense--can stroll into one of her three boutiques and lay out $12,800 for a designer evening gown.

Ma, who turns 50 this year, said an aunt with a sense of grandeur got her interested in glamour.

“When I was a child, I used to help my auntie. I remember helping her prepare a dinner for Clark Gable. There were always people like that coming around. Everything my auntie did was always very grand. I think that’s where my sense of style comes from.”