In March last year, Chinese premier Xi Jinping and his wife, former folk singer Peng Liyuan, visited Russia on a state visit.

But back home it was not the politics that made the news, it was the fact China's army of fashion bloggers had gone bananas for the black trenchcoat the Chinese First Lady wore.

The website of the company that made it crashed and pretty soon Liyuan was being hailed as the Chinese Michelle Obama.

For reporter Jesse Levene, the story illustrates how much the importance of clothes and shopping for clothes has changed in China in just a few decades, and in China In Vogue (BBC World Service, Tuesday, 8pm) she revisited the country she spent three years covering to take the temperature of this new-found fashion fever.

Along the way she met Momo, who makes her own clothes, and Momo's mum, who remembered the bad old days (or were they actually the good old days?) when everybody in China dressed the same, men and women.

She loitered outside a Beijing magazine seller's cabin to cast her eye over the 100 or so magazines dealing with fashion and lifestyle, among them Vogue China, which sells 640,000 copies and recently had to move to 16 editions a year from 12 to cope with advertiser demand.

And she bagged some poor quality audio from a press conference at which Vogue China's August 2013 cover star Victoria Beckham trotted out trite platitudes about empowering women to feel "good and confident and sexy".

Chinese women do not think it trite though, according to Vogue China editor Angelica Cheung.

She has met Victoria Beckham and had the dubious pleasure of escorting her to a local university at which the former Spice Girl was feted by female students.

To them, Cheung said, Beckham is "the ultimate role model … they want to become a woman like that".

Sociologist Leta Hong Fincher is one who takes issue with this sort of talk - "this proliferation of fashion magazines places a lot of economic and psychological pressure on women," she told Levene - but it was an admission by Central St Martins-trained designer Vega Zaishi Wang that was the most eye-opening.

"It takes time for me to understand my own culture," she said, admitting she also knew little about her country's history.

But for Cheung, it is only in mining those two subjects that a truly Chinese fashion vernacular can be unearthed.

"This is where we will find a Chinese Prada or a Chinese Armani," she said finally.