DESIGNER CHINA
Domestic designers explore national identity, balancing history with global fashion trends
It was the showstopper that launched a thousand memes, on both sides of the Pacific. But Rihanna’s 2015 Met Gala dress, featuring a 55-pound gold cape by haute couture designer Guo Pei, was originally considered a risky move.
Organizer Anna Wintour had reportedly feared that the year’s theme, “China: Through the Looking Glass,” would end up seeming racist, or like a Chinese restaurant. Instead, bemused netizens Photoshopped pizzas, omelets, and jianbing pancakes atop Rihanna’s 16-foot yellow foxfur trimmed train of Chinese floral embroidery, which took two years to make. The Washington Post, though, pronounced the evening “a thoughtful, expressive, and… utterly breathtaking exploration of China.” And state media were quick to applaud, as China Daily claimed “Chinese elements help Met attendance reach record high.”
Amid the triumphalism, there was frustration. While designers like Guo were enjoying the rare international exposure, Grace Chen, who has designed for both Oprah and Fan Bingbing, told Jing Daily that “the Western world has a huge misunderstanding of Chinese culture, and they don’t even realize it.”
Chinese media are usually quick to herald any major international event featuring homegrown designers as a watershed moment. “‘Distinctly Chinese’ elements stealing spotlight,” crowed China Daily, again, after a “new wave of modern design that champions cultural elements from China” debuted at London Fashion Week in 2016, apparently delighting consumers “seeking Chineseinfluenced design in their search for new identity and individual expression.”
The reality is more nuanced. With a history dating back millennia, as well as the aesthetics of 56 unique ethnic groups, “Chinese elements” are difficult to define. What does exist is an organic movement of young Chinese designers who are forging new markets by designing fashions that speak to their personal identity.
“When designers decide to make something ‘Chinese,’ some go for the most obvious thing: a qipao,” points out 32-year-old Zhang Wei, who launched her eponymous brand, Cindy Wei Zhang, in 2012, after earning a degree in fashion from Australia’s RMIT University. “Let’s be honest, when is that last time you saw a woman wearing a qipao to go shopping? Never, right?”
“Chinese elements can be overpowering to a design,” 33-yearold upstart designer Wang Mo stipulates. “Chinese designers can balance them because it is in our soul, but foreigners may have a difficult time.” For example, when Melania Trump visited the Great Hall of the People in 2017, the black Gucci qipao- like dress that she wore, embroidered with pink phoenixes, was criticized by some for its “cheap” fur-cuffed pink sleeves.
There is little consensus about how to balance heritage with modernity, let alone proletarian aesthetics from the 1950s and 60s that are nostalgically making a comeback. Instead, designers often rely on their personal taste. “I cannot separate myself from my brand. I am Chinese, so naturally, my clothes have a Chinese feeling,” says Wang, who came to her interview with TWOC wearing unisex clothing from her own label -A (pronounced “minus A”), which champions neutral colors, sharp tailored lines, and fine fabrics. After nine years overseas, she viewed China’s dearth of stylistic options as a call to action: “Clothes have a special power to them. When you wear high-quality clothes that match your personal style, you look completely transformed.”
An enthusiast of traditional Chinese painting, Li Yalong moved
“I CANNOT SEPARATE MYSELF FROM MY BRAND. I AM CHINESE, SO MY CLOTHES HAVE A CHINESE FEELING”
to Tokyo to pursue his fashion studies, before returning to Beijing in 2017 and starting Yoikadakada. “I am made in China and I am proud of it,” he tells TWOC.
Li is careful, though, not to add homegrown elements for the sake of it: “When Chinese aesthetics match my design concept, I definitely use them. But, I don’t rely on any single one culture for my designs. I want everyone to be able to appreciate my collections, no matter what country they are from.” (One of his most recent collections includes a purple jacket with big red Chinese characters saying “堕落天使”, Fallen Angel, on the back.)
Zhang, by contrast, actively seeks out local inspiration for her signature patterns. When starting a new collection, she visits historical sites and museums to photograph anything that she finds visually appealing, whether it’s the guardian figurines on the roof of the Forbidden City or Tang dynasty lacquer. For the next month or two, she produces sketches based on her favorite images until she has perfected a pattern that can be replicated on her clothes.
In 2015, Zhang worked with her grandfather, a Traditional Chinese Medicine enthusiast, to create “Herbs,” which featured patterns of sinuous greens, bulbous pinks, and cellular blues. Each garment’s inside tag described the medicinal effects of a plant.
“I love to wear my own clothes; I love the patterns and the colors,” Zhang says. Her designs were described by LA Fashion News as having “a purity of tone, exceptional handcrafting, and a quiet charm that has already resonated with peers.”
Designers like Zhang say they are creating clothes they always wanted to wear, but never had the opportunity to before. Using fashion to express one’s individuality is a relatively new concept in China. For decades, clothes were made and patched at home with “cloth tickets” that rationed how much fabric someone could purchase.
Even after market reforms, “Chinese just had a few fashion brands to choose from, so their tastes were limited by the market options. People ended up buying the flashiest clothes they could find to show off their wealth”—a trend that persists to this day, according to Wang.
“The more independent designers like me there are, the more the sophisticated Chinese tastes will become. It means that Chinese must start reflecting about who they are and what they think is beautiful,” Wang believes. “Not only will this self-reflection benefit Chinese designers, but it will ultimately benefit Western brands, as well.” – E.C.
“The soul of a buyer shop is the taste of its buyer,” says 31-year-old Xun Bing, a fashion buyer who now owns boutiques in Sydney and Shanghai.
Xun used to dream of being a designer, but after getting her bachelor’s degree in the subject, she developed an interest in business, and looked for a way to combine it with her creativity. “It’s not only about selling products, but presenting an attitude,” she tells TWOC of her current career, which involves trend-spotting and recommending promising brands and designers to shoppers who visit her stores.
In the fashion industry, buyers (买手) “are the link connecting brands, sales channels, and consumers,” Hong Huang, fashion editor and founder of buyer store Brand New China, told Lifeweek magazine in 2013.
Until recent years, though, buyers’ role in the industry was probably the least well-understood—and not only by the public. “Through buyers and buyer shops, designers can learn more about the market,” Hong explained. However, “lots of [independent] designers never have any contact with customers, but just open a little workshop for fun and stay in there tailoring and cutting all day…at most, a friend of theirs might say, ‘I like your clothes, make one for me?’”
This amateurism wasn’t just bad for designers, it hindered the spread of Chinese designs to the world. “[I’ve] been covering Chinese designers for eight years, but…when readers called to ask, ‘I’m interested in that product you featured, where can I buy it?’ I had to say, ‘you can’t,’” Hong told Lifeweek. “I realized I could devote pages to ‘Designed in China,’ but there was still a real distance before it can be brought to market.”
Professional fashion buyers first appeared in Europe half a century ago, and today, most are still employed by international labels or department stores. Their main job is to attend trade shows, visit showrooms, and flip through lookbooks to source marketable styles and designers to sign.
It wasn’t long, though, before some decided to strike out on their own, leading to the creation of multi-brand stores, or “buyer boutiques” (买手店) in Chinese. Operating like a nichemarket personal shopping service, these stores curate some pieces for the showroom, but their real target customers are “professionals, mostly women…who don’t want to appear at events in outfits that clash with anyone else’s,” and rely on buyers to scout out little-known brands, explained Hong. (Most are “second-generation rich” or overseas returnees, she added.)
Hong’s Brand New China has cooperated with at least 150 Chinese designers, a far cry from when China’s first buyer shop appeared in Shanghai in 1996. The buyer industry had taken time to develop in China, with luxury multibrand store Galeries Lafayette’s first flagship outlet closing only one year after its debut in Beijing in 1997. Lane Crawford’s Shanghai store opened in 2000 and closed in 2006.
That all changed around 2010, thanks to China’s growing middle class picking up the trend. According to a 2014 report by research firm RET and Fashion Trend Digest, four times as many buyer shops opened between 2010 and 2013 than the previous 14 years combined, with some even appearing in “second and third-tier cities.”
By 2014 homegrown stores accounted for 55.6 percent of the mainland market for buyer stores. “[Middle-class] consumers have started to pursue individualistic and distinctive labels, with their interest gradually shifting from popular mainstream luxury brands to those that express unique personalities,” opined Ye Qizheng, editor-in-chief of Fashion Trend Digest, to Jing Daily in 2014.
These buyers in turn created new platforms for local designers. In 2009, Beijing’s Wudaoying Hutong saw the opening of Dong Liang, a multibrand store featuring homegrown designs only. Since 2014, the store has hosted the “Dong Liang One Day” show at Shanghai Fashion Week every year, allowing Chinese designers to showcase their work. “We are like a window for the fashion industry from abroad to look at…chinese creativity,” boasted co-founder Tasha Liu to Time Out in 2011.
Xun believes that buyer stores like hers are on the cusp of a revolution. “Customers may be tired of the sales model in department stores.” Online shopping, meanwhile, comes with no guarantees of quality or customer service.
But not everyone shares Xun’s optimism. Chu Chu, a brandemployed buyer for Stuart Weizman, with nine years’ experience in fashion industry, tells TWOC that “successful buyer shops” are not as common as people think. They recently “boomed” simply because there were so few to begin with, and, as buyer Sun Ying told news site Jiemian in 2017, media hype had “misled people to think it’s easy to run a buyer shop.”
“Most buyer shops can only be seen in developed regions, which is far from enough to compete with e-commerce platforms,” Chu adds. Taobao and other e-market places, in spite of their reputation for unreliable quality and copying, may be better— or at least less costly—bridges between independent designers and their market.
This means that despite the odd successful shop that “discovered” and profited by launching the career of an unknown designer, most still bow to market pressure. “Maybe 10 percent of the goods [in the store] are there to show the buyer’s class and taste, but make no profit, while the other 90 percent follow the market’s trends,” Chu estimates.
It’s not all bad news, though. The fact that buyer shops are continuing to increase mean that “China’s developing market has cultivated more mature customers and diversified aesthetic tastes,” Chu believes. It only remains to be seen if their appetite can match that of China’s buyers—or if the latter have bitten off more than they can chew.
BUYERS ARE THE LINK CONNECTING BRANDS, SALES CHANNELS, AND CONSUMERS