The Tamesis
“We wanted to create this Chinese girl image,” Liu Yansong said backstage, as we admired a beautiful Madras patchwork ruffled cheongsam dress, my favorite chic cocktail of the entire collection. Madras is a traditional Indian fabric pattern that, through British colonialism, was incorporated into American standards of wear as a symbol of middle-class preppyness. By using it here, Liu and his co-designer Austin Wang seemed to highlight the potential re-contextualization of traditional “oriental” dress codes they were concerned with into a fresh, contemporary dialect of Chinese style.
The strongest sign that their simple yet playful take on traditional dress can translate to contemporary Chinese prep is how good it looks. Onion quilted separates, felted wool shift vests and shift skirts, salt and pepper knitted wool tweed jackets for men and women, tulip skirts in raw denim or cotton gingham, and quarter zips in silky nylon or cotton jersey are just a few of the clothing groups that have made it through local screening. Frog details on fasteners, fold-over tie embellishments, and simple structures in traditional shapes like cheongsams and mandarins are some of these localized details.
From the beginning as a patchwork of embroidery to the final explosion of embellishments, the designers also applied a range of different decorative arts to depict the orchids. Liu said: “Chinese poets always describe orchids because it represents the character of the Chinese people. We hope to create an image of a Chinese intellectual.”
The fashion world equivalent of Madras in this collection—floating references that rushed here from afar and then took on new meaning through relocation—seemed to be Miuccia Prada’s sexy librarianism. The designers applied this in an additive way that seems more interesting than reducing derivatives. They said the couple’s closing look reflected an exploration of wedding culture here, with both the couple and guests wearing Chinese and non-Chinese attire at different stages of the celebration. This nicely encapsulates the dialectic between home and away, a sense of self-placement in the wider world that seems to be the core creative driver of this excellent series.
