“We want to make this Chinese girly image,” said Yansong Liu backstage, as we regarded the wonderful ruffle-piped qipao dress in patched madras that was my favorite cocktail of fashion flavors in a collection full of them. Madras is a traditionally Indian fabric pattern, which via British colonialism became appropriated into the canon of worn Americana as an emblem of middle-class signaling preppiness. By using it here, Liu and his co-designer Austin Wang seemed to foreground the potential recontextualization of the traditional “Oriental” codes of dress they are focused upon into a freshly modernized dialect of Chinese style.
The most powerful indication that their minimalist but playful take on traditional dress can translate into the contemporary as a form of Chinese prep is just how good it looked. Onion quilt liner separates, felted wool shift waistcoats and straight skirts, salt and pepper weave wool tweed jackets for men and women, tulip skirts in raw denim or cotton gingham, and quarter zips in silky nylon or cotton jersey were just a few of the garment groups actualized through an intentionally deliberate local filter. Frogging details at the fastenings, folded bow-tie decorations, and the minimalized architecture of traditional shapes including the qipao and mandarin jacket were a few of these localized details.
From the embroidered patchwork at the start to to the exploded embellishments near the end, the designers also applied a broad bouquet of different decorative articulations that depicted orchids. Said Liu: “Chinese poets always describe the orchid because it is representative of the Chinese character. And we want to make a Chinese intellectual image.”
The fashion-world equivalent of madras in this collection—a floating reference washed up here from afar then given fresh meaning through relocation—seemed the sexy librarian-ism of Miuccia Prada. The designers applied this in a manner that seemed much more interestingly additive than reductively derivative. The couples’ looks at the close, they said, reflected an exploration of wedding culture here, in which both couples and guests will dress in both Chinese and non-Chinese attire at different stages of the celebration. This finely encapsulated the dialectic between home and away, a sense of self placed within a wider world, that seemed the core creative driver of this excellent collection.
