Fashion Design Is Just This: Design It, Buy the Fabric, Make It, Sell It | 100 People With Ideas

We talked to Zhang Da, a veteran among Chinese fashion designers, known to everyone as "Uncle Da." He's a lot of fun.

Ordinary article

Zhang Da designs clothes, but the outside world keeps pinning other roles on him: thinker, artist, philosopher. That got worse after the "Hair Exhibition" he staged in March 2012 inside the fashion boutique Dong Liang — a crossover that looked like it had nothing to do with fashion design, and gave people all the more reason to read meaning into him.

"If even I can be called a master and an artist, you can see how cheap those words have become." Zhang Da has no time for being defined that crudely. In his eyes there is nothing glamorous about being a fashion designer: "Everyone's impression of a designer is that one moment of glory taking a bow at the end of a show. But that's two days a year. What about the other three hundred-odd days? You work late every night, the same as any other office worker."

2015 spring/summer collection

I first met Zhang Da at a fashion lecture. Beside the swagger and easy confidence of the younger designers, he gave nothing away. He likes talking about design and business themselves, but will say little about his private life: "None of that has anything to do with readers, or even with my customers."

Born in the 1960s, Zhang Da is an elder among today's independent designers. He was formally trained, but "in those days there was no such thing as a fashion designer — there were only workers who made clothes." So he spent a few quiet years teaching at a university, then went abroad to study further and made a name for himself there. In 1999 he joined Shanghai Yifei Fashion Company as a designer, and in 2005 he founded his own label, Boundless.

His current title is designer at Shang Xia, the Chinese brand Hermès invested in. When it comes up with friends he doesn't make much of it — though he credits the value of working for a commercial brand more than most independent designers do: "It makes you understand that this job is doing the design, buying the fabric, then making the clothes and selling them."

That is also why he argues for "designing for ordinary people." At last year's autumn/winter fashion week, the models on his runway were all around 165 centimeters tall — "friends, and friends of friends." "I'm selling clothes for ordinary people to wear, so there's no need to use a model's body or expensive fabric to cover up flaws in the design itself." Zhang Da wants to make the kind of clothes you can grab off the rail, throw together and walk out the door in, at the pace city life runs at.

2014 autumn/winter collection

"The food that stays with me is always the plainest, most everyday food. The big meals I've eaten — even food in Michelin-starred restaurants — I can't remember the taste of at all. Whether you're cooking or making things by hand, the simpler it is the more it tests you, because you only have so much to work with." His work often has a kind of magic-realist plainness to it — this year's spring/summer collection, for instance, whose ad campaign took a swimming pool as its inspiration. His collections usually have no name and no fancy meaning behind them; he says he isn't good at telling stories.

But it would be wrong to say Zhang Da only chases wearable design. The complex abstraction of the Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo has its own value in his eyes, because it is a breakthrough, and it can set other people thinking. He hopes he too can push past the boundaries of design — that is what his own label, Boundless, is meant to say — but he doesn't think he is at that level yet.

Asked about his ideals, he says he wants his work to do a few things. First, to use the form of clothing design to express his own understanding of the world; second, to meet functional needs. The higher goals — breaking past the boundaries of design, and carrying on great design — are not, he thinks, what someone at his level should be attempting.

2015 autumn/winter collection

His latest season is, in a sense, an argument about how the functional needs of clothing are changing: traditional Chinese cotton wadding and diagonal front closures combined with a modern sportswear line. "I want to bring materials that belong very much to this place into modern daily life." The subject clearly excites him.

He has made attempts at the boundaries too. A few years ago he designed a garment with a special cut that avoided straight lines in every contour, a piece with "no character of its own" — it took on a different shape and a different air depending on the body wearing it.

"I think making clothes can go as deep or as shallow as you like, and there's nothing wrong with simple pleasure. A customer buying a piece of clothing isn't thinking about how profound its ideas are; they just look at the color, the cut and the quality."

Zhang Da

Everyday Style List:

Q: When did you buy your bike, and what brand is it?

Z: Two years ago. A Giant.

Q: Which brand fills the most of your closet?

Z: Uniqlo.

Q: Where do you usually shop?

Z: Uniqlo.

Q: What kind of hotel do you pick when you travel? Where's the most memorable place you've been?

Z: I use Airbnb. Every place I've been has stayed with me.

Q: What's your favorite film?

Z: The German films Summer in Berlin 《柏林的夏天》, Heaven 《天堂》 and The Shy Gun 《羞涩的枪》, and the Iranian film A Separation.

Q: Recommend the restaurant you go to most often.

Z: Xi'an Famous Eats.

Q: Recommend one thing QDaily readers absolutely shouldn't miss.

Z: There's nothing you absolutely can't miss.