She Became the Template for Taobao's Bestsellers by Accident. Has Liu Qingyang Read China's Taste in Clothes Right? | 100 People With Ideas

You may not like Liu Qingyang's designs, but you can't deny that she has found a path of her own through a crowded, complicated market.

"Liu Qingyang" is a popular search term on Taobao.

Luo Chunyuan found this out while shopping for a dress on Taobao. The dress she wanted had first appeared on a magazine cover, worn by Vivian Hsu — many-colored, built from showy blocks of color, with a graceful line to it.

When she searched Taobao for the same style, she found that besides "Vivian Hsu" in the product keywords, another name was flagged in red across the whole screen: "Liu Qingyang."

Sharing the screen with "Liu Qingyang" were Fan Bingbing, Joe Chen, Liu Shishi, Zhang Xinyuan, Bai Baihe and Sun Li. The actresses' names had turned into adjectives, strung together with "Liu Qingyang" to sum up what a product was selling: "Bai Baihe Liu Shishi Liu Qingyang same-style elegant off-the-shoulder fishtail evening gown slim shoulder-baring dress." That is how bestseller titles usually read — written to catch the most searches.

But not one of the small Taobao shops Luo turned up had anything to do with Liu Qingyang.

Shops with names like ZZLADY, NIASA Niansang Haute Couture, Qiaojiaren Hanyige and Nana High-End Custom are, at most, people who covet Liu Qingyang's work.

Liu Qingyang and her studio

Liu Qingyang is one of the best-known independent designers working in China today, and the copying and knockoffs on Taobao have given her no end of trouble. In August she wrote on her personal WeChat page: "Knockoffs do fatal damage to China's creative industries, but designers defending their rights on their own can't solve the problem."

For an independent designer, though, being knocked off on Taobao is an awkward business, bad and good at once.

Copying should be stopped; it is theft by another name. But the irony is that it may also be a crooked route by which Chinese independent designers reach a wider public. People may have no idea who you are, but at least you are no longer unknown, and plenty of them want to wear the clothes you designed.

It was Fan Bingbing, in fact, who first put Liu Qingyang's clothes in front of the public. After Fan wore one of her designs in 2013, Liu Qingyang became famous fast. Actresses started picking her clothes for public appearances, so often that two of them would sometimes turn up in the same dress. Most of them went for bright colors and lively patterns that still kept something feminine about them. Those are also the Chictopia styles most widely copied on Taobao now.

That distinctive way with pattern is exactly where Liu Qingyang's strength lies. If you haven't looked through everything she has made, you would probably agree with most of the press that "Queen of Print" fits her perfectly.

But print is not all there is to Liu Qingyang's work. She founded Chictopia in 2008, and the prints — especially the ones actresses like today — only start appearing after 2011. Before that, it is hard to point to anything that marks her work as hers.

Her ability to make these prints has a lot to do with what she studied.

At Central Saint Martins, Liu Qingyang majored not in fashion design but in textile design. Textile design is not confined to fabric for clothes; it also covers interiors, product design and more. As a student she worked on wallpaper, curtains, upholstered sofas and flooring, and even tried designing with shape-memory alloys.

Every fabric in her clothes is her own design. Usually a design needs a separate textile designer, who works with the fashion designer, after which a pattern maker turns the result into a garment. Liu Qingyang's designs begin with the fabric, which means that when she is working out the idea behind a whole collection she has to think about the cloth, and about how the print will read, from the start.

"I draw, retouch on the computer, decide whether to do digital printing, consider whether the texture of the cloth suits the idea — whether I want it to drape or hold a stiff shape. Sometimes the composition of a fabric needs adjusting too. If I'm doing jacquard, I design it from the weaving stage. I have to think about everything from fiber content to feel," Liu Qingyang said of her fabric work. "But printing is only one technique. My designs also use jacquard, pleating, bonding and precision cutting."

Liu Qingyang thinks "design is all of a piece." She went back to Beijing, found the city's veteran master craftsmen, and spent a year learning how clothes are made, pattern-cutting and tailoring included. That is what Chictopia is built on.

Still, it is print that gave the Chictopia label what passes for a signature. As Liu Qingyang says, the main reason she likes designing with print is that a pattern is direct and plain — easier to tell a story with.

Liu Qingyang has her own reading of Chinese taste: she thinks Chinese celebrities prefer designs that make them look pretty. That is a mild way to put it. When a celebrity steps in front of the flashbulbs, what she wants is not what ordinary people mean by "pretty." Looking good is only the floor; on top of it the design has to be interesting, worth talking about, hard to forget.

Ordinary shoppers want the same thing. If you spend close to a thousand yuan on a dress that carries no established luxury name, most Chinese consumers want other people to see where the money went. Styles that stand out sell better than quiet ones.

Liu Qingyang's prints really are unusual, which sets her apart from designers who win on cut alone. Choosing Liu Qingyang can mean choosing something people will remember. There is no praise or blame in saying so: in an age ruled by Instagram and by pictures, visual force counts for far more than cut or the subtler question of how a fabric feels. It photographs well.

Tasha, who runs the multi-brand boutique Dongliang, says the early Liu Qingyang was more her own person, and that the effect celebrities have had on her since is plain to see — the market's choices made this designer.

What is interesting is that Liu Qingyang describes her early work as designs made to please the market, and the later, better-known pieces as her real self. That is the exact reverse of what Tasha says.

"I think a fashion designer, an independent one especially, has a duty to bring people good things, rather than be led by others," Liu Qingyang said.

Liu Qingyang's designs

Liu Qingyang's early designs

These days Liu Qingyang is forever balancing that contradiction in her work.

When the label started, Chictopia, like most independent designers in China, showed only spring/summer and fall/winter. Liu Qingyang then went to four collections a year, adding pre-spring and pre-fall to fall in step with the international calendar. The division of labor is clear: abroad, pre-spring and pre-fall designs are more commercial and easier to wear. Liu Qingyang does the same, making those two collections more practical — dresses and coats, say — while she likes to work experimental elements into spring/summer and fall/winter. The four collections balance design against commerce. Two of them she makes more commercial, closer to what most people want, easier to wear.

The market idea behind pre-spring and pre-fall, though, is not something Liu Qingyang picked up at Saint Martins in London. She learned it from working with Lane Crawford, the Hong Kong department store that buys by buyer.

Sarah Rutson, Lane Crawford's fashion director, called Chictopia a mature commercial label to the press as soon as she brought it in: "She's fun, quite witty. I want the world to see that Chinese women have a great sense of feminism and can express their inner feelings successfully." Before she settled on her three partners — Ms Min, Chictopia and Helen Lee — she had looked at 120 Chinese designers.

What she means by mature can serve as a general test for any designer.

First, get into large, commercially seasoned department stores and multi-brand boutiques — "see how design gets turned into commerce." Second, know who your customer is. Last and most important, launch a secondary line beside the main one to speed up the production cycle.

"I looked at Chinese designers' timelines. Their moves came too close to the seasons themselves, about six months late. No retailer can work to a schedule like that," Sarah Rutson said.

Liu Qingyang's link to Lane Crawford began with the fashion editor Ye Zi; it was Ye Zi who introduced them, and Lane Crawford came to Liu Qingyang to talk about working together.

Before that, Liu Qingyang's collections came out two months behind the international schedule. At Lane Crawford's request she brought her pace roughly into line with the rest of the world. Showing and delivering on time every season is critical if an independent label is going to work as a business.

Lane Crawford also arranged a collaboration between Liu Qingyang and the American luggage brand Tumi — the first crossover it had put together between a Chinese independent designer and a foreign brand. For that 2014 project, Liu Qingyang designed a line of printed luggage for Tumi, including bags and small cosmetics cases.

Liu Qingyang's designs for Tumi

Lane Crawford was of course looking after its own business as well: it needs new names, and it needs to stand apart from China's many near-identical multi-brand boutiques.

Like Lane Crawford, Galeries Lafayette came to Liu Qingyang first. Her store opened there the moment Galeries Lafayette arrived in China. But her arrangement with Galeries Lafayette is simpler — a conventional lease.

Galeries Lafayette had first imagined taking the clothes on consignment; instead Liu Qingyang opened a store outright. "The good thing about working with Galeries Lafayette is that I'd always wanted to get into a department store. It was a pretty good start," Liu Qingyang said.

From 2008 to now, Chictopia has built out its channels smoothly. It became the first Chinese independent design label to enter Lane Crawford, and today Galeries Lafayette, Arrtco Collection at China World Trade Center Phase 3, and designer boutiques in second-tier cities all carry it, alongside its own stores at Jianwai SOHO in Beijing and Kerry Centre in Shanghai.

Even so, Liu Qingyang has done little to promote herself. She has staged exactly one runway show.

"I don't like the show format. For me a runway show is a huge amount of pressure — so much to prepare, models, press, the set, all of it to coordinate — and it lasts 15 minutes," Liu Qingyang said.

Her next attempt will be a static presentation: the clothes shown on mannequins.

At that presentation, Liu Qingyang plans to show the new season's furniture line beside the clothes. The stools and umbrellas are already finished; she did the print and fabric design for them. This is the direct payoff of knowing how to design fabric — in her words, a textile designer is "the designer best able to cross into other fields."