Fashion Designer Zhang Na: She Talks Art, But She's Running a Business | 100 People With Ideas
She gives the runway show a special meaning, in a very literary turn of phrase: "a kind of self-examination with the space stripped away." She is also called one of the most commercially mature designers in China.
She gives the runway show a special meaning, in a very literary turn of phrase: "a kind of self-examination with the space stripped away." She is also called one of the most commercially mature designers in China.
Among China's early fashion designers, Zhang Na counts as one of the lucky ones.
Even now the independent design market is barely out of its infancy, and most designers have no idea where to sell their own clothes. When Zhang Na was starting out, the multi-brand boutique one by one found her; a Hong Kong boutique called Seven Days asked to work with her; and soon after, the Hempel Group came to her and placed a large order.
That was a far smoother start than most fashion designers get.
But launching a design brand is not that simple. Beyond finishing the drawings and finding somewhere to sell, there is a mountain of small business to keep chasing. "The embroidery has to be done early, or the embroidery factory won't have time for it later." "The Italian factory is slow, so this is a sample we had a Chinese factory try first." "This fabric came out too white in the wash — it has to be redone." Zhang Na, in the unmistakable accent of a Beijing girl, runs through the garment-making process at high speed.
Most of the time, Zhang Na would rather not talk about design. She would rather talk to you about something else.
Things like "people with ideals ought to live better than everyone else," or how she uses the architect Gaudí as a yardstick for telling apart the people who accept the universe from the people who manufacture things of their own. Unlike most fledgling designers, who are learning how to commercialize, Zhang Na these past few years looks more like someone learning to be an artist — or, put another way, someone working flat out to recover the feeling side of herself. At times this has even gone a bit "too far."
Zhang Na's father was a painter, and she learned to paint as a child. She studied at the Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts and then at MOD'ART in France, and after graduating she became planning director at EVCODE, a commercial fashion brand in Shanghai. That was where she learned that fast-fashion brands like Zara have a supply chain of their own kind: production and supply fully automated, and buyers who handle fabric, market and sales all at once.
She now runs a 13-person studio with five departments — sales, production, design, inventory control and finance — and four assistants of her own. Most of the time she is in the third-floor design room, but she often turns up on the first floor to talk orders, and a chart in the second-floor production department keeps a careful record of order numbers. Passing the fabric room around the corner, Zhang Na will tell you that holding fabric always beats holding finished clothes: a garment can be made in two weeks, and if it takes longer than that, the customer may be gone.
People who have sized Zhang Na up, the fashion columnist Lin Jian among them, all say the same thing: she is a mature designer trained by commercial brands, and if she wanted to she could walk into any commercial brand in China as creative director tomorrow, on an annual salary of a million yuan.
Zhang Na felt she had "truly had enough of that kind of thing." It took real work to shake off the limits and the inertia that came with commercial experience and "recover her palate for design." In 2009 she quit for good, went traveling, then took part in the 1981 design exhibition. She needed to find her way back to the "first idea" of a design — the idea that has nothing to do with whether anyone else likes it or accepts it. The logo of her own brand, FAKE NATOO, was drawn as a hot-air balloon; Zhang Na says it stands for the best gift she could give herself.
She looks like someone with everything under control, but she has done her share of crying over it. In the early days she worried about where to sell. When the boutique Seven Days went under in 2009, Zhang Na got back a large refund; she sat in Beijing's Guomao district drinking coffee and weeping. "I still remember how miserable I was. The whole thing had collapsed — what was I supposed to do?" Now, though, when she talks about later ending her arrangement with the boutique Dongliang, both Zhang Na and Tasha, one of the people who run Dongliang, sound offhand about it. A change of style naturally means the audience and the sales channels both have to adjust, the two of them say.
FAKE NATOO now sells in dozens of boutiques around the country, and what Zhang Na worries about these days is finer-grained. The month before fashion week is the busiest. Even after going through this round-the-clock rush twice a year, every year, Zhang Na still has moments when she falls apart — on the morning before this season's show, she cried hard over a problem with an important piece of fabric.
Look through the past few seasons' work and you find that developing fabric has become a crucial part of FAKE NATOO's daily business. This season's "Micro World" collection, for example, sets out to convey exactly how human cells look under a microscope, and the layered fabric design it uses has to reach a certain degree of transparency. Zhang Na has worked with the Italian fabric supplier Tissu for a long time; now she is also talking to Chinese fabric suppliers, who are more interested in independent designers than they have ever been.
The collection Zhang Na most likes to talk about, Peter and the Wolf, was the first season in which she tried developing fabric. To get a stronger fairy-tale feel, she and the fabric supplier developed a fabric with matsutake-shaped bumps on the surface. She later called that collection FAKE NATOO's turning point. It was also the point at which FAKE NATOO began building two seasons around a single theme. "Working it through this way goes deep, and it feels comfortable," Zhang Na says.
The independent fashion designer Nicole Zhang thinks fashion design is now close to saturated, and that developing fabric counts as a new way out for designers. She had seen some of Zhang Na's work from earlier seasons, and this season she watched a Zhang Na show for the first time; she says Zhang Na's designs have flair, breadth and nerve.
Zhang Na has probably worked out, step by step, how to put commercial method and expression by feeling together. The fashion blogger Ji Liang says that in FAKE NATOO's first few years the brand paid more attention to line, color and structure — abstract things with no obvious signature meaning, and little to do with what was in fashion. In recent years, though, Zhang Na has chosen to add a measured amount of print and embroidery, making the brand "more popular and more fashionable."
On runway shows too, Zhang Na has gradually given up some of her old fixations. "I think the clothes speak for themselves," she used to say. Now she has changed her line, giving the runway show a special meaning in a very literary turn of phrase: "This is a kind of self-examination with the space stripped away." The phrase has traveled widely among designers who still insist on staging shows, and it sounds a lot like the theme of her previous season's work, Landscape and Bird's-Eye View.
But that pure literary streak makes her look all the more stubborn about other things. This summer Zhang Na found that a print she had designed for this year's spring/summer line had been copied outright by the fashion brand Kawen and put on sale in 300 stores nationwide. She sued Kawen, and the plagiarism case has already been heard in court.
"I don't want damages. I just want to stand up and say it, and I want the court to rule in my favor," Zhang Na says.
"Because I drew every one of these prints from nothing, one version at a time."
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.