Hey, Young People Who Make Clothes — What Exactly Are You Thinking? | Shanghai Fashion Week

Then again, from 2007 to 2017, what they think has never quite lined up with what everyone else thinks.

"Go help my neighbor out — she's really talented."

That remark, from a friend, is how Andreina Longhi, a Milanese, first came to notice Chinese designers, in 2007. Thirty years had passed since she left Max Mara's marketing department to start Attila&Co., an agency that markets fashion brands; nearly five had passed since her first trip to China.

For Chinese fashion designers, 2007 is a year worth marking. The phrase "Chinese independent designer" turned up in the domestic press at scale for the first time. That year Qiu Hao, newly back from Central Saint Martins, registered his own label, Qiu Hao, in London, and the press was glad to call him the first Chinese designer to come home from "Saint Martins, the world's top fashion school." Two others founded eponymous labels at about the same moment: Zhou Xiangyu (Xander Zhou), back from the fashion academy in The Hague, and Shangguan Zhe (Sankuanz), who set up his studio in Xiamen.

The "neighbor" in that remark was Uma Wang (Wang Zhi). In "a small room," Andreina saw her show "flowers, candles, and some wonderful clothes." Uma Wang had registered a studio in London by then but had no label of her own yet. After the meeting in that small room, Andreina Longhi took her to show in Milan and into the pages of Italian Vogue. Today the label's average spend per customer runs 5,000 to 20,000 yuan, and it sells through more than 70 retail points worldwide.

Uma Wang was among the first independent designers Chinese shoppers knew by name. Before her, a cohort born in the 1960s and 1970s had shown abroad: Wu Haiyan, Liu Yang, Xie Feng, Liang Zi, Ma Ke, Wang Tao. Ma Ke was invited in 2008 to be the first of them to show at Paris haute couture week.

But that list of names is unfamiliar to Chinese shoppers — and even Andreina Longhi, 30 years in the industry, had at first only read about them in French magazines.

Uma Wang's own road to a debut was long. She took her undergraduate degree at Donghua University (then China Textile University) in the 1990s, and in 2002 finished an eight-month short course in accessories at Saint Martins in London. By the time she first showed at Milan's spring/summer week, in 2011, she was 39.

Today's crop of young designers has it easier. Like many Chinese industries tied to how people live and spend, fashion design has grown fast. The younger generation tends to come from money; a degree from Saint Martins or Parsons is no longer rare; at home they find more funding, more professional presentation, more buyers and more places to show. Even department stores — the mass market — have begun courting them, in the name of variety.

Around 2013, labels such as Shangguan Zhe's Sankuanz and Deepmoss, by Liu Xiaolu (Dido), reached a wider audience through a Shanghai Fashion Week that was gaining influence. Now Andreina Longhi's client list has a few new names on it: Angel Chen, Samuel Gui Yang, Percy Lau.

Set against the two earlier waves, most of these designers were born around 1990 and set up their labels and studios abroad straight out of school. Their brands are one to five years old; their clothes cost 1,000 to 8,000 yuan. They know modern Chinese life under a market economy, and they have also spent three to eight years in the West at the best schools. They know clothes, and they know a little about styling, art, music and culture. They work hard, and — like their customers — they live on social media and like to talk.

Yes, in China's consumer market as a whole, fashion design is still tiny and scattered. As Dorian, a young man we met, put it: when it comes to buying fashion, most people either "don't get it," "can't afford it," or "have nowhere to wear it." And yet the industry's prospects are far wider than they were ten years ago, and far sunnier.

Identity, though, is still a problem. The fashion columnist Leng Yun puts it this way: "Designers born in the 1990s are international, you could say, but they have no identity, and a visual shock is getting harder to land. Commercial success, even when it comes, doesn't necessarily produce influence in design."

"There look to be more opportunities, but they will also run into problems the last generation of designers never had," Andreina Longhi says.

(1) These People Are So Fresh!

On April 9, Angel Chen and the French singer Petite Meller staged a concert together in Venue 4 of Labelhood, at the Bailian Fashion Group Center.

Labelhood is the independent-designer venue Shanghai Fashion Week started in 2015. It is run separately by a company called Leihu; one of the people behind it is Tasha, a co-owner of the Chinese multi-brand boutique Dong Liang.

For three or four days each April and October, young designers whose applications are accepted get to show themselves to press, buyers and ordinary shoppers, either as a presentation or as an exhibition. This year brought a new format: the live concert.

Angel Chen and Tasha met in London. In October 2013, invited jointly by Shanghai Fashion Week and the British Fashion Council, Dong Liang joined Design By Shanghai, an overseas promotion at London Fashion Week, as the only Chinese multi-brand designer store on the roster. Tasha brought five designers to show: Liu Min, Du Yang, Shangguan Zhe, He Yan and Su Renli. The next year she also made time for the Saint Martins graduate show, where she saw work by two Chinese graduates, Angel Chen and Guo Yirantian.

The shows went over well. During Shanghai Fashion Week in April 2014, willing to give it a try, Tasha brought the London format home and started "Dong Liang Day," once a season. The first edition had Shangguan Zhe, Guo Yirantian, Zhang Da, He Yan and Nan Lang; the second grew to seven — Zhang Da, Su Renli, Angel Chen, Guo Yirantian, Liu Xiaolu, Wang Haizhen, Feng Yuqi — and brought in Lorenzo, founder of the American boutique H.Lorenzo, and the critic Colin McDowell. The third drew a clear line between runway shows and presentations: four labels walked — Nicole Zhang (Zhang Xu), Hiuman (Zhou Xiaowen), Museum of Friendship (Wang Tianmo), Boundless (Zhang Da) — while Deepmoss (Liu Xiaolu), Babyghost (Huang Qiaoran and Joshua Hupper), Percy Lau, Yirantian (Guo Yirantian) and Angel Chen presented.

Plainly, platforms like "Dong Liang Day" and Labelhood let young designers such as Angel Chen and Guo Yirantian show alongside designers already known at home, straight out of school.

But what these platforms really offer is leverage — a small push that moves a heavy load. For young designers, Shanghai's autumn/winter week, held every April, sits awkwardly on the calendar. Many have already done one of the big four international weeks in February or March and taken their orders for the world. Another show costs time and money a beginner can barely spare, and the extra orders from domestic buyers may not amount to much. A presentation gives them more for less.

Presentations also put more weight on a designer's storytelling. Beyond the clothes, the styling, the setting, the music, the movement and the mood all belong to the story; the designer has more room, and the audience gets a clearer read on what the label is.

Take the same subject — how young women live. SHUSHU/TONG's girls are always half inside a daydream: for spring/summer 2017 the space became a garden, the girls drowsy-eyed, fingering petals; for autumn/winter 2017 the backdrop was a classroom, imagining what the good students, the bad students and the teacher would wear. Museum of Friendship's girls are full of odd ideas: for spring/summer 2017 they formed a choir, and by autumn/winter they were packing passports and setting off to explore.

Next to the generation of Ma Ke and Uma Wang, these labels — most of them not yet three years old — show far more personality. Angel Chen is the loud one: shaved head with a small braid trailing down the back, red lipstick. Her label is loud too, colors detonating, fabrics woven every which way; last season was about Shanhaiguan, this season's inspiration is Morocco. The piece social media shared most is a trench coat with a line printed across the back: "In heaven above and on earth below, I alone am the honored one."

Guo Yirantian is the steady one: black hair parted in the middle, plain clothes, and in interviews she stops to think before she answers, slowly. Her clothes are more grown-up — sober browns, grays, blacks and whites, clean cuts, fabric you notice by feel — and most of her customers are women between 30 and 45. Asked how age and style relate, she looks up and pushes back: "Does maturity have to have anything to do with age?"

These presentations try to read contemporary Chinese life and to hook into what international runways are talking about. DANSHAN, reckoning that "the pressure on Chinese men today comes mostly from fierce competition and from never being taught how to feel," turned the space into office cubicles, rewrote the show notes as a job application form, and papered the facing wall with job ads mocking the limits placed on men's careers. Liu Xiaolu's Deepmoss, Xu Jiazheng's Sans Titre and Li Jiapei's Andrea Jiapei Li all took space and the cosmos as their theme, echoing the return of 1960s science fiction on international runways.

Even menswear, which changes less than womenswear, is feeling for a style of its own. Li Yang — born in Beijing, schooled in London, working in Paris — trained under Raf Simons, buys his fabric and makes his clothes in Italy, and has been called a "luxury streetwear brand" by i-D; at Labelhood he used an invented music label, Samizdat (the word for underground publishing), to introduce bands he likes. Pronounce is known for spliced fabrics, distinctive but wearable; its autumn/winter 2017 collection took the Rarámuri, the long-distance runners, as its starting point, and the models came out in five groups, like clans, each group a different kind of man. Junwei Lin is good at the boyfriend women imagine: he staged a wedding, and fine-featured male models walked out in slim shirts trimmed with ruffles, carrying flowers and candles.

They also worry less than the last generation about where they come from. Angus Chiang, from Taiwan, has finished three menswear collections since graduating from Saint Martins, drawn in turn from rural Taiwan's tram culture, its banquet culture and its school culture. It does not trouble him that people in other markets will find these things strange — "that's exactly what makes them curious."

To anyone who knows the European and American fashion system inside out — or is sick of it — these new ideas and formats come as a relief. Jack Cassidy, a menswear buyer at Selfridges, invited to Labelhood for the first time this year, could not hide his excitement: "You know, after sitting through so many tiring runway shows, to come to Shanghai and see these young designers present — an international eye mixed with local inspiration, and the staff running around in good-looking uniforms, running the platform like a brand — it's a real surprise." His one regret: the budget was already spent at the big four, and another order would mean asking for more.

Some Chinese buyers and ordinary visitors see it differently. To them, a presentation "with no proper runway show" is a letdown, and they may not know the difference between a runway look and a piece that goes on sale. "It's like graduation work — still rough. Some of it, the long sleeves, the big trench coats, looks like nothing new," one visitor, who described himself as a performance artist, told QDaily.

Anja Aronowsky-Cronberg, editor-in-chief of the fashion journal Vestoj, objects to measuring Chinese designers' history against Europe's and America's. "Compared with their peers in other countries, young Chinese designers are generally better off, that's true." But "China has only had this much time. Paris fashion week is more than 100 years old; you can't catch that up. A format like Labelhood — more experimental, newer — is where China can stand out. You don't have to follow the Western fashion system. Opening your own is the more exciting thing to do."

To help visitors understand the designers, Andreina Longhi has Angel Chen play the video of her Milan runway show at the Labelhood concert, and Zamira, one of the people behind Tube Showroom, tells Chen Xuzhi to remember to play his London show video in the room where buyers place orders.

"Let them know what you've done on the world stage."

(2) Is It Easier to Be a Designer Now?

This wave of designers also caught manufacturing at the right moment.

Factories used to live on state export subsidies and had no interest in serving independent designers: small orders, complicated work, hours hard to count. Now that manufacturing is moving elsewhere, Chinese garment factories are looking to change, and looking for new partners — among them an ever-larger pool of independent designers.

Angel Chen and Wang Fengchen both make in Shanghai, and both use Chenfeng Group. The 50-year-old garment manufacturer produces for Marc by Marc Jacobs, Tsumori Chisato and Adidas, among others; the "brand partners" page on its website now includes Lü Yan's Comme Moi and its own womenswear label, Blinkgallery. Since about 2015 it has also given the independent designers it works with studio space of roughly 400 square meters, production line attached.

Kim, who runs marketing at Chenfeng Group, declined to be interviewed. But Wang Fengchen, the designer behind Feng Chen Wang, told QDaily that her work with Chenfeng began at the end of April 2016. Willing to try it out, the factory boss lent them an empty fourth floor at the Anting plant in Shanghai as a studio, with the production line two floors below. To sort out cutting and construction, he also assigned her the senior hands from the sample room — unlike line workers, sample makers can work alone and build a whole garment themselves. Pay was switched from piece rate to hourly.

"Piece rate makes workers ignore quality and count pieces. The way we work now, one person finishes one garment and gets paid by the hour, so he has the patience to study the technique. He doesn't have to think, my God, I've only made one or two garments this week."

Sponsorships and collaborations are arriving too. Big companies all want young customers, and their marketing departments have started talking about youth culture, niche communities and market segments — which makes independent designers a convenient target.

At the fashion week that has just ended, KFC signed up four labels — Rico Lee, Ren Qian, Yirantian and Deepmoss — and asked them to work its freshly ground coffee into their shows. Nike and Converse were on the feet of models at Pronounce, Wanbing Huang, SHUSHU/TONG, DANSHAN, Hiuman, Xu Zhi and Junwei Lin. Before that, Chow Tai Fook and K11 went to Yirantian for a jewelry line, and Gap plans a collection with Pronounce.

Last year Angel Chen also landed Mercedes-Benz as a sponsor and showed on the official Milan calendar. "The stylist, the photographer, the makeup artist — Mercedes found the whole team. They told me to add a few sweatshirts to make the collection read as complete on the runway. I went to Milan four months early and spent a while working the local team in before we finished the last 30% of the collection. The show itself ran to more than 120 SKUs." That show also got her an invitation from the Milan organizers for the following season.

Sales channels are changing too. Guan Lin, who founded Short Sentence, studied fashion marketing at Parsons in New York, came home to work several years at the commercial womenswear label Viviniko, then decided to start her own.

At the order fair, Guan Lin set the minimum order at one piece — not at 30,000, like the commercial menswear label Consistence. The point is to accommodate the boutiques, which are multiplying and taking every possible form. "You can see everyone changing. Department stores want to open their own multi-brand stores, boutiques want to get into shopping malls, and luxury brands want to sell furniture and perfume in their own stores, so those look like multi-brand stores too."

That gives small labels more ways to reach shoppers. Besides SKP, which opened its own boutique, SKP Select, in 2015, Beijing's Hanguang Department Store and Chengdu's Renhe Chuntian have both come to Guan Lin. "The buyers are getting better at this."

(3) But... Where Are the Customers?

"I don't understand it. China already has so many good designers, and people still trust foreign brands more. Why?"

"Look at all the beautiful clothes at the order fair. Why is it so hard to see anyone wearing them on the street?"

The questions come from Andreina Longhi and from Minki, a Hong Kong designer.

Everyone has noticed the gap between a market that looks bottomless and what people actually buy. Chinese shoppers crowding the overseas flagships of luxury brands tell the industry that this market has never lacked the spending power and energy other countries envy. Walk down the street, though, and you will hardly find a thing by a new Chinese designer.

Fashion week and daily life seem to run on separate tracks. Labelhood is an island where the industry celebrates itself: most of the crowd is press, buyers, the friends and families of the people taking part — models, photographers, stylists, designers, bands — and design students. Outside that circle, almost nobody knows these designers.

Insiders like Leng Yun think "this group of designers is exploratory; it doesn't stand for commercial business yet." Another view is that China's enormous, scattered market is still working out what fashion even is.

"When I first came to China, a lot of people in the industry had one bad idea: that fashion had to be exaggerated, shocking, above ordinary life. Shoppers looked at street style and at those magazines and saw fashion as a monstrous thing. But that isn't fashion — fashion was always simple. It is part of life," Andreina Longhi says.

At Shanghai Fashion Week we also met Dorian, who is 26. He did two years of undergraduate study at Donghua University and two years of menswear design in Italy, then worked two years, first in Uniqlo's design department and then at the clothing brand Neiwai. He has just been admitted to a master's program at the London College of Fashion.

Dorian is not optimistic about the market at home. "Overseas consumer markets look so varied because the occasions for fashion, and the culture behind it, are varied: punk, rock, art, equal rights. Countless small circles produce countless ways of buying clothes, and people dress to show which circle they belong to. Here, people only started to recognize those scenes in recent years, as social media grew, and in daily life they are still very small. Independent designers can't price low either, because production and distribution won't allow it. Even people who get it and can afford it may not know where to wear it, because there are so few places to wear it."

Designers, for their part, are puzzling over how to find customers of their own. In Europe and America, a young designer joins an established house and learns how demand works; in China there are very few companies worth starting a career at, which raises the risk of going out on your own considerably.

Every young designer who spoke to QDaily was anxious about something: money, contacts, exposure. The mix differs, and some talk around it while others say it straight, but exposure — how much, and how to get it — worries nearly all of them. With so many brands and so many scattered channels, whether you can be heard and understood decides whether the clothes sell.

Showrooms and PR agencies have two standard ways of getting a designer seen: dressing celebrities, and placements in magazine shoots. While the variety show Ace vs Ace was on the air, Tube Showroom used its contacts to put Bai Baihe in a pair of frayed Xu Zhi jeans as she arrived at Chengdu airport; entertainment and fashion outlets ran the airport photo everywhere, and the jeans sold out fast. Xu Jiazheng's Sans Titre, founded in 2015, has one store, in Beijing; after Yang Yang, Kris Wu and other stars wore it, press and shoppers poured in, and the designer was left worrying about whether the supply chain could keep up and how to hold quality and price.

One answer that works is to find your exact place in the market rather than chase a style. Guan Lin puts it this way: "Shoppers abroad are already mature in what they buy and how they look at it, so they'll order good-value basics online from Acne, Everlane and the like. In China, fast fashion — Uniqlo, Zara, Gap — has already covered basics. What's missing are mid-priced brands that still care about design."

Her Short Sentence is Tube Showroom's best seller, priced between 1,000 and 4,000 yuan.

And social media is always the easy route. Last October, Labelhood started assembling "Cool Kids" to cover the shows. Most are new-media or independent publishers with large followings on Weibo or WeChat — YohoGirl and the blogger Yvonne Ching, for example, with 1.66 million and 1.21 million Weibo followers. This April, Labelhood brought in 18 bloggers to stream live from its official account on Yizhibo, with at least 4.3 million followers between them.

Nobody can say what sort of shoppers those 4.3 million are, what brands they usually buy, or whether they would spend 1,000 to 8,000 yuan on a piece from a label less than five years old. But you can see that the number puts a lot of minds at ease.

Cover images: the XU ZHI autumn/winter 2017 show and the Angel Chen autumn/winter 2017 show, respectively. Cover and inline images from Labelhood, Tube Showroom and Not Showroom.