Zhang Da, a Fashion Designer Who Likes Blunt Truths, Talks to Us About Clothes and People

He wants to study how clothing design has changed over decades, even a century, to learn "how much has been carried off by time, and how much has stayed."

"Zhang Da, fashion designer, currently living/working in Shanghai, China. In the first few years of [Boundless], Zhang Da tried to apply Chinese ways of thinking to design" — that is how Zhang Da introduces himself on his own website.

He was dressed all in black, with black glasses and a hoodie printed with the words "spirit of freedom." He speaks with a slight northern accent, and when he is making a point he has a habit of stepping outside it halfway through to contradict himself from another angle.

He also admits to the contradictions and the extremes in his character — in his own words, the "complexity" of being a person.

The designer had just finished showing his own label, Boundless, at Zhuse Hui, a new platform at Shanghai Fashion Week. The theme was unusual: "Is a conjoined person one person or two?" The whole collection started from that question — two jerseys worn one over the other, multiple collars, multiple sleeves, skirts layered over trousers — pushing past the traditional definitions of top and bottom.

The show was on the second floor of the Zhongshi Building in Shanghai, a British-style building put up in 1929, with narrow, worn staircases and lighting deliberately kept dim. In that concrete-and-steel space Zhang Da had built an art installation; in a room on the other side he had built a stage out of three mirrors, tilted so that they threw off the sense of space.

This was not a runway show in the usual sense. It was closer to performance art, where the theatrical effect counted for more than the clothes on display. It opened with a seemingly meaningless black-and-white film on a screen while non-professional models dressed in black made strange movements on stage: pressing themselves against the mirrors to merge with "themselves," rolling on the floor, black plastic bags pulled over their heads.

The second act played like a mysterious rite. Models in Eastern-cut garments punctured the same black plastic bags seen in the film, and black balloons came pouring out. The contrast between the solemn, silent young Asian women and the violence of the act carried a dark, negative emotion.

Then the darkness began to lift, and the clothes began to show pink, blue and other combinations that Zhang Da calls "sweetly kitschy." The only black left was the black sheet masks on the models' faces.

Zhang Da uses non-professional models in almost every show. For one thing, he says, clothes are designed for ordinary people to wear, so showing them in an imperfect way suits them better. For another, he admits that cutting two sets of patterns and making two sets of clothes — one sized for models to show, one sized for ordinary bodies to sell — "costs a bit too much for a small studio like ours."

In 2005 Zhang Da set up his own design studio, Parallel, and started his own label, Boundless. During that time he also worked as a designer for Shang Xia, the brand owned by Hermès. He graduated from the Northwest Institute of Textile Technology in 1990, then studied at the institute's VVOB centre under teachers from the fashion department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, and in 1998 interned at the Rome couture house SARLI. From 1999 to 2002 he worked at Shanghai Yifei Apparel Co., the period he counts as the one that taught him the most, when he came to understand the whole process of making clothes.

Now Zhang Da is concentrating on his own studio, and has recently launched a new label, Riyong ("Everyday Use"). As the name says, Riyong leans toward clothes for daily life.

We talked with Zhang Da about Riyong, the flattening of design, the identity of Chinese independent designers, and what he thinks clothing is.

One thing worth mentioning: after the show an architect came over to discuss architectural thinking and spatial ideas in clothing. Zhang Da said that was "giving him too much credit" — "clothing itself can't express all that much." Still, he likes talking with architect friends; he thinks their field of vision really is wider than that of fashion designers, and that they think about problems more deeply.

We have included that architect's conversation with Zhang Da in this interview.

Q: QDaily

Z: Zhang Da

A: The architect

Q: The balloon-bursting performance and the models in black sheet masks felt a little oppressive, while the clothes used very bright colours. What was the whole show trying to say?

Z: To keep it short, there really are two moods in it.

Black stands for the more oppressive things, even slightly aggressive ones. You can see the black fading out from beginning to end, until only a bit is left on the face masks at the very end.

To me, that is the real situation. Of course, that kind of reality doesn't necessarily belong in design; it belongs more in pure artistic expression. Art should be the one channel where expressing negative emotion has value — provided you can turn it into something that gives people insight. In any other field there is hardly a case where it draws a positive response.

Its opposite is probably the pastel checks, that sweetly kitschy kind of thing. There is a real contradiction between the two. With the bursting, I also wanted a big contrast: the girls look calm, wearing a mix of Chinese and Japanese styles, and then suddenly do something you would never expect — something quite violent.

Of course I haven't seen how it turned out, or whether it came across accurately. What I wanted to express was that situation — that a lot of things... well, explaining it like this is pretty dull, it makes it sound too simple — is that what you see and what you actually know are not quite the same. That's where things get complicated: how a person looks and what that person does can be different. But maybe that is exactly what they are — they have different sides, they have their own complexity and richness.

Social media today flattens complexity and richness out. It asks you to make something clear in 140 characters, or sometimes to sum something up in one sentence. Sometimes you can sum things up, sometimes you can't. All these ways flatten what is complex and rich. That's why a lot of people today think in a way that is rather dumb, rather simple-minded. There's no depth to it.

Q: I was talking with a fashion columnist about what worries him most now, and he also brought up the flattening of design — everyone thinks through social media, so if all your sources of inspiration are flat, what you design comes out flat too. JW Anderson's new season, for instance, looks good, but it's especially flat.

Z: Flattening — if you think one step further than he did, you'll feel it's a problem. But if 90% of people don't think it's a problem, then it isn't one, even though the thing itself really is a problem. It depends which angle you look from. Take the résumés our studio gets: not a single word, just a résumé with a photo attached, and that's it. Those people don't think there's anything wrong with it, and when they send it to people their own age nobody else thinks so either, so the question of rudeness doesn't arise.

Q: Do you think it's a problem?

Z: I think the cover letter is a problem. You're applying for a job, you write nothing, you just attach a résumé — it's like telling me what I want before I've even introduced myself. In China, someone walks into a shop, looks around, and leaves without a word, and neither the owner nor the customer thinks anything of it. In the West, if you go in without a nod or a greeting, and leave without saying goodbye, people think you're rude. So it depends on the environment you live in.

Q: Does that make you angry?

Z: Where would all that anger come from? Thinking about these things is rigid in itself. What is there to get angry about — who has the time to mind that kind of business.

Q: A lot of young Chinese designers now don't stress whether something is Chinese or global. They just say expressing their own worldview is enough, and whoever likes it can come find them. When you design, do you feel that discussing Chinese design is an important subject for you?

It depends how you talk about Chinese design. Plenty of people talk about it, using different examples to work it out. On the face of it, honestly, I can't describe it, in either abstract or concrete terms. Nothing presented so far has satisfied anyone, myself included. If that's the type of Chinese design we mean, I'm not even interested in looking at it.

But it is a subject worth a lot of people discussing. I can't explain it clearly on my own. You say you express things according to your own worldview — of course you can. That's tied to how you grew up and how you were educated. But where is your distinctiveness?

There will be some, of course, because more people now stress individual distinctiveness rather than speaking from within a particular culture. That isn't a problem either; it's a matter of personal choice. You can express your own distinctiveness from a personal angle, or express both yourself and the traits of a regional culture from a cultural angle. Either is fine.

It's a free choice. There's no need to insist that anyone must do it a certain way. It's only that a lot of what gets designed now, which you take for international, is actually a loss of individuality.

Everyone gets a lot out of that word, "international," because it feels like we're finally on a level with the world. But that state of mind is something you only arrive at from a position of weakness. If you were the one who started things, you'd never think about it at all. You're delighted to have caught up only because you were so far behind. You're still chasing other people, so you have no direction of your own. If your direction is the same as everyone else's, what individuality is there to speak of?

That's my view.

Q: What are the plans for the new Riyong line?

Z: I had the plan a few years ago, but for all sorts of reasons it didn't get made. The reason for doing it is that I like this kind of thing myself, so I'm willing to make it. And plenty of people need this type of product in daily life.

From a professional standpoint, making this kind of product lets me understand the process of making clothes better. As the saying goes, drawing a person is hard and drawing a ghost is easy — because with a basic style, everyone already knows what it should look like. If you do it badly, everyone can tell.

If you make something whose shape and proportions are very different from traditional clothes, nobody can really tell there's a problem. You say you changed it to look like this, and there's nothing anyone can say.

It also makes you pay attention to what people wear in daily life rather than what's in fashion. You have to think practically about what suits that kind of person, that kind of body. It has a closer relationship with the person, whereas fashion is about what everyone admires in a given period, which has no particularly concrete or definite relationship with the person. So that's what I get out of making this line — and if I really do it well, customers get something out of it too.

Q: What are the commercial plans for Boundless and Riyong?

Z: There's a certain correspondence with how people dress. You can't wear very dramatic clothes all day every day. Some people do, but very few. Most of the time people wear what we'd call ordinary clothes, but you also need something novel to break it up. What I make matches my own taste first, and most people's taste second. That in itself is a commercial consideration.

Clothing is a commodity. Besides its cultural attributes and its design value, it has commercial attributes, and you have to worry about how it sells. For now the Riyong line is sold only online.

Q: Any plans to get into multi-brand boutiques?

Z: I'd rather it sold more online than in physical shops. This kind of clothing covers a broad range, so it suits online selling better. Once you know the size fits, you can just buy it online. No need to try it on.

Q: You don't need anything experiential?

Z: No need. You experience it once you take it home. After wearing it for a year you know whether it's good or not; if it's good you keep buying, if not you stop. You don't need the experience of a shop's décor and atmosphere, or a service experience.

Q: In an earlier interview you said, I think, that what you make is fairly zhongyong — middle-of-the-road.

Z: It's still fairly zhongyong now. It just hasn't had any real, substantive breakthrough.

Riyong is a different case. I wouldn't call it mediocre. I think it's closer to the way things originally were, or the way they normally were. I want to understand how people usually made clothes decades ago, and 100 years ago, when the conditions were very different from today — how much has been carried off by time, and how much has stayed. Learning that is more useful for making clothes now.

It — Riyong — has nothing to do with zhongyong. It's my experimental design work that has to do with zhongyong. But zhongyong isn't a bad word. A lot of people don't know traditional Chinese learning, and neither do I. Zhongyong basically gets treated as a bad word, because everyone has taken on Western values and reads it as mediocre and incapable, when it's actually a rather wise idea. So all you can say is that people are ignorant. They've taken on Western things without digesting them, and haven't understood the good parts of their own classical tradition either.

Q: So do you think zhongyong is a bad word?

Z: I don't think zhongyong is a bad word. I'm only saying that what I make is fairly mediocre. Of course I used the word zhongyong myself, out of habit, so I can't escape it either.

Q: When you're designing, what question do you pay the most attention to, and think about most?

Z: The commercial side matters more.

Q: Over your design career, what has changed in what you think about?

Z: Not that much. There are two phases, earlier and later, where something did change.

When I first started making my own products I thought about abstract things more. I wanted the work to carry no trace of a concrete surface — all abstract thinking.

What I made after that had a stronger pop-art flavour. That word isn't quite right, of course; it's just the closest one I have.

At this stage I want the two to blend better. I want the abstract side to carry on, because it gives you a better analysis and understanding of things. But surface emotion should be there too; the two shouldn't be held so far apart. Having been through the first and the middle phase, that's where my understanding of clothing stands now.

Q: Looking back, what do you most want to do commercially?

Z: There's a lot. Not only commercially — there's a lot on the design side that needs improving, and I want to do that too. The two have to support each other well. You trade good design for money, and that money keeps you alive. That's the relationship, and both sides matter. If your design isn't good but you make money... I'm not saying making money is bad; making a lot of money with ordinary design is certainly lucky. But if you have expectations and standards for your own design, and you can trade a reasonably decent design for some money, then you're satisfied yourself and customers give the brand the respect it deserves. Then you use that money to make the brand better. That's really the relationship.

Q: Has anything lately given you new ideas?

Z: I read two books. No — I listened to one book. An audio programme. A lot of people might think he's old, or not know him at all. His name is Ah Cheng. I listened to someone reading his essays aloud.

I think he's a good one, he has a head on him. For one thing his knowledge crosses fields; also, his understanding of things doesn't carry so much... I can't say "subjective," because everyone understands the world subjectively, but he has less restlessness, or rancour, than a lot of people. Others have plenty of it — someone like Chen Danqing, not that interesting. He has insight, but on the whole he doesn't see things quite so... With Ah Cheng, the sorrow and the anger aren't as strong, so he doesn't cover up his objective view of things. He sees things fairly clearly. Not completely clearly, of course — nobody sees everything clearly. But he really is wiser than most people.

A: I'm an architect. I just watched the show, and I'd seen your clothes online before. I can feel a connection between your clothes and architecture, and I'd like to know whether you've actually put architectural ideas into them.

Z: Yes, but saying so here would be showing off my axe at the master carpenter's gate.

A: I've seen other fashion designers too, but your clothes hit me hard — that sense of space and structure. I'd like to hear what connections there are to architecture when you make clothes.

Z: I have architect friends myself, so I know a little, but only at the surface. I like architecture, I like looking at it, but I don't like the construction side, so I know very little.

I'm very interested in how architects look at a thing. When an architect friend talks with me and when a fashion designer friend talks with me, the difference is night and day. Fashion designers' field of vision is still very narrow.

Architects touch on so many fields — social resources, the relations between different kinds of power — it's very wide. So they're forced to think about these things, or they're interested in thinking about them to begin with. I really have learned a lot from them. How much of it has been converted into my products, I wouldn't dare say.

My early designs did try. Enough that some architects were genuinely interested. Columbia's architecture school has an office in Beijing, and many exchange students have come to look, and have bought things too.

What I care about is how architects look at space, what role a building plays in relation to its surroundings, and how much a building's own internal dimensions affect people. I'm not able to convert that into clothing well, but I really am interested in it.

One other thing: I dislike it when people describe clothes as sculpture. To me that's a bad review. A good garment should just be a good garment, not like some sculpture. I know it's a figure of speech, and I have nothing against figures of speech; it's the angle behind it I dislike — the idea that a garment is only right when it rises and falls like a sculpture. Italian Baroque design especially — there's Baroque design in clothing too — that kind of rise and fall is a dead, rigid thing to me.

I think the Eastern way of joining fabric to the body is finer: it isn't made into a fixed shape and put on the body like a shell; there's a fit between it and the body. That's only one way of thinking about it, of course, but I think letting the material itself, and its weight, take shape around the body's own form is the more refined approach.

(The Q&A has been edited and condensed.)

Cover image and in-article images: Boundless