A Chinese Fashion Moment?

The Wall Street Journal

July 3, 2008

By STACY MEICHTRY

July 3, 2008; Page B7

As young designers, Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent dueled in a 1954 contest that helped put both on the fashion map. This year, the competition has been resurrected, and the finalists reflect the emergence of a new source of fashion talent: China.

Two Chinese designers, Qiu Hao and Shao Jia, are among 10 finalists who will today unveil runway collections in a bid for the Woolmark award, which provides more than $150,000 for the winner's label.

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Having buoyed the luxury-goods industry's growth for years, China is becoming an incubator of design talent, from young Europeans seeking jobs in the country's massive textile industry to a rising generation of homegrown Chinese designers.

Just hours before the Woolmark contest gets under way, Ma Ke will become the first Chinese designer to present an haute couture collection in Paris. Three more Chinese designers will appear on the Paris runways during ready-to-wear fashion week in September.

At the root of China's fashion moment is the growth of the country's middle and upper classes. For fashion companies, strong Chinese demand is now offsetting spending slumps in the U.S. Chinese tourists are boosting sales in Europe. "There is no question that China is an asset," says Didier Grumbach, president of the French Fashion Federation, the industry's main lobby group.

Not only are Chinese people buying more fashion; as families' incomes grow, parents are increasingly sending their children to pricey design schools, both in China and abroad. At London's Central Saint Martins fashion school, the alma mater of designers such as John Galliano of Dior, Chinese designers last year made up 15% of the school's foreign students.

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The emergence of Chinese designers represents the last leg of China's journey into high fashion. The country's low-cost labor has for years allowed it to pump out inexpensive textiles. However, cultural traditions that prod children toward pursuing careers in medicine or finance have so far prevented China from grooming the kinds of iconic fashion designers that call the shots on Europe's runways.

That is now starting to change. Mr. Grumbach regularly travels to China; he is currently arranging for a group of Chinese designers to study at the Federation's vaunted fashion academy, which has trained designers such as Mr. Saint Laurent and Valentino Garavani, in August.

A French embrace of Chinese fashion designers could help improve a relationship that has recently been tested. When the Olympic Torch arrived in Paris in April, protesters mobbed Chinese supporters and lunged at torch bearers, including a wheelchair-bound Chinese woman. The mayor of Paris, Bernard Delanoe, recently named the Dalai Lama, a fierce critic of China, an honorary citizen, provoking a testy exchange of letters with the mayor of Beijing.

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The Woolmark Company

A design contest once won by Karl Lagerfeld (above, left) and Yves Saint Laurent (above, center) is being revived.

Despite the fashion rapprochement, some of the French fashion elite say Chinese designers have yet to exhibit originality. Many Chinese designers continue to blend Japanese and European styles rather than developing looks of their own, says Veronique Philipponnat, editor-in-chief of the French edition of Elle and a judge in the Woolmark contest. "I can't tell you one Chinese brand at the moment that seems to be creative," she says.

If Chinese designers face a dearth of creative options, Europe may be partly to blame. For nearly a century, European designers have appropriated Chinese art and traditional dress to give their collections a whiff of exoticism, notes Pamela Goblin, fashion curator at Paris's Musée des Arts Decoratifs.

Among the designers that over the years have used Chinese influences in their collections are Mr. Saint Laurent, Tom Ford, Miuccia Prada and Giorgio Armani. French fashion house Dior has drawn on glamorous images of Shanghai for its haute couture collections.

That leaves Chinese designers in a bind. Chinese influences can potentially look hackneyed, but eschewing them carries risks, too. Mr. Qiu, 30, recalls that a London-based critic once warned him that his designs would never turn heads in European department stores because his designs were not "Chinese enough."

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A look by Chinese designer Qiu Hao

Mr. Qiu's recent collections feature dresses with long flowing ends that echo the costumes used in Chinese opera, but he generally eschews overt nods to his heritage. "Incorporating very obvious elements such as dragons, phoenixes, red ponies or Chinese collars and knots is just not my style," says the designer, who works on his namesake collection from Shanghai.

The search for a distinct Chinese style also runs up against decades of authoritarian rule in China that spurned individual style in favor of utilitarian looks, such as the navy blue "Mao" jackets, named after Mao Zedong.

Growing up, Mr. Qiu was no fan of the "camouflage" his parents used to wear to blend in. He instead marveled at the stories his grandmother told of her glamorous life in "grand Shanghai" before the Cultural Revolution. "The magical fashion sparks just went off in my eyes," he recalls.

Mr. Qiu got his start in fashion when his parents gave him more than $1,300 to buy a computer for college. He instead put the money toward a sewing machine and fabrics to stitch together his first collections, which he sold in a small boutique in his home town of Suzhou, just west of Shanghai.

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Qiu Hao

More than 300 miles to the north, in the beer-brewing city of Qingdao (also rendered as Tsingtao), Ms. Shao's parents were socking away money to put their only child through college. Many parents in China expect their children to pursue a degree in a field such as accounting or engineering that provides a reliable return on investment.

Ms. Shao, now 24, had other ideas. She was accepted into a new program in fashion design at the Beijing Institute of Technology. After graduating, she took a job with the Chinese edition of the French magazine L'Officiel. She then convinced her parents to send her to Milan for a master's degree at the European Institute of Design. Already fluent in English, she picked up Italian by living with a Milanese family and spent her summers in the hill towns of Tuscany.

Taking a cue from Italian designers such as Messrs. Armani and Garavani, Ms. Shao has tapped a college friend from Beijing with connections in the textile business to be her braccio destro, or "right-hand" partner. The two plan to open a studio for Ms. Shao later this year in Beijing.

At today's Woolmark contest, Ms. Shao and Mr. Qiu will compete against eight other designers of various nationalities, including Japanese, American and Belgian. The Australian wool growers' association behind the Woolmark label is a descendant of the same group that organized the showdown between Messrs. Lagerfeld and Saint Laurent more than half a century ago. For Woolmark, the prize's purpose is the same as it was back then: to find talented young designers and make sure they're using wool in innovative ways.

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Shao Jia

Shao Jia

In 1954, Mr. Lagerfeld won the prize for best coat, while Mr. Saint Laurent won in the dress category. This year, as the contest is relaunched as an annual event, prizes won't be awarded in categories. Instead, one winner will take home all the prize money. Some of the funds will finance a fashion show for the winner's label at an upcoming Paris fashion week.

While both Ms. Shao and Mr. Qiu say they're ready for the showdown, neither yearns for the spotlight. Ms. Shao, who dyes her hair deep purple and wears oversize horn-rimmed eyeglasses, confesses to feeling camera-shy. Her designs for the Woolmark contest spurn some of the more flamboyant looks that have defined the Paris catwalks. The designer drew upon medical diagrams of spinal columns and muscle tissue to create dresses with sinuous strips of wool that interlock at the back.

Mr. Qiu, too, prefers to keep a low profile. Although self-promotion remains an inescapable reality in the fashion business, Mr. Qiu says he prefers to "just make clothes."

Christina Binkley will return in two weeks.

Write to Stacy Meichtry at stacy.meichtry@wsj.com4

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