11/19/2022 0 Comments Rihanna love on the brain переводMandarin is Guo’s only language, and her clothes speak it, too. Their court dressmaker, who was unknown in the West until recently, and to whom the West was virtually unknown until sixteen years ago, is Guo Pei. They are impatient with drabness and proud to assert their national identity-not to say their buying power. China’s rich think of themselves as a new aristocracy. Ma Ke’s couture dignifies the harshness of proletarian life with garments of mud-caked homespun, but she is an exception. Photograph by Pari Dukovic for The New Yorker Photograph by Pari Dukovic for The New Yorker Guo recently opened a Paris atelier in order to qualify for a slot on the calendar for Paris Couture Week. The radically original Ma Ke, who dresses China’s First Lady, graduated from Central Saint Martins, in London. Qiaoran Huang studied at Parsons, in New York, and Grace Chen at the Fashion Institute of Technology. High heels made in China are now widely available in Beijing’s discount malls, but high fashion is still the province of a few designers who earned their cachet in the West, and in most cases trained there. They had thrown her shoes-a pair of high heels-up into a tree. But in a climate hostile to personal expression both sexes wore the same shapeless clothing as a badge of patriotism.” Her mother, she said, once passed a barefoot woman on the sidewalk surrounded by a crowd that was shouting insults at her. “Dark colors are practical for a filthy climate. We were walking through a residential hutong-an alleyway that had not yet been gentrified-where sooty wash hung from clotheslines. “Drabness has been a kind of camouflage we’re only just sloughing off,” my young friend Luhan remarked. Even in the Dashanzi Art Zone, a former factory complex where galleries and design companies are concentrated, there is little of the fashion street theatre that enlivens comparable neighborhoods in Tokyo, Berlin, and Brooklyn. When I visited, in early January, everyone seemed to be wearing jeans and puffers. But you can’t rent Han clothing for an outing to the Great Wall, and sartorial fantasy of any provenance is scarce in Beijing. The Han dress movement, which started a decade ago to protest the dominance of Western fashion, encourages its followers to post pictures of themselves in period costume. Even these garments exist in dialogue with the West: the “Mao” jacket was actually introduced by Sun Yat-sen, to Occidentalize Chinese menswear, and the qipao, based on a gown for male scholars, was adapted for women by French-inspired tailors in Shanghai. When most Westerners picture Chinese dress, they think of the Mao jacket, or of the qipao, a sexy sheath with a mandarin collar and frog closings. The kimono is a national costume for which China has no equivalent. “With a package deal, you also get accessories and a hair style.” As a guide explained recently, during a selfie break, the reënactors were renting their finery by the hour. Whether they are nostalgic for their lost imperium or just having fun, they kit themselves out to visit the temples in head-to-toe Edo style: men in gray cotton kimonos, women in brightly flowered ones. Its arts, writing, and dress were imported to Japan millennia ago, and Kyoto, in particular, attracts throngs of mainland tourists. “I aim to create heirlooms.” Photograph by Pari Dukovic for The New YorkerĬhina’s patrician culture, unlike its avatars on TV, had an ethos of supreme refinement based on xiushen, the Confucian notion of self-cultivation. “Changing your look every season to please a fickle customer isn’t how I work,” Guo Pei says.
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