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Wu Haiyan
Uses National Culture to Create New Fashions
 On
March 8, 1999, many visitors attended the opening ceremony of the
Tibetan Clothing Exhibition and Fashion Show which was part of the
"Shining Pearl of the Snowland！China Tibetan Culture Exhibition."
A total of 53 Tibetan dresses and adornments were shown on the catwalk
with a background of Tibetan architecture.
These dresses comprised a collection with the theme of "Roving
Around like a Nomad" and combined modern designs with primitive,
straighforward and uninhibited concepts. This has brought great interest
in traditional Tibetan clothes that are brimming with a new vitality.
There was also another collection with the theme of "Monks"
that had deep religious reds and golds as their basic color scheme.
To put Tibetan culture and spirit into clothing was the dream of
Wu Haiyan, a famous dress designer in China, who graduated from the
handicraft art department of the China Academy of Fine Arts. Wu is
now vice chairman and associate professor of the design department
at the academy. She is also a chief designer for the China Fashionable
Dresses Group, the largest clothing enter-prise in the country, and
chief designer for the Chinese Clothing Design Corporation. Her design
collection called "In the Period of Great Prosperity" won
the gold prize at the 1993 China International Youth Designer Competition
and was exhibited by the Chinese Museum of Costume Art. In 1994, 1995
and 1997 at the China International Costume Fair, she developed a
personal fashion conference. Various countries and regions in Europe,
Asia, America and Australia ahve exhibited her works and she has taken
part in fashion fairs in Hong Kong, Munich and Duesseldorf.
In order to design the collecti8on of Tibetan dresses, Wu Haiyan
headed a team of four designers and collected and analyzed materials
related to Tibetan cultural li8fe, including the Tibetan language,
Tangkas, patterns, music, dance and attire. Finally, they chose 53
sets out of more than 100 patterns. They designed and made dresses
in a workshop for three months where a total of about 28 people were
involved in the fashion show.
With the titles of "one of China's top ten designers"
and "one of China's gold textile designers," Wu Haiyan still
has dreams and hopes that Tibetan-style clothing will become popular
throughout the world. In order to make her collection more accessible
to the public, she used modern materials such as wool, and the original
fresh colors were adjusted for the stage show. The designers also
conducted careful research into Tibetan embroidery, printing and dyeing
and adapted these techniques so as to create the new and popular fashions.
Wu learned about Tibet through her dress research and designing.
In the past Tibetan women suffered at the hands of dominant husbands,
but now Tibetan women are taking charge of their own lives as a result
of the 40 years of modern development since the democratic reform
of 1959 in the Tibetan Autonomous Region. Today many Tibetan women
are economists, engineers, lawyers and artists. The very fact that
many women are designers as well as models shows that they have truly
become emancipated.
Wu believes that all Chinese and foreign designers, writers and
architects use history to find creative inspiration. Thus, traditional
culture and the human spirit are the richest sources for designers.
These can be easily tapped as they are our common heritage. |
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