Sheguang Hu, and why The Hunger Games' Capitol should've looked more like Beijing Fashion Week.

Beijing Fashion Week rarely makes it to mainstream American/British fashion magazines and blogs, and coverage outside of highlight galleries seems to be nigh-on impossible to find. Which is too bad, because if you enjoy truly out-there couture (which I do) then Beijing is streets ahead of Paris at the moment. Although designers like McQueen are still regularly turning out excellent couture shows, I've found that many of the major fashion houses on the London/Paris/Milan/NYC circuit have been noticeably lacklustre over the last few years.

photos from here.

Autumn/Winter 2012/13
Last month's Sheguang Hu show in Beijing was gothic and alarming, and filled with expressive and over-the-top millinary.

I loved the fabric used for this dress. Hundreds of tiny, mournful faces printed onto the fabric, acting as a counterpoint to the aggressive metal spikes on the belt and shoulder-straps. This entire collection was about combining conservative, relatively simple silhouettes with extravagant detail work. Although a few elements of fetishwear and classic goth/punk looks were included, they were far more subtle and less cliched than those found in most "dark" collections.

One of the reasons why I took such a shine to Sheguang Hu is that he shares my love of upholstery fabrics. In general I think florals are vastly overused in almost every area of fashion design, but when they're a) used in the context of an aggressively structured outfit like the one pictured below, or b) printed or embroidered in the style of pre-1900s fabric designs, then I approve. Another thing I've noticed about Huang's designs is that although he's very fond of the ever-favoured super-slim fitted dress, he does include quite a few more forgiving cuts -- something that's doubly unusual in couture shows, because couture is so obviously not created to appeal to general audiences. But the suit below would work on a variety of women's body shapes.

Spring/Summer 2012
For contrast, I'm including some of my favourites from last season's collection as well. A lot of designers don't vary much from season to season (not necessarily a bad thing -- for example, Gareth Pugh makes clothes exclusively for fetish robots who never go outside or, indeed, breathe, eat or walk anywhere, so "seasons" are completely arbitrary) but Sheguang Hu's Spring and Fall 2012 collections were very different.

Spring/Summer photos from here.

Sheguang Hu moved to Amsterdam as a teenager, studied design there, and now owns a store in the city. I think there are definite European influences in his work, but those influences seem to stem from the fashions of three or four hundred years ago. It reminds me a little of Vivienne Westwood, in fact -- pastiches on the theme of neck-ruffs, Tudor corsets and heavily embroidered fabrics, but never anything that actually resembles period costume.

This candy-pink dress is strictly fairytale, but manages to avoid venturing into Harajuku territory thanks to the huge, robe-like sleeves and simple silhouette.

One of my favourite outfits of the entire collection. It combines the full sleeves of a 16th century gentleman's padded cloth "armour" doublet with a more feminine bodice and modern trousers, creating a shape and aesthetic that overall fails to identify with any era. This look reminded me very much of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, although perhaps that's partially down to the slightly Tilda Swintonish redhaired model.

Looking at many of the highlights from Beijing Fashion Week I not only mourn the comparative tameness of recent Paris/London/etc Couture shows, I find myself getting slightly annoyed at the Hunger Games movie. I haven't posted about it here on Hello, Tailor (yet) but I must admit I found the supposedly-extravagant costumes of the Capitol unexpectedly disappointing. There was a fair amount of pre-movie viral marketing centred around the Capitol fashions, but when it came to the film itself I realised that many of the most prominent costumes had already been revealed, and the bar for outlandishness was nowhere near as high as I'd expected. I'm not saying I disliked the costumes, but I am hoping they edge more towards the Nicki Minaj/Sheguang Hu/Alexander McQueen end of the scale in the sequels as opposed to the brightly coloured but ultimately uninspiring looks we saw this time round.

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NYFW Fall 2012: Jason Wu.

This season Jason Wu decided to explore his Chinese roots, giving the fashion community ample opportunity to partake in one of their lesser-known hobbies: mildly racist commentary. Sorry, guys, "mysterious" and "ethnic" are not synonumous with "Chinese" in any way, shape or form. Go directly to Vocabulary Jail; do not collect 200 Fashion Dollars.

The show was divided into three themes, the first being the military of Mao-era China. The colour palette was obvious: the green-grey of military uniforms, and the red of Communism.

A lot of the time a designer's original inspiration is so obscure (cf. Gary Graham's Iranian wrestling tunics/Manchester Film Festival inspiration for his recent NYFW show) that it adds relatively little to my interpretation of a collection. In this case it added a certain coherency that might not otherwise have been apparent since it was genuinely helpful to see the demarcation between Wu's favoured three periods of Chinese history

Without Wu's explanation of the show's theme(s) it wouldn't have been nearly so highly rated overall. The individual clothes didn't stray far from acceptable RTW norms, but as a complete unit the collection was a pleasure to watch. I suggest checking out the show footage once you've read this, if only to catch the stomping army of models marching down the runway for the finale.

Tailoring was the main focus of the Mao section, in keeping with the uniform theme and a desire for severity. The only frivolous notes were lace patterns on some of the jackets, which reappeared later in the show to tie the three time-period elements together.

The second section centred around the Qing Dynasty. I wasn't completely on board with this one, as the hats seemed way too pastichey (what would you think of someone wearing one of these in real life?) and on a basic aesthetic level the cut of the trousers didn't appeal to me at all.

The third and final inspiration: the false Hollywood impression of China, brought on by films like Shanghai Express in the 1930s and '40s. Marlene Dietrich, enveloped in an opulent cloud of fur coats. Anna May Wong, and the cheongsam. A show like this was more or less obliged to include a cheongsam or two, but I'm not surprised that only a couple were included. The history of the cheongsam is so riddled with appropriation and re-appropriation and redesign and the conflict between practicality and high-end fashion that despite the fact that it's often known merely as "the Chinese dress", there isn't really any such thing as "the original cheongsam" to work from. Which I guess was sort of the point of this third and final theme -- the inauthentic Hollywood portrayal of Chinese fashion in the form of luxurious Shanghai eveningwear.

The kind of melodrama Wu provided with the 1940s-glamour gowns made me hope that he's going to continue in this vein in future seasons. It's certainly something that appeals to my personal taste more than his usual sportswear, although a lot of the first two thirds of the show would undoubtedly still appeal to those audiences.

It seemed to me that the final outfit tied together the three themes of the show: the militaristic neatness of the jacket combined with the sultry Golden Age Hollywood skirt of the gown, plus the more old-fashioned gold detailing on the chest and shoulders.

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