Models present creations by Laurence Xu at the Paris Haute Couture Fashion Week. Photo provided to China Daily
"From those paintings, I not only saw Buddhist rituals and beautiful dance, but found 'fashion'. I found people in the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907) and earlier dynasties wore trousers with braces and trench coats!" Xu says.
"I borrowed my ancestor's designs for my work and wish to create a modern look juxtaposing both Western silhouettes and the Chinese flavor," he says.
Like all luxury brands, special materials are vital to Xu's collections. He paid homage to the traditional handicrafts of China, as each couture piece was made in the Nanjing Yunjin brocade.
Literally meaning "beautiful could in the sky", Nanjing Yunjin was a complicated textile incorporating materials such as silk, gold and peacock feather yam. Only made in Nanjing, East China's Jiangsu province, it was once used to produce royal garments. In 2009, UNESCO named it among the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
"Xu's vision involves all the necessary elements for a luxury haute couture brand: craftsmanship, history, cultural heritage, storytelling, emotion and endless elegance," says Christine Zhao Qian, director of Paris Chinese Haute Couture Association, who recommended Xu to the Paris Haute Couture Week.
Xu, 41, was born and raised in Zaozhuang, East China's Shandong province, not a fashionable area in China but the home province of Confucius and rich in traditional Chinese culture.
Xu, the second child in his family, had two interests when he was young: accompanying his mother to see the local opera and altering his father, sister and brother's clothing.
"My boyhood dream was to be a local opera performer because I thought the costumes were amazingly pretty and the gestures full of imagination. The actor waves a whip to symbolize riding a horse and demonstrates embarrassment by covering his face with his long sleeve," he says.
As for his passion for clothes, he recalls once cutting the collar off his father's shirt but before he could make a new one, he was discovered by his father and got a good smacking.
In summer, he "mixed and matched" many clothes and pretended to perform on his bed－he considered it a stage－and was laughed at by other boys.
He also tailored a qipao, a traditional Chinese cheongsam for his sister. She rode a bicycle while wearing it, and he sat on the back to show her off across the small town. But he was very embarrassed when the hemline got tangled in the bicycle wheel.
In 1997, he studied design at the Central Academy of Art and Design in Beijing, going on to further study in Paris in 1999.
After returning to China, he started to design costumes for theater and film, getting to know many actresses such as Fan Bingbing, Zhang Jingchu and Zhou Yun, for whom he started to make red-carpet gowns, gaining wide acclaim.
Xu now has a studio in Beijing and specializes in haute couture and wedding gowns.
