The Past, Present And Future Of Chinese Independent Fashion Designers

With the rise of Chinese fever, Chinese fashion designers are also being sought after by more and more media around the world.

Owning personal brand is the dream of many fashion designers.

In the early days, because the threshold of entrepreneurship was too high, most designers chose to design for the commercial Brand Company, or simply gave up the designer's dream.

Nowadays, e-commerce, especially the Taobao mode, has greatly reduced the threshold of entrepreneurship.

As far as financing is concerned, parents who are 80 or 90 are more willing to let their only children or single daughters do what they like to do, so they provide financial support for their children's entrepreneurial desire.

With the development of financial system and policy, domestic professional investment channels are becoming more mature. In recent years, the crowd raising mode has been increasingly sought after.

These factors make financing no longer as remote as ever.

In addition, in recent years, the difficulty of the employment market has forced more young students to embark on the path of entrepreneurship. In order to alleviate the employment predicament of graduates, the state is more willing to encourage graduates to start businesses, and has provided many preferential conditions for entrepreneurship.

Driven by many reasons, it is almost a trend for students of fashion design to start their own brand after graduation, and these new designers have become the mainstream team of the current "independent designers".

Independent designer Shangguan Zhe's works, his design mixed with Chinese, Japanese, black and European and American street art and other culture, with a few Chinese people's humorous and playfulness attitude, emitting a weird, rebellious, ruffian and mysterious flavor.

Before we know what an independent designer is, we should first understand what the designer brand is.

In particular, with the popularity of designer brands, there are more and more brands that call themselves "designer brands".

In academia and practice, a relatively wide range of cognition is that designer brand is dominated by creative design, and in contrast, it is a commercial brand dominated by market demand.

There is no doubt that this does not mean that the designer brand must not be commercial, or that the commercial brand must not be creative.

From the point of view of the main designer, the designer occupies a strategic position in the designer's brand, and for the commercial brand, the designer is more obedience to the market demand.

In terms of business scale, designer brand is more particular about design uniqueness, and consumer group is smaller than commercial brand, so its commercial scale can not compare with commercial brand.

Take the two big group companies in the fashion circle as an example: the acquisition of many designer brand luxury goods group LVMH and the founder of fast fashion, Spain's INDITEX group, the parent company of ZARA.

LVMH has nearly a hundred years of history, and its fashion brands are about 15.

According to LVMH's 2014 financial report, the annual sales revenue of its fashion product line is about 17 billion 400 million euros (other industries such as liquor and real estate are not included).

INDITEX's 8 brands are more than 40 years old, with sales revenue of 18 billion 100 million euros in 2014.

Although there is little difference between the annual income of the two brands, LVMH's fashion brands are almost two times that of INDITEX and have a longer history. Therefore, it can be concluded that their single brand income is far below INDITEX.

However, few people will be concerned about the designer behind ZARA. On the contrary, even if it is not a professional designer, they may be familiar with the leading designers of LVMH's brand.

Because ZARA is a typical Brand Company that replicates fashion rather than creates fashion as a design strategy.

From the practice point of view, there is a certain degree of ambivalence between the creative style of the main designer and the commercial scale.

When the designer brand grows to a certain scale, how to stick to the individual design concept and style while continuing to maintain steady growth in performance is a challenge for every designer brand.

Because the growth of performance means the need to expand consumer groups, expanding consumer audiences means that we need to consider the broader tastes and habits of consumers.

When the audience is very small, designers are more likely to find similar styles in their personal style.

But when the audience needs to expand, personal style may be affected by the size of the group.

At this point, designers need to find a balance between personal style and business scale, and it is likely that they must be more inclined to market acceptance rather than expression of personal design style.

In fact, behind many bright and gorgeous designers, the vast majority of designers are swaying between their artistic creations and business scale.

Most of the star designers we know, objectively speaking, most people or have a very good business partner, or they themselves have an excellent businessman mind - they know that as long as you want someone to pay for your product, you must obey the business rules.

These cases include characters such as Marc Jacob, Michael Kors, Tom Ford.

The struggle of designers is, in the final analysis, the problem of positioning their roles.

The most essential problem in design is not "what is design" or "how to design", but "Why Design".

The vast majority of people, including designers, consider designers to be an artist who expresses their emotions and hopes to find resonusers. (of course, understanding artists is superficial, but the fact is that most people are so superficial about artists' understanding).

The functions of design are mostly limited to "decoration", that is, to dress up something and someone.

These superficial understanding of design and the difference between designers' understanding of their roles are the fundamental reasons for designers to struggle.

In fact, if the designer knows, the design is a creative process to solve the problem and serve others (rather than self expression, although this emotion must exist in design, but it is definitely not the main thing); design requires teamwork more than one person can contribute.

If we can understand the nature of design, perhaps designers themselves do not need so much entanglement.

Of course, it is undeniable that the genius of an artist can bring many unexpected gains to designers, but designers should never regard themselves as artists only.

The concept of independent designer has no uniform or definite definition in academic circles.

But the more common understanding is that the designer designs his own brand and has greater autonomy for the brand.

The investment can come from the designer himself or from the partner.

Usually in the form of workshops, both commercial scale and personnel scale are small and small, usually only a few people.

Business models can be either retail or wholesale, but also provide design services for other enterprises.

In some ways, being an independent designer will not be a great success, but perhaps because of the higher degree of freedom, perhaps the sense of happiness is stronger.

Although the emergence of independent designers seems to be a matter of recent years, if we define the independent designer by the above concepts, China already had its own independent designer in 80s, but as time went on, some independent designers gradually disappeared from the design circle, and some of them developed into hundreds of millions of designer brands.

Shortly after the reform and opening up in China, in the early 80s, many fashion designers tried to set up their own workshops and create their own brand names.

For example, Beijing's early antelope, Ye Hong of Shanghai, and Liu Yang of Guangdong.

These designers build their own brands, shop directly in the mall, and provide customized services for their guests.

However, most of the pioneering pioneers in this group were short of business results. So the designers of the new generation hardly knew that China had its own designers from eighty to 90s.

The reason is both complicated and simple: untimely.

At that time, whether the overall business system, from the market distribution system, brand building to market media, or consumers' habits, abilities and tastes, did not reach the standard of consuming designer brand.

And the designer himself is exploring the market with great courage and without fear of any previous experience.

Their understanding of design, whether they are concepts or horizons, are mostly blocked and monotonous by the objective conditions at that time.

Another challenge faced by designers at that time was that, due to the lack of understanding of the business system, all the pressure on the success of the brand was placed on the part of the main designer, ignoring the need for a brand to succeed in professional teamwork.

Even if the designer is excellent, no marketing, media, retail and other professional team support, designers can not single person to achieve an excellent brand.

Designer Liu Yang's works in 1990.

Objectively speaking, this set of works is not out of date even now.

One of the ways the students of Saint Martin college subvert the tradition is to use less material in the use of raw materials.

One of the works of the 2013 CSM show was made of goldfish jar, and Liu Yang had made plastic bags with plastic bags in early 90s.

The most fortunate age of Chinese fashion designers began in the mid 90s and early twenty-first Century. The most critical factor is the beginning of the real development of China's capital market.

At present, several commercial brands that have been developed to the scale of hundreds of millions of designers, such as exceptions, Providence, vegetarian and Jifen, were first born in this period.

This just confirms once again that the essence of design can not be separated from commerce.

A good business environment is a priority for all brands.

Of course, compared with the designers who started business in 80s, the generation I call the "second generation" designers, both in terms of the perception of design and the grasp of the trend of market development, have been more mature in the business world.

The taste of consumers also gradually deviate from the habit of being single and drift along.

All these have created good objective conditions for the second generation of independent designers to grow into brands.

Compared with earlier designers, independent designers in China now face more opportunities and challenges.

In terms of opportunities, there is no doubt that the biggest opportunity for domestic designers is the word "China" in two words.

Especially in the media.

Whether in the industry media, consumer media or academia, with the "Chinese craze" warming up, more attention is paid to Chinese designers.

In terms of industry media, WWD, the internationally renowned fashion and fashion media, invited Hong Huang to make a series of special reports on Chinese design in 2013. When the Chinese version of Vogue was first introduced to China in 2005, it took the lead in reporting a number of cutting-edge designers (though why the logic of these designers were questioned). Generally speaking, both home and abroad fashion magazines have given more attention and coverage to Chinese young fashion designers, and academia has paid more attention to Chinese fashion designers.

The latest academic publications are from more than 40 Chinese cutting-edge designers interviewed by GemmaA.Williams, who are almost independent designers.

This is the first time I introduced the Chinese fashion: dialogue with fashion designers in 2009 through the British Bloomsbury press.

This book published the overseas Chinese language version and the mainland simplified Chinese version respectively in 2011 and 2013 by University of Hong Kong press and Donghua University press.

The book can be listed overseas and published in Chinese again, to a large extent, thanks to Yu Hai's readers' curiosity and expectation for Chinese fashion designers.

In the four fashion week, since 2006, Xie Feng first represented mainland China designers in Paris fashion week. Almost every year, Chinese designers appeared.

In terms of education, the proportion of Chinese students enrolled in the Saint Martin Institute of art and design in London and the New York Parsons School of design in the international first-line Design Institute has also begun to gradually surpass the proportion of overseas students who are mainly Japanese and Korean.

All this shows that Chinese fashion designers are becoming more and more active in the international arena.

However, the two word "China" is a double-edged sword.

Designers need to realize that most of the current concerns about domestic designers are confined to the media - no doubt that this is a huge improvement. It is almost impossible to find overseas media interested in Chinese designers 10 years ago.

But as mentioned before, design needs support from the business model of sustainable development, otherwise the independent designer is just a false name or a cloud.

Marco's useless, in 2008 became the first Chinese mainland designer to visit Paris's high fashion week.

Useless is worth looking forward to becoming an independent designer brand in another sense, though small, but of far-reaching social significance.

This is not to say that independent designers have to grow up to be designers with a certain scale.

In fact, independent designers have two choices: one is always a niche designer.

Stick to your personal style and pursue sustainable development only in business.

Such designers do not necessarily have a successful commercial scale in the traditional sense, but this does not mean that they can not become outstanding designers.

For example, Alexander McQueen, which died in 2010, is not very successful in business, but its personal design history is undoubtedly a landmark figure.

If McQueen is not acquired by Gucci (today's Kering) group, instead of being an independent designer, he will probably not die early.

Many independent designers look forward to the input of professional capital, and think that as long as they have money, plus personal design talent, they will succeed.

In fact, the failure of many brands is precisely the intervention of professional investors.

The job of a professional investor is to maximize profits in the shortest possible time, and the investment objective is very simple -- "profit".

Once professional capital is involved, designers will inevitably wavering in their personal design style and commercial capital.

This is not an easy process.

Therefore, when inviting investors to intervene, designers should define their future positioning clearly.

For independent designers, it may be the dream of most people to grow up to be a real designer brand, but in the process, the price that designers need to pay for them is also very expensive.

Dreams are not good or bad, but designers should know what they want and what they need to pay for it.

Once the goal is clear, what the designer should do is stick to it.