A Splashy Entrance by Rihanna Puts Chinese Designers in the Highlight

When Rihanna donned a fur-trimmed yellow satin gown by the Chinese-born designer Guo Pei to the Met Gala on Friday night, it became the talk of Twitter, which erupted with jokey comparisons to omelets and chicken wings. Memes using toon characters like SpongeBob SquarePants were uncontrolled. "The fashion world pretty much visited a standstill, inches Glamour newspaper wrote of the "jaw-dropping" cloak, while Time newspaper declared that the singer borrowed the show. Yet Pei isn't the first Chinese-born designer to make a media meltdown with a spectacular design. The X-Men star Fan Bingbing donned a bright yellow dragon prom dresses under 200 by Laurence Xu to the 2010 Cannes Film Happening, and the Showmanship Reporter wrote that it "launched her into the style stratosphere. inches "Sensational! inches the website Red Carpet Awards proclaimed.

The dress got so much attention, in fact, that the actress Qin Hailu complained publicly that Fan was using the Chiffon Sweetheart Floor Length A Line Prom Dress to cast herself as China's leading lady (a charge that Fan rejected), and London's Victoria & Albert Museum ultimately snapped it up for its permanent collection. Now, that dress and two Guo Pei designs are area of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new Costume Institute convention, "China: Through the Looking Glass. inches Juxtaposed against a dragon dress of Mary Ford for Yves St Laurent, Xu's gown highlights the different ways contemporary Chinese designers misinterpret their aesthetic history, and shows the approach of a new samsung wave s8500 of Asian kitchenware game makers who are drawing attention and acclaim for work that is defined by a modern balance between East and Rest of the world. Last year, for example, Yiqing Yin, the Chinese-born, Paris-based couturier who won the fashion designer of the year award at France's prestigious Globes de Cristal in April, was named artistic director of the French fashion house Léonard. And in '08, Qiu Hao won the International Woolmark Prize, thanks to the hand-woven fabrics he uses in his smart, system looks. "With so many brands doing range things, and a country of 1. 3 billion people, the Chinese designers don't need to conform to us in the Rest of the world, and we'll see this develop, inches said Gemma A.

 Williams, mcdougal of "Fashion China. inches "They will study on what we've done and put their own spin on it. inches Observe Boundless, designed by Zhang Da, giving classic padded, quilted lawn wear a new spin by re-imagining them in luxury cottons, soft pinks and modern geometrics. Or Chictopia, designed by Christine Lau, whose pop designs are drawn in your hand rather than computer. Dooling Jiang of Breakdown Design also uses a traditional approach, in her case ancient cutting techniques, to create conceptual pieces like a landscape-inspired shirt-and-cropped-trouser combo; smart, packaged jackets; or crinoline-esque paper-thin dresses.

 As the Qingdao-born, London-based designer Huishan Zhang said, there's more to Chinese design than dragons, phoenixes and the color red. "There is a really interesting feeling of these designers working with a blank slate, and much more ready take risks with their designs, inches Angelica Cheung, the editor-in-chief of Fashion China, wrote in an email. When the newspaper started, in 2005, she struggled to find local designers to fill her pages, but is now, according to her, completely overwhelmed. The 32-year-old Ban Xiaoxue, for example, is one of China's rising stars; he won the Asian kitchenware final of the 2012 International Woolmark Prize the same year he introduced his namesake label. Situated in Guangzhou, he uses ancient embelleshment techniques to create modern floral and grid patterns on signature hovering, female pieces, and is known for his fabric experimentation.