On October 9 the China National Museum of Women and Children in Beijing handed its floor to a design project. Twenty-two outfits made by the students and tutors of a National Arts Fund training programme for Guizhou ethnic dress went down a runway mixed with live dance, closing a run of workshops and fieldwork that had begun earlier in the year.
On the Runway, Six Living Crafts
Two halves split the show, and the first belonged to the old garments. Out came the crafts the project had spent months studying in the field: the indigo cloth that is beaten until it holds a sheen, batik, dyeing with maple sap, cross-stitch embroidery, brocade and silver ornaments. Local Guizhou clothing brands joined the presentation, which the organisers describe as a university, enterprise and project model rather than a campus exercise.
New work took the second half. The twenty-two sets made by the trainees and their tutors were built around three themes: turning traditional craft into something a contemporary designer can use, rebuilding traditional forms and motifs for a modern silhouette, and remaking materials so the body reads differently. The makers drew on resist dyeing, embroidery and pleating, and at least one group worked with 3D printing alongside the hand techniques. Dance students from the university’s own dance project shared the stage, so the outfits were shown in movement rather than on a static line.
Where the Cloth Comes From
Behind the runway sits a touring showcase, “Guizhou Blossoms: Ethnic Dress, Old Garments in New Fashion”, which is itself attached to a larger exhibition. “Patterned by Dye”, on printing and dyeing as a Chinese craft, ran from September 10 to October 10 and was co-hosted by the Chinese National Museum of Ethnology and the China National Museum of Women and Children. It takes in the long history of mineral colour, dye plants and printed and tied resist cloth, and shows more than two hundred pieces across three sections, from mineral pigment through to contemporary cross-disciplinary work.
That framing explains the shape of the October 9 programme, which split the runway into an old-garment section and a new-fashion section rather than running the two together. The project itself is a training programme, not a fashion label: its participants are trainees, and the pieces they showed were made under the guidance of tutors who had spent the fieldwork months in Guizhou.
Dyeing workshops and a presentation of modern printed and dyed pieces ran alongside it on other days. The training programme that produced the outfits is run by Minzu University of China, organised by its Academy of Fine Arts, and co-organised by the museum and by the Fashion Art Committee of the China Textile Engineering Society, which is why the audience on October 9 mixed museum staff, textile engineers and design teachers.
The Three Results So Far
Li Juan, vice-chair of the China Textile Engineering Society, said the project had produced three things: a static exhibition, a live showcase and a field research report. She noted that Guizhou ethnic dress carries the cultural memory of several ethnic groups and records the way they have lived alongside one another, which makes it a resource for both design and scholarship. Reviving that dress, she added, needs academics, designers and the wider public working on it together.
Han Yuze, party secretary of the Academy of Fine Arts at Minzu University of China, put it that the programme rests on the National Arts Fund platform, joins expert teaching to fieldwork, and sets out to raise what the trainees can actually design. The aim, he said, is to use ethnic fine art to tell the story of how these communities have exchanged and blended with one another.
