Paris Fashion Week’s official schedule carried a Tang-dynasty collection on October 2, when the Chinese designer Ren Chunmei staged a solo show at La Galerie Bourbon, a former Bourbon royal mansion in the Golden Triangle district of central Paris. The presentation carried forty-one pieces of hand-made haute couture built around the spirit of the High Tang, set under the century-old ceilings of a European royal house.
To appear on the official Paris schedule is to enter one of the most closely watched rooms in fashion. For a designer working from Chinese sources, the invitation reads as recognition of both craft and vision, and the show placed a Tang idea inside a calendar that otherwise belongs to the established European houses.
Forty-One Outfits, One Dynasty
This is Ren’s second cultural project after “Zhouyuan Yiyu”, which also reached the Paris schedule and won a MUSE Design platinum award in the United States, a design gold from France’s FDA and a Red Dot concept award in Germany. This time she drew on the grandeur of the High Tang, on the upheaval of the An Lushan rebellion and on the echoes that followed, folding Tang murals, poetic imagery and ritual forms into avant-garde cutting.
Finishing gave the theme its texture. Embroidery, light-transmitting gauze and aged relief sit over the silhouettes, the better to carry a dynasty whose dress women wore with high waistlines, wide sleeves and layered silks. Ren has described the approach as letting culture speak through clothing, taking a period that survives in paintings, poems and tombs and making it wearable again.
A Poem, a Stage, a Runway
Literature gives the clearest source. Ren said the designs grew mainly out of “The Song of Everlasting Sorrow”, the narrative poem by Bai Juyi (白居易) that follows Emperor Xuanzong and his consort Yang Yuhuan through love and loss, and out of the live dance drama of the same name staged by the Shaanxi Tourism Group at its Huaqing Palace scenic area.
Read together, the poem and the stage production shape the romance, the splendour and the turning point of the High Tang into a set of garment decisions: a colour, a hem, a play of light through gauze. The story reaches the runway with its narrative intact rather than as decoration.
Two Civilisations in One Room
“The High Tang is the warmest, most romantic age of Chinese civilisation,” Ren said. “Through this collection I want the world to see the East’s joys and sorrows, its brilliance. When the spirit of the High Tang meets the century of glory in the Bourbon house, the meeting of two civilisations throws off a force of its own.”
Dress became the medium that carried a Tang story into a contemporary fashion setting, tying a ninth-century poem, a modern stage at Huaqing Palace and a Paris mansion into a single presentation. With the collection now on the official schedule, the designer joins a small group working in original Chinese design on the international stage, telling a Chinese story in a language the runway already understands.
