"Let young people appreciate the beauty of traditional costume culture."
Text | Wu Xiao
Edit | Yang Wenjin
Images (unsubponded) are provided by the interviewee
Chu Yan: 2022 Winter Olympics Awards Plaza Awards Costume Designer, 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics, Winter Paralympic Winter Games Closing Ceremony Handover Ceremony Performance Costume Designer, 2014 APEC Leader Costume Creative Designer. She is the first doctor of fashion design in mainland China, a professor at Beijing Fashion Institute, and the founder of the "Chu and Tingxiang CHUYAN" brand.
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Four years ago, the closing ceremony of the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics "Beijing Eight Minutes" performance, under the leadership of "Captain Panda", 22 "roller skating teenagers" with a sense of science and technology appeared in the dark, using their own light and shadow and 24 transparent ice screen intelligent robots to jointly interpret winter sports such as ice hockey and curling, showing Chinese aesthetics and scientific and technological fashion.
These pandas and teenagers who "bring their own aura" wear clothes designed by Chu Yan.
Four years later, the costumes designed by Chu Yan were once again unveiled at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics - the "Tang Hua Fei xue" series of costumes was selected as the award dress and appeared in the award ceremony of the Winter Olympics.
How was the Winter Olympics awards dress born?
Compared with the previous performance costumes full of technology and futurism, "Tang Hua Fei Xue" is more ethnic and traditional.
This is a "proposition essay" that the Beijing Winter Olympic Organizing Committee has been soliciting from the world publicly, and Chu Yan has been preparing "answer sheets" in accordance with the requirements of the collection since November 2020.
She led the team to submit four different theme design plan renderings, after a round of elimination, three sets of plans into the preliminary evaluation of 15 sets, 15 series, finally, the organizing committee's clothing design collection review office selected "Tang Hua Fei xue" as the ceremonial dress of the award square. After that, after a round of revisions, the opinions of expert judges and the Olympic Organizing Committee were solicited, and adjustments were constantly made...
After more than a year, the final version of "Tang Hua Feixue" was presented to everyone at the press conference of the award elements of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Winter Olympics on December 31, 2021.
There are three sets of winter Olympic awards dresses, namely "Ruixue Xiangyun", "Hongyun Shanshui" and "Tang Hua Feixue". Among them, the "Tang Hua Fei Xue" series was designed by Chu Yan.
"Tang Hua Fei Xue" draws inspiration from traditional Chinese Tang Dynasty fabrics, extracts and simplifies the Baoxiang pattern, combines with the snowflake pattern that is also central radial symmetry, and combines the light pattern in the core graphics of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, the core elements of clothing modeling draw on the classic shape of Chinese clothing - the most basic collar of the collar since the Han and Tang Dynasties, and the overall structure is simple and fashionable, showing the solemn and youthful contemporary aesthetic interest of the ceremonial personnel.
For the choice of patterns on the costumes, "the Tang Dynasty Treasure Phase Flower symbolizes the weather of the great country and welcomes all countries in the world to participate in the grand event with an open mind; the snowflake pattern echoes the theme of the Winter Olympics and expresses the ardent expectations for the complete success of the upcoming winter sports events."
The color of the costume mainly adopts the four colors of Xiaguang Red, Tianji Blue, Ice Blue and Ruixue White, these four colors are selected from the color system of the Beijing Winter Olympic Games and the Winter Paralympic Games, combining the traditional Chinese color culture with the spirit of the Winter Olympics, red reflects the passion of sports, the Spring Festival festival atmosphere, and the combination of white and dark blue and light blue means pure ice and snow, the future and dreams.
It is worth mentioning the design of the women's hat. As always, Chu Yan always spares no effort to "bring" some traditional "good things". She adopted the traditional craft of Beijing's intangible cultural heritage, Velvet Flower, on the hat of the award dress, and invited Cai Zhiwei, the non-hereditary inheritor of Beijing Velvet Flower, to make it herself. "Using exquisite traditional Chinese handicrafts to show the world the aesthetics of Chinese craftsmanship".
The velvet flowers on the hats were handmade by Cai Zhiwei, a non-hereditary heir of Beijing velvet flowers.
What exactly can represent China?
After the release of the Winter Olympics award ceremonials, there were many voices on the Internet, some people praised "real beauty", and some people felt that there was a taste of "little sisters of grassland heroes", not "China".
For the different voices of all parties, Chu Yan believes that it is very normal, first of all, the public does not understand the selection mechanism of costumes that appear in national activities, including the conditions and strict requirements of various angles of design works, and it is easy to give negative evaluations to design works. "It is indeed a very strict propositional composition, which is not what the design of ordinary and beautiful daily clothes can carry, and needs to meet the requirements of culture, aesthetics, function, ritual and other aspects."
The main reason is that "everyone will have their own inner expectations, or have different understandings and cognitions of what can represent the cultural characteristics of the clothing and clothing of the host country." ”
Chu Yan is adjusting the design of the "Tang Hua Fei Xue" series.
In her opinion, it is understandable that everyone has the feeling that the awards costumes of the Winter Olympics have the feeling of the northern ethnic minorities, or the Costumes of the Mongolians.
"In fact, the Chinese national costume itself is a fusion of multi-ethnic costume cultures. Especially in contemporary times, it is difficult to say that the Chinese costumes we want to express today are expressed by the single costume characteristics of a certain ethnic group, which is often the fusion of multiple national costume cultures. For example, the silhouettes and patterns of many Mongolian costumes we see today have also been influenced by the Han costume culture, which are originally homologous, and are the aesthetic characteristics of the same root and homology of our Chinese national costume culture. ”
Chu Yan also believes that the difference in public perception just explains the problem faced by Chinese designers today - how to more accurately express the cultural characteristics of Chinese clothing aesthetics?
Know where to come from, know where to go
What is Chinese Costume Aesthetics? How to express the aesthetics of Chinese clothing? This is a question that Chu Yan has been thinking about since she was a graduate student.
In 1993, Chu Yan was admitted to Beijing Fashion Institute. Like many designers of the same era, Chu Yan's clothing education and aesthetic education have always been influenced by Western fashion design, starting from design and drawing renderings, all the way to cutting and sewing, basically all techniques, including the style of design, are learning Western fashion brands, and she has also been lost in the strong Western fashion aesthetics, until she met Li Keyu when she was a graduate student.
Li Keyu was the costume designer of China's first ballet "Swan Lake", and designed Chinese-style costumes or national costumes for many Chinese ballets and song and dance dramas. "My mentor often said that we must draw inspiration from traditional Chinese culture and innovate Chinese clothing design!" Upon graduation, she submitted her master's thesis on "Oriental Style Costume Design Re-creation", and since then she has embarked on the road of studying Chinese clothing and finding Chinese beauty.
"When we look back at history and return to the prosperous Tang Dynasty, Chang'an at that time is actually like Today's New York and Paris, it is also the fashion capital of the world and the source of leading international fashion trends." We see how confident the Tang people are, they comb their Uighur hair buns, use rouge from the Silk Road, and even wear Persian-like Tang Jin, on the whole, Datang is still Datang! Why we spend so much time and energy to restore these is not to say that we will wear this in real life in the future, but we must find a very high-level taste of beauty through the excavation and collation of traditional clothing culture little by little. In this process, we will find back the aesthetic spirit that belongs to our China. In the final analysis, to sum up is six words: know where to come from, know where to go. Chu Yan said.
Chu Yan design.
"The so-called 'knowledge of the source' means that we must have a real and in-depth understanding and collation of our traditional culture, have a correct understanding and understanding of the shape and production process, and fully taste and understand it from the level of color, pattern, aesthetics and cultural implications." 'Ming Go' is to carry out creative transformation and innovative development from the level of design practice on the basis of full cognition, based on contemporary life and aesthetics. ”
Innovative Chinese clothing design
To truly achieve "knowing where to come from, knowing where to go", Chu Yan believes that it is necessary to have the ability to have a forward-looking and prejudging future, to know the general trend of human future development and the changes in the international trend, including the stirring of different ideas and the change of lifestyles that are happening every day at the moment where we are located, and to have an open attitude towards new technologies and new things.
The concept of "knowing where to come from, knowing where to go" was also used by Chu Yan to design the 2014 APEC meeting leaders' costumes. Since the 2001 Shanghai APEC meeting chose Tang costumes, many people speculated whether Hanfu would be used this time. However, Chu Yan considered that China is different from more than a decade ago, and Chinese design is also stripping away symbolization, so she boldly integrated thousands of years of Chinese clothing characteristics into an innovative design. She integrated the standing collar placket that has existed since the Ming and Qing dynasties and the placket that had appeared in the Shang and Zhou Dynasties to create a "standing collar placket", and at the same time integrated the Chinese shoulder sleeves with the Western three-dimensional tailoring, which was refreshing and also made the "new Chinese" clothing high-profile into the public's vision.
In Chu Yan's view, whether or not you can truly understand and interpret China's high-end aesthetic interest is where the new Chinese clothing lies. "The new Chinese costume does not have to carry a phoenix and a dragon with a peony, but should pay attention to the sound of the big sound and the invisible elephant." There is no need to be the Forbidden City red, imperial yellow, it has no fixed pattern and unified law, as long as it can convey the Chinese aesthetic interest is a kind of success, for example, the spring river is as green as blue is also very Chinese. ”
Nowadays, the new Chinese clothing is just red.
Xiaohongshu "2022 Top Ten Life Trends" shows that the new Chinese style will take over the national tide to become the Xiaohongshu fashion trend in 2022; the "2022 Spring and Summer Women's Wear Industry Trends" shared by Alimama and Taobao also found that in this year's spring and summer women's wear trends, eight major trends such as new Chinese style will be highly sought after by young consumers.
Chu Yan is also exploring how to let more young people appreciate the beauty of traditional clothing culture through her own design, such as starting from the structure of traditional Chinese classic costumes, while adding more fashion elements, so that clothing can be more convenient to wear and take off, and suitable for the current state of life.
She has cooperated with the famous cultural variety show "Shangxin • Forbidden City" to launch cultural and creative costumes, designed with the pipa and flute theme patterns of the banquet music in "Han Xizai's Night Feast", and created the "Tianyin" series of sweatshirts. Once launched, the keyword "Forbidden City sweatshirt" was on Weibo's hot search, with sales of more than two million in five hours and a recognition rate of 4020%.
The "Forbidden City Sweatshirt" designed by Chu Yan has been on the hot search.
In 2021, she cooperated with the Forbidden City to develop the Guochao Cultural and Creative Costumes for sale online, and settled in the Forbidden City Cultural and Creative Costume Museum located in the Shenwu Gate of the Forbidden City. The new product series Chu and Tianwu, Chu and Jueshi and Chu and Jueshi also appeared in this year, covering more life scenes and audiences.
The "Seawater River Cliff Sweatshirt" designed by Chu Yan was stationed in the Cultural and Creative Hall of the Palace Museum.
The Beijing Institute of Fashion, where Chu Yan teaches, has also jointly established the New Era China Beauty Research Institute with Poly Zhongsi Group. Chu Yan has a grand goal: he hopes that in the future, he can sort out a more systematic, accurate and comprehensive framework for the cultivation of a knowledge system for aesthetic education and cultivation of traditional Chinese costume culture, costume aesthetics, and traditional skills of clothing, so that more young people can understand the most advanced parts of Chinese culture and Chinese aesthetics, "not only let them know the elements, graphics, and symbols that can be seen, copied and imitated on the surface, but also let them understand the Chinese cultural spirit and Chinese aesthetic spirit behind these elements and symbols." ”
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