Sheguang Hu, and why The Hunger Games' Capitol should've looked more like Beijing Fashion Week.

Beijing Fashion Week rarely makes it to mainstream American/British fashion magazines and blogs, and coverage outside of highlight galleries seems to be nigh-on impossible to find. Which is too bad, because if you enjoy truly out-there couture (which I do) then Beijing is streets ahead of Paris at the moment. Although designers like McQueen are still regularly turning out excellent couture shows, I've found that many of the major fashion houses on the London/Paris/Milan/NYC circuit have been noticeably lacklustre over the last few years.

photos from here.

Autumn/Winter 2012/13
Last month's Sheguang Hu show in Beijing was gothic and alarming, and filled with expressive and over-the-top millinary.

NYFW Fall 2012: Jason Wu.

This season Jason Wu decided to explore his Chinese roots, giving the fashion community ample opportunity to partake in one of their lesser-known hobbies: mildly racist commentary. Sorry, guys, "mysterious" and "ethnic" are not synonumous with "Chinese" in any way, shape or form. Go directly to Vocabulary Jail; do not collect 200 Fashion Dollars.

The show was divided into three themes, the first being the military of Mao-era China. The colour palette was obvious: the green-grey of military uniforms, and the red of Communism.

A lot of the time a designer's original inspiration is so obscure (cf. Gary Graham's Iranian wrestling tunics/Manchester Film Festival inspiration for his recent NYFW show) that it adds relatively little to my interpretation of a collection. In this case it added a certain coherency that might not otherwise have been apparent since it was genuinely helpful to see the demarcation between Wu's favoured three periods of Chinese history