The show had to go on despite an angry Typhoon Aere. Models queued up for their turn on the catwalk to breezily parade the Autumn/Winter collection of one of the country's top designers, Fu Zi-jing (
The event, held Tuesday at a sandbagged building in central Taipei, was a kind of coming-out party for a designer who has been a leading light on the local fashion scene for over a decade. Dresses in cherry red, bright pinks and blues loudly announced that Fu was taking a departure from her more usual black and neutral tones, for what she called a "romantic" look.
PHOTO: JULES QUARTLY, TAIPEI TIMES
Her signature black gowns were elegantly put together with the usual painstaking eye for detail, as shown by the embroidered hems, cut lines, folds, accessories and wide-range of fabrics, many of them from original designs.
PHOTO: JULES QUARTLY, TAIPEI TIMES
But it was the red outfit, with the long-sleeved top and Tibetan-ethnic highlights, a bare-midriff and long skirt, that grabbed the attention. A pale indigo, robe-cum-cardigan worn over calf-length trousers was in a similar vein. If this relative explosion of color is a new direction, it would seem from the reaction of those there that it was going the right way.
"She hasn't really used red before, her style has changed a lot," said public relations director Ginny Chang (
"Though she has become famous, this became a bit of a headache for her. She was not happy with her collection. She tried to relax in her personal life and work. This effected her design, which has become more soft and mature.
Fu said her collection was inspired by the idea of opening a treasure box and said each design was the result of an idea or concept derived from an opera, a painting, a movie theme, an experience or a book.
Fashion photographer Mai Xian-yun (
"You can't compare Fu with other designers. In the beginning she [incorporated] foreign cultures and designers. She's now moved on from this. Everyone wants an international market, but its difficult to do this. Fu Zi-jing is one of the few designers to have the opportunities."
"Taiwan fashion is quite different from the rest of the world," Mai said, adding the leading players had all been successful abroad. He mentioned Sophie Hong (
"That's the concern about the next generation, many of them don't know the next step to make it international. They have a Taiwan market, but they need international looks."
Rather than just catering to niche markets locally, Mai said, the aim should be to develop a broader appeal in order to break into Europe, Japan and the US. "China is, of course, a massive opportunity for us."
Mai also said there was a need to co-opt the media and government so they could build a platform for designers to be noticed. But the recent Ministry of Economic Affairs-led initiative to give the fashion industry a lift, with the ambitious "Fuse 2004" program, has been a disappointment.
A planned month-long fashion party this month showcasing young talent was promoted as "linking Taiwan fashion design talents globally." It turned out to be a washout, with just one cat-walk show and an exhibition taking place.
A typhoon could not stop Fu Zi-jing. Perhaps there are lessons to be learned here.
There is a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plot to put millions at the mercy of the CCP using just released AI technology. This isn’t being overly dramatic. The speed at which AI is improving is exponential as AI improves itself, and we are unprepared for this because we have never experienced anything like this before. For example, a few months ago music videos made on home computers began appearing with AI-generated people and scenes in them that were pretty impressive, but the people would sprout extra arms and fingers, food would inexplicably fly off plates into mouths and text on
On the final approach to Lanshan Workstation (嵐山工作站), logging trains crossed one last gully over a dramatic double bridge, taking the left line to enter the locomotive shed or the right line to continue straight through, heading deeper into the Central Mountains. Today, hikers have to scramble down a steep slope into this gully and pass underneath the rails, still hanging eerily in the air even after the bridge’s supports collapsed long ago. It is the final — but not the most dangerous — challenge of a tough two-day hike in. Back when logging was still underway, it was a quick,
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
RSS