Why Make the Cheongsam/Qipao
In the fall of 2019 I met with Colleen Quen who is an accomplished artist and fashion designer in San Francisco. She came to my home studio and I listened to her talk and learned so much! She asked me in not so many words, as she came to understand that I am primarily a visual artist and not a trained fashion designer, “Why not just make prints for interior living spaces with your art?” And I thank her deeply for these words as it motivated me to present to you my Fine Art Photography Website in which I may offer to you for purchase my photography as fine art prints.
So why am I making fashion, other than the fact that it’s in my family genetic code to work in the clothing business?
The simplest, most direct answer I can give is to paraphrase Roberto Cavalli. When I first started studying fashion I came across a quote in which he stated something like, “I made fashion because I want to see beautiful women wearing my designs.”
I love to make people happy. I love to make them laugh and smile. I love to make them feel good. I’m in love with falling in love and I’m just in love with love. So to make myself happy by seeing someone wearing one of my designs and feeling good while wearing it, to make the person wearing it feel good, I started on my venture into making apparel with my prints. And of course I am making fashion in the hopes of creating a business and a brand. I could have just focused on building a business to sell my art as prints. But I have been working in collaboration with people my entire life. I’ve never worked as a sole artist. The idea that I would focus all my attention on creating art for walls and be a “sole” artist, versus working with other artists in collaboration as I do when I act in plays and media has no appeal to me. I’m a people person. I gotta work with people. By making fashion, I get to work with other photographers, models, stylists. By having a business I can work with business and marketing people. By building a business and a brand I hope that I will be able to have some influence in the world to help make the world a better place for everyone. And as clothing is one of the three essentials in life, it just feels right to me, combined with my family background, I make clothing with my art printed on fabrics.
A few years into my study of textile and fashion design I found the website for Black Milk Clothing. The artist in me wanted to make similar style clothing with my prints and I knew I could. The “actor” in me wanted to play the role of a Fashion Designer/Entrepreneur and create a business to make and sell clothing. I took classes in making apparel and made a collection of leggings and short body con dresses, the old fashioned way. I printed the fabric, took it to a sewing factory and had myself an inventory of leggings and body con dresses. I also had the seamstress who made my prototypes make some sample mini skirts, swimsuits and bikinis.
I launched an online website with shopify to sell the products. The fit model I used had experience in marketing and came up with thea name for the company; Wild Beautiful Clothing. Sounded good so I decided to use that name for the Brand.
I showed my fashion around the Bay Area at fashion shows,clubs and fairs and sold some dresses to a store on Haight Street and I made a few sales from my online shop at the fairs.
But the entire time I felt like I was REALLIY just “acting” as I had virtually no experience in running an apparel company. My experience as a Real Estate agent in helping people sell their homes was wasn’t helpful at all as the dynamics of pricing and how people buy and sell real estate is completely different than the dynamics of how people buy fashion. I became uncomfortable with “playing the role” of an entrepreneur/fashion designer with so little foundation, so little experience in actually BEING an entrepreneur/fashion designer. So as my inventory dwindled from sales and from my giving away most of the items I made for promotion, I decided to close up the Wild Beautiful Clothing shop and continue to learn more about the world of fashion and apparel
Around this time I was marketing my Wild Beautiful Clothing I became friends with one of the models who was modeling Wild Beautiful Clothing. Sascha Okamoto grew up in Japan. Her grandfather owned a sewing factory there. She provided me some very essential information about the process of working with apparel companies/sewing factories and I’m forever grateful to her.
35mm film photos I shot of Sascha wearing one of the dresses I made
A photographer I knew who was familiar with my work knew a young fashion design student from Japan who was studying at the academy of Art here in San Francisco. He introduced us. Suzuki (she goes by her last name) liked my art. She came to my home in Daly City, picked out the images she liked for the fashion she wanted to make. She sat with me as I edited my images to fit her patterns. It was my first experience working as a textile designer directly with a fashion designer. Suzuki made a collection of clothing with my prints. In her collection she had made kimonos and one long and one short cheongsam/qipao style dress. She did a photo shoot with the models wearing her collection and we showed the collection around San Francisco. Sangeeta Ghosh Yesley who promotes creative performances in New York City saw the collection and invited us to bring the collection to NYC for dancers with the Benjamin Briones Ballet to wear during a performance at the Dixon Place Theatre in Greenwich Village.
Please click here to see a youtube video of the performance.
Photo shoot by Suzuki and a student photographer at AAU in San Francisco
Shortly after Suzuki and I were in NYC she returned to Japan. Rather than bring this collection to the market place, she decided to make swim wear. Hopefully in the future we will collaborate again.
After she left I was still thinking about what kind of fashion to make with my prints. It was tempting to go back to making “regular clothing” with my prints. But as I was learning more about fashion and clothing, and I had the desire to make clothing that would be of value to it’s owner, not just a piece of fast fashion. Of all the pieces that Suzuki had made, I loved the way women look when they wear the qipao. It can make a woman feel elegant, graceful, beautiful. So I decided to consider making the qipao with my prints and began to do research in this field and learned so much about this dress. I had seen this style dress made with traditional Chinese prints. I had learned about the movie “In the Mood for Love” and decided to buy it. I learned from this movie that this style of dress was being made not just with traditional Chinese fabrics, but with beautiful fabrics that were not traditional. Seeing this film, and knowing that this style of dress had been originally made in Shanghai inspired by the mixing of western culture with Chinese culture, I was inspired me to use my prints to make this style of dress.