CONSUMERS
About Chinese Creativity
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Nathalie Omori, Senior Partner of Zhenji, a marketing firm devoted to Chinese HNWIs, rounds up examples of the new Chinese creativity which draws on the country’s traditional skills. Nathalie Omori,…
Over the last decade, collaborations between luxury brands and contemporary artists have gone beyond mere artistic partnerships towards a new kind of luxury branding.
PARIS – Art and fashion have always developed side by side, for fashion, like art, often gives visual expression to the cultural zeitgeist. During the 1920s, Salvador Dalí created dresses for Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiapparelli. In the 1930s, Ferragamo’s shoes commissioned designs for advertisements from Futurist painter Lucio Venna, while Gianni Versace commissioned works from artists such as Alighiero Boetti and Roy Lichtenstein for the launch of his collections. Yves Saint Laurent’s vast art collection, recently auctioned at Christie’s in Paris, testified to his great love of art and revealed the influence of a variety of artists on his own designs.
In the 1980s, relationships between luxury brands and artists were advanced when Alain Dominique Perrin created the Fondation Cartier. In the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, a book marking the foundation’s 20th anniversary, Perrin says he makes “a connection between all the different sorts of arts, and luxury goods are a kind of art. Luxury goods are handicrafts of art, applied art.”
The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemparain building in Paris
Nathalie Omori, Senior Partner of Zhenji, a marketing firm devoted to Chinese HNWIs, rounds up examples of the new Chinese creativity which draws on the country’s traditional skills.
Nathalie Omori, Senior Partner of Zhenji, a marketing firm devoted to Chinese HNWIs, rounds up examples of the new Chinese creativity which draws on the country’s traditional skills.
Gradually emerging from a reproducing and copying age, China proves today its genuine creativeness: a quite recent but rich creativity largely rooted in its ancient knowledges. So lets pay attention to this true chinese revival which, concerning the luxury goods, wakes up the old skills of the imperial court in the Forbiddden City of Beijing, Xian or Luoyang as well as those of the “Années Folles” in Shanghai.
Ma Ke is very well known in the world of fashion: her Haute Couture show, which opened the Fashion Week of Paris, in March 2007, has been a noteworthy event. Ma Ke is also the daily creative of the Mixmind brand which counts 180 boutiques in China.
Mixmind first: The brand presents a timeless sort of fashion made of materials like raw cotton. The choice of loose-fitting shapes echoe the light, free, floating style of the Han dynasty dresses.
And then comes Exception: Here each piece is unique, dyed with pure pigments and made of organic material which Ma Ke has thrust into the earth for several months. Haute Couture? Art? Who knows ?
Exception has been registered at the Haute Couture Chamber in Paris. Its clothes are not sold in boutiques but only shown in art galleries.
Zhao Yi is a brand created by a Hong Kong jade jeweller established in Beijing who owns two shops and a VIP Center where courses about jade gems are given. This very refined work on white jade, a material reserved to the emperor in the old days, also exploits the shape of the Pi, a precursor of the current Tai Ji Tu, the black and white symbol of the Yin and Yang well known chinese concepts.The Pi, already present in the ancient chinese necropolis, is a flat ring which symbolizes the lively energy flowing to-and-fro endlessly between the Yin and the Yang. Its origin is lost in the mists of times but it surely precedes the Tai Ji Tu arrival.
Zhao Yi also makes good use of the chinese craftsmen techniques which had been employed in Shanghai during the “Années Folles” : some transcultural know-how stemed from the occidental Art Deco, Art Nouveau and Bauhaus style art and design.
Finally, lets point out that the Zhao Yi promotional visual shown here is based on the symbolic of the Moon under its Yin, feminine aspect.
Using organic produces as mashed avocado or red cabbage juice, Joyce Wang, “make up” Editor for the chinese luxury magazine “I look”, imagines some feminine and Yin faces marked by Yang stains. This process evokes calligraphy and also these chinese landscapes painted in indian ink.
Nathalie Omori, Senior Partner, Zhenji
Senior partner
I am a specialist of Luxury Consumption in China by HNWI. I make Market Research, Consumer Insights, Media Planning including Chinese Internet, and works with Chinese Media to develop luxury consumption in China. My clients are main of the famous European Luxury Groups including LVMH, Moët Hennessy, Richemont Group, Remy Cointreau or Pernod Ricard. I also work for many brands from Cartier to Guerlain,as well as Cognac Hine or Château d’Yquem, …
