Visiting Designer Laurence Xu: Chinese Embroidery Has A Soul.

Fan Bingbing's Dragon Robe at the twenty-third Cannes Film Festival.

Your work is famous for its Chinese style. What makes you have such a deep understanding of Chinese culture?

Lawrence Hu: I am a deeply rooted Chinese.

My hometown in Zaozhuang, Shandong, what "saints" Mo-tse, Confucius, "three thousand" Meng Changjun, "self recommendation" Mao Sui, and so on, are from my hometown, this kind of thing is actually deep-rooted in my mind.

At the same time, I was born in a building family, and my father always taught me well.

Lawrence Hu: when I do design, many things that I learn from small to large will come into my mind imperceptibly. For example, the western structure, which I learned later, and the traditional ideas of the Chinese nation are deeply rooted in my mind, so that they can easily produce the sense of learning and applying them so that they can be integrated with each other, and then form the style I now design, that is, the so-called Chinese style.

How do you see the controversy over the Dragon Robe dress?

Lawrence Hu: the biggest purpose of a red carpet is to create an explosive effect.

On overseas red carpet, if you are not dressed enough in China, you may be considered to be Japanese. This is a very helpless situation.

I hope that people will be concerned about the design elements of this dress when they argue about whether the Dragon Robe dress is beyond the scope of the fashion industry: Panlong embroidery, deep to shallow water totem, and representative Chinese yellow.

Is it intended to carry forward traditional Chinese culture?

Lawrence Hu: I am an extreme aestheticism.

In my work, I often see embroidery of various schools including Suzhou embroidery, Gu Xiu, Jingxiu, pan silk show, relief show and so on. Most of my works are traditional and precious materials.

Like the cloud brocade dress I made for Zhou Yun, I used the national treasure fabric brocade called "inch size gold". The cost of the fabric alone is as high as 140 thousand yuan.

When Yun Brocade was successfully listed in the world's intangible cultural heritage, the director of Nanjing cloud brocade Museum excitedly telephoned to thank me for my contribution to the protection of these vanishing cultural heritages.

How do we see the further integration of western culture and Chinese elements?

Laurence Xu: our clothes were flat in the past, just like we needed boxes, and we needed to use wardrobes abroad.

Now that we are all internationalized, many international brands have entered the family of ordinary people. China has also become one of the world's largest luxury goods and the most expensive countries. Many things have become new and old integration, integration of ancient and modern times, integration of Chinese and Western cultures, and integration of Chinese and Western cultures.

It's like when we decorate, we mix the design of furniture into the popular elements of Mashup, or put the beautiful fireplace in a Chinese home, and many buildings are actually western style frames, which cover the roofs of China and glazed tile.

The combination of Chinese and Western seems to be the most fashionable thing at present.

Nowadays, Chinese wind is very popular in European and American fashion circles. How do you evaluate the Chinese style works of foreign designers?

Laurence Xu: just like embroidery in our clothing culture, there are no embroidery crafts in this area. They may be machines instead of lace or lace and some needlework.

They can take away the pattern or take away the color, but they lose the sense of soul created by hand. This is the difference between the essence and the essence.

You know, those fabrics that have been touched by hands for thousands of times have souls.

What is your ideal?

Lawrence Hu: whenever I walk on the streets of London, Milan and New York, which are full of luxury brands, they are very heartache. Why none of these expensive luxuries belong to China? I hope to establish the first luxury brand that belongs to China, and let the Chinese gem such as brocade go to the world.