Diversified Museum Elements Are On The Way To Development.

Recently, there is a new designer in China's clothing industry.

He went into a short time, did not design many works and did not win any awards from the clothing industry, let alone show up in the four fashion week just finished.

But what is interesting is that people who know him live in all walks of life, and even when foreigners talk about China, they must mention his name.

You can also see countless inspirations in his body. He knows more about China's long history and culture than any other people, and is committed to telling stories buried in time with design. He has a familiar name the Imperial Palace.

It's not too much to call the Imperial Palace a designer.

In recent days, the Imperial Palace's subordinate cooperative enterprise and Beijing the Imperial Palace palace culture development company have launched a new revival of traditional dress culture called "regurgation of elegant clothes" in cooperation with the global designer platform ICY.

There are five Chinese designer brands participating in the project, including AWAYLEE Li Wei, MI fan's 100 drama Bureau, MENG HUITING, QDO and 5MIN. In the authorization of about 1800000 the Imperial Palace relics, five cultural relics such as Qingming Riverside, Lang Shining's flower and bird chart and Hai Hai Tu are selected as the spiritual objects, and five fashion designs including "Shanghe Anfu", "flower building flourishing age", "Aya embroidery and Ruyi", "sea wrong auspicious" and "wine song Changle" are designed.

In traditional Chinese culture, "Ji" is a symbol of good luck.

In ancient times, especially in the Qing Dynasty, the imperial costume was mainly worn by royal members in the prelude and the end stage before the major auspicious festivals, banquets, and before and after the activities of the sacrificial subjects, also known as "Jia Fu", "rich clothes", "colored clothes" and "flower clothes".

But the reason why "Jilin" can be chosen as the theme of this cooperation is a very ingenious thing that Gu Ying, the founder of the global designer platform ICY, who is responsible for the designer's cooperation.

"We didn't get to know the concept of Kyrgyzstan at the beginning."

In an interview with fashion style, Gu Yingying admitted that after establishing cooperation with the palace culture of Beijing's the Imperial Palace, she and her team have been looking for the dress culture that can be re interpreted in modern society in the ancient Chinese historical records, and finally chose the category of "imperial dress" from Royal costumes of the Qing Dynasty, such as Royal costume, imperial clothing, regular clothes, and costumes.

This is a very clever choice.

On the one hand, to understand from the literal meaning, "Ji" is linked to good luck. In Chinese people's minds, there is a very special feeling to luck from ancient times to now. "Especially now everyone is talking about the economic cold winter. Choosing the" lucky clothes "also borrows the implication contained in it.

Gu Ying added.

On the other hand, with the accelerated pace of life in modern society, it is hard for the current consumers to have the patience to go deep into some difficult cultural points. In the application of the concept of the Imperial Palace, too heavy cultural points are not as good as those that are more interesting and easy to understand.

However, the concept of "Jilin" has been identified. If we want to pick out the elements that can be used in modern kits from about 1800000 collections, and challenge the traditional oriental aesthetics in China, the challenge is just beginning.

As the main member responsible for the design and production of the project, ICY did not directly designate designers at the beginning. Instead, it chose to think about how to deduce the elements of the the Imperial Palace from the whole, and chose a multi-dimensional designer's combination of understanding Chinese Oriental aesthetics, from senior to new, from the trend to the classical.

The Beijing the Imperial Palace palace cultural development company, which owns the right to use the elements of the the Imperial Palace, recalls the fashionable memories of the interface. Before the product design, their team and designers spent a lot of time discussing the planning of products and the development of the Imperial Palace elements, hoping to empower the designers according to the style of each designer, so that designers could choose the cultural aspects that interest them and understand them.

Innovation under conflict

But simply combining the Imperial Palace elements with fashion products is not enough.

In the early days of using the Imperial Palace elements to develop products, many collaborators tended to use the elements that directly put the Imperial Palace elements on the product.

"They did not go deep into the cultural heritage of the the Imperial Palace collection, and then made a process of innovation. What they did was more focused on ordinary the Imperial Palace souvenirs." Ma Xiyuan, deputy director of the Beijing palace Court Culture Development Co., Ltd., who is responsible for the Imperial Palace's element authorization, said that "clothing is a very important category of our main lifestyle categories. We need to compete with the entire apparel industry market, from price, aesthetics to cultural details, all need to be differentiated."

She said that Beijing the Imperial Palace palace culture development company began to introduce the Imperial Palace elements into the market since 2015, and has developed a series of literary creation, accessories and jewelry products, but rarely gives some elements of the Imperial Palace to a certain product to tell stories.

"If we want to relate to the aesthetic and pattern of young people, we must use different design methods to re interpret the concept of culture."

The same is true of "gyms".

Different from the appearance of the ancient "Jifu", designers have more new ways of displaying the cultural concept of the Imperial Palace collection.

For example, designer MIN WU, in her design, chose the wine culture advocated by ancient Chinese literati and took the calligraphy of Emperor Qianlong as an example to blend in the printing of clothing to express free and easy artistic conception. The design of "Hai Mishui auspicious" series designed by Dido Liu was based on "Hai Hai Tu", which recorded more than 300 true and false mixed animals in the Qing Dynasty.

In the application of this element, Dido Liu arbitrarily placed different kinds of marine organisms in different corners of clothing.

And the use of gauze and satin as the main clothing materials, in order to make the clothing when moving up to show the feeling of swimming animals in the sea; Li Wei, who uses the tide card as the design style, pondered the color of the the Imperial Palace architecture, and applied the color of the red brick and tile in the ancient Chinese aesthetics to the design of the clothing.

But Gu Yingying also said in the interview that as the first cooperation with the palace culture of the Imperial Palace in Beijing, the project has been started from the beginning to the formal completion, and the real operation time is only three months.

"Everything in the Imperial Palace is very complex, such as a five grain stocking, it will need a lot of different colors to deduce."

Gu Yingying said.

In fact, it also brings great risks to the innovation of cultural elements, especially when designers who take part in the design of the Imperial Palace elements are mostly exposed to young people who design aesthetic education abroad. Some innocuous but possibly not rigorous designs are easy to touch the edge of traditional culture.

In the eyes of Yuan Hongqi, the deputy director of the Palace Museum, who specializes in the palace history of the Qing Dynasty, some of the designs in the series of "dress regurgence" still have room for improvement at the cultural level.

"Designers want to highlight their own design, more from the perspective of clothing aesthetics, but from my point of view, the culture needs to be improved," she repeatedly mentioned in the interview "integrity" concept, "Chinese ancient understanding of culture, in addition to implicit and complete, a very important point is symmetry, like the the Imperial Palace building is very symmetrical."

Yuan Hongqi was satisfied with the design of "Mei Zhu calligraphy fan Gold Foil Print pleated skirt" designed by the founder and designer of the "Secret Fan" brand. The design is from the folding fan of Jiang Tingxi painted Mei bamboo picture copied by Emperor Kangxi in Han Wen's calligraphy.

Diversified development of Museum elements

Before stepping into the field of clothing, the Imperial Palace has gone through nearly 10 years of pformation.

With the successful pformation of the Imperial Palace through these social and youthful means, the Imperial Palace's development has created a top-down new industrial chain.

By the end of 2016, there were altogether 9170 kinds of products created by the the Imperial Palace Museum.

Fortunately, consumers are also very popular about the combination of this culture and fashion products.

According to Phoenix network, sales of cultural and creative products in the Imperial Palace exceeded 1 billion yuan in 2016.

In 2017, the revenue of the Imperial Palace's creative department was nearly 100 million yuan, and the income of online Taobao shop was nearly 50 million yuan, plus the revenue from other the Imperial Palace departments contributing to cultural and creative products. The total annual revenue of all creative products reached 1 billion 500 million yuan.

Among them, a very important part of the publicity of the Imperial Palace elements, leaving aside the previous the Imperial Palace related arts that focus more on cultural relics, such as "national treasure" and "my cultural heritage in the Imperial Palace". In November 2018, a variety of "new star" was adopted by the "expert + star" guest mode. While popular science culture, it also joined hands with famous designers and university design students, and each phase launched a cultural and creative derivative.

Among them, in the second phase of the development of products with the Imperial Palace elements, "Chang Yin Chang Xin series pajamas" in the release within two days to get more than 670 thousand of the public funding.

The the Imperial Palace palace culture development company of Beijing, including the launch of "regurgious clothes", started in 2015. After testing the major markets with the Imperial Palace culture and jewelry, it confirmed that consumers pay much for this fashionable but with certain cultural details.

Wang Yamin, executive vice president of the the Imperial Palace Museum, said in an interview with China news agency that according to the normal speed, the Imperial Palace should create an annual growth rate of 50%.

However, in the specific implementation process, there still exist problems such as lagging behind in research and development management and incentive mechanism, and unclear ideas about creating and developing products in museums, and now only 20% to 30%.

In addition, the development of the Imperial Palace elements is also facing competition from other museums at home and abroad.

For example, in 2016, National Museum opened an official flagship store on the electronic business platform, launched its own brand creation "Guo Bo Yan Yi" and launched micro-blog with the same brand.

It is also the first step of the the Imperial Palace to cooperate with Paris L'OREAL to launch the 5 limited lipstick gift boxes in the Qing Dynasty, which is inspired by the collection of national treasure.

Because museum museum industry is relatively special, people in need often have to understand the Chinese traditional culture in depth while taking into account the design ability. However, the domestic universities are involved in the education of museums, arts and creative industries. With the blowout development of museum culture, the industry has begun to have a talent gap.

Even today, museum development of creative products, such as independent research and development, outsourcing, cooperation with manufacturers, and IP authorization, will bring some traditional culture related training to designers, but it is still very difficult to achieve results in the short term. This also leads to the homogenization of products with more and more museum elements.

Gu Yingying knows this very well.

"The Imperial Palace element is actually a bridge, we can express some of our ideas through it, but of course, this is also a mixed blessing. The reputation and authority of your good platform will be improved. If you do poorly, it will be counterproductive," she added. "Just like many the Imperial Palace works, if it's just tagged design, it will be very difficult to have another one."

How to avoid this kind of low quality and homogenization is fundamentally based on cultural pmission, and cultural communication is actually a continuous process of communication.

In addition to the exhibition, WeChat launched a small game to introduce design elements and cultural information. ICY hopes that through virtual space, more people will feel the aesthetics of the Imperial Palace relics through visual experience, thus increasing the appeal and attraction of this culture.

"Once we have a cooperation, we will build a trust between the palace culture of the the Imperial Palace, so the next time we may make a more delicate cooperation, such as making a series closer to the imperial dress in the way of skirts," Gu Ying Sai said at the end of the interview. "We also hope that through the application of this modern technology, many people can be pformed from the disseminator of culture to the disseminator."

This is also one of the original intentions of the Imperial Palace to reach the field of clothing.

After all, for the Imperial Palace fans, it's much more cool to put the riverside picture on Qingming River directly than a cup with the same pattern.