Ready-to-Wear
Ngan Lok
Luxury womenswear shaped for the breadth of climates, lifestyles and attitudes across China — developed through an intimate dialogue between muse, collection and atelier.
Scope
Em, the proprietor, had an extraordinary eye and an openness to experimentation that made her a natural creative catalyst. An Olympian turned pop star and entrepreneur, she embodied many of the contradictions I found fascinating within contemporary Chinese luxury — strength and femininity, visibility and intimacy, discipline and exuberance. She inevitably became a muse for the collections, with different facets of her life providing the starting point for new worlds.
Our process became highly instinctive and collaborative. I would develop the collections from London and present to Em and the team in China each week, using her responses to propel the next stage of research and development. Rather than designing around a fixed archetype, the product evolved through this ongoing exchange — a creative symbiosis that allowed the collections to remain personal while speaking to a much wider customer.
What Em and Mr Ren had built in Shenzhen was particularly exciting: an in-house atelier and sampling system that combined China's advanced manufacturing technology with the sensitivity and craft I associated with the Parisian atelier. Digital cutting, large-scale print technology and highly efficient production systems existed alongside accomplished draping, hand-developed patterns and detailed fitting. Having that infrastructure directly connected to the design team meant ideas could be tested, challenged and refined continuously.
Designing for the breadth of the Chinese market added another layer of complexity. A collection could need to move across dramatically different climates, cities, lifestyles and customer attitudes while still retaining one coherent identity. Range planning, cut and fabrication therefore had to be considered with particular precision. By the time the showroom filled with samples, every piece had travelled through a rigorous process of research, development, fitting and editing — allowing the final collection to feel expansive in possibility but unmistakably connected by the same creative language.
