Interpreting Ancient Chinese Fashion (Day 2)

I came to visit a beautiful Miao family today. I was extremely excited to have Tong share with me her treasures. It was amazing. I saw all the colors, the beautiful embroidery, everything was made out of hand. I can feel her energy in it, and she took pride in her work, which I do too as a designer. The thing that was so inspiring about Tong's work and the work of the Miao people is how much respect they have for their materials, so it really has inspired me to create very smart, very well thought out clothing that's timeless and elegant. I'm wearing the most amazing three ancient pieces of theirs. In fact, it's from their grandparents actually that have embroidered these pieces. The most beautiful thing about it too is that everything is eco. Everything is coming from the earth. I really was really surprised to see how much of the Miao work had in common with the indigenous Mexican work. That really struck me. I particularly remember a yellow panel that was hanging over the door. The combination of pink and yellow is so pervasive in Mexican culture. They're two colors that represent festivities or a certain alegría, they say, in Mexico. You see it at every party and every festival. I really had these fantastic feelings to know that people separated by so much geography and so culturally different could share so much common ground. My first piece that I'm wearing right now is such a beautiful piece. This is a celebration coat. The second piece that I love, which is the skirt, and has amazing, beautiful pleats, all intricately handmade, and it's knotted and pleated and hand-ironed. The process is basically to use a metal pipe or a metal bottle of some sort and fill it with boiling water and use that like an iron. I thought that was really ingenious. As you notice, these pleats are pleated separately and equally, but yet when she puts it on and it drapes, it actually creates this little ripple of pleats that just bunch up and creates its own path. The one thing I like about the skirt so much is it's really substantial. It really says skirt with a capital S. It's very archetypal. Another skirt that I was really inspired by was the mushroom pleating, and it's similar to the skirt that I'm wearing right now, but it was in green color, a beautiful green-purplish color. And the amazing part about it was that the color came from the leaves, because it's hand-stitched and pleated as well. So the jacket I'm wearing today is a testament to sort of the international quality of really great designs. This is great. It's really chic. Oh, I love it. I'm really inspired by the humanity of it, like how beautiful it is, but also the design is really fantastic. With indigenous designs, I think it's fascinating, the economy that they use and the ingeniousness they utilize in making these things work. So in European design, we're always cutting things up into these little tiny pieces, and here they're using these very wide pieces and using the shape of the fabric or closures to make the shape, so it's very nice. The thing I love so much about it is you could wear this in Paris and still be extremely chic or fit in perfectly with the Miao villagers. And with the right sash, you might even be able to work it into a Mexican ceremony. The third piece that I have that I'm wearing right now, too, and which I really honor, is the baby carrot, which you can see here on my back. And then Jude has to get inside. Jude, come on over. The baby carrot has a wonderful shape to it. I'm really inspired by shape and architectural shapes. As you can see this piece here, you can tell that it drops right below my neck so that you can see the shape of my neckline, but as well as this architectural shape that protrudes out. And I think it's very elegant, really chic, and it's amazing. It's so inspiring for my next collection. In the West, we tend to use synthetic or petroleum-based chemical dyes or petroleum-based mordants to set the dyes, as well as processes to make the dyes permanent. Looking at those processes they use in the village, it was really fantastic to see them use vegetable dyes or find out specifically what types of plants dyes come from. I think in the West, that's something we've really lost touch with. One of the really surprising elements that we looked at was soybean milk or soy milk as an important ingredient in setting the dyes and making them permanent. So I had really never thought about how versatile that food product was, but when you think about how environmentally friendly it is and using that in place of really harmful dyes, I think that's really fantastic. The beautiful inspiration that they have given me, too, was that they thought out every step. They really are true designers, pure designers from thousands of years ago. They actually dye the thread, weave the fabric, as well as embroider it, and even do the pattern design to it. So the full course of design is so precious and so timeless. I think that's just wonderful and so complete. And I have a really fetish for color, so this is a wonderful concept. A color fetish? I do have a color fetish. Thank you.