Wuyong Living Space (Beijing)

In Beijing we met Ma Ke, one of China’s best-known and most groundbreaking fashion designers. In 1996 she founded Exception de Mixmind, China’s first designer brand. Despite the brand’s overwhelming success, after ten years she left the company and decided to take an entirely new path. She developed Wuyong, “which is a social enterprise [...] a brand of traditional handicrafts, inheritance, protection, and innovation. The main goal is to help folk craftspeople in very remote areas of China and protect and inherit those ancient crafts.”

What followed was eight years of intense research. Ma Ke travelled throughout the country, staying in farming communities in remote areas, in search of Chinese folk art, traditional textiles and techniques. China has some 56 different minorities, each of which has its own techniques and traditions, based on different local materials and plants. Communities in the south of China mainly grow hemp and cotton. In other parts of the country, they are more likely to work with wool, or with camel or yak hair.

At her Wuyong Studio in Zhuhai (southern China) she works with craftspeople from different parts of the country, developing fabrics. Only once a fabric is right will she start her design – sometimes a garment, but she also makes home textiles. The dyes for the fabrics are made from plants that grow on the studio site. Her goal is: “to provide natural and handmade daily necessities to those who are after simplicity and searching for the essence of life.”

Wuyong products are meant to last a lifetime. Anyone who buys one of her designs receives lifelong maintenance. Items that break or wear out are carefully repaired and, if necessary, they are re-dyed.

Wuyong Living Space in Beijing is a shop, a café, and an exhibition space where traditional textiles from different parts of China are displayed. When we visited, there was an exhibition about cherishing clothes, featuring garments that had all been worn and repaired many many times, to last for generations. Ma Ke believes we can learn a lot from this.

Wuyong 無用means ‘useless’. Ma Ke chose this name for her brand because when she was still studying her unique designs combining local cultural values, sustainable materials and high-quality craftsmanship were seen as ‘useless’.

The photos below show the Wuyong jacket designed by Ma Ke, with a hand-embroidered sunflower motif. The blue version of this jacket, dyed with indigo, is displayed in the exhibition. It can be worn both inside out and upside down.