Chinese designer Uma Wang on her Italian-made clothes, creating costumes for film sets, and why kids fear her on the basketball courts
- Uma Wang has built her eponymous label into one of China’s top designer brands in just a decade
- She says she makes her clothes in Italy not just because of the quality, but because people there try to understand what’s behind her style and philosophy
Talented and commercially successful designer Uma Wang may be celebrating her eponymous brand’s 10th anniversary this year, but when the chance came to create costumes for a historical movie, nerves began to flutter and doubts set in.
The fears were unfounded. Wang’s silver screen debut, designing costumes for the 1930s Beijing-set drama Hidden Man – directed by Jiang Wen and starring Liao Fan and Eddie Peng – was deemed an unqualified success. The film even got a nomination for best make-up and costume design at Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards.
Wang found the process creatively stimulating and professionally satisfying, not to mention immensely challenging, necessitating a total change of mindset from fashion design.
“When I design my collections, I don’t know who will wear it. But when you do a movie you know exactly who will wear it, so there is a real connection – you know the personality and the story, so you have to inject feeling and emotion into the mood of the person,” Wang says. “The director said he wanted someone with no experience, like a blank sheet of paper, so I would think in a different way. Sometimes experience can kill the magic of creativity.”
Wang designed the costumes for the lead actor and actress and explains that the period was the “end of an era”.
