These are exciting times for London-based Chinese fashion designer Masha Ma. She is planning to shoot a short film in Paris with photographer Bruno Dayan for the coming season, and her MA collection was selected for a show at London Fashion Week. It was subsequently bought by the edgy bStore in London. Recently, her spring-summer 2011 collection was launched in the Isetan Shanghai department store, in a city where she has just started a second studio. In 2009, Ma won the Mouse Ji Best International Innovation Award in the China Contemporary Design Contest. Today her designs are featured in many of the international leading fashion glossies from Vogue to Harper's Bazaar.
A graduate of London's Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and a rising star in the fashion world, Ma says the sheer size of China makes it difficult to sum up a general sense of taste. Instead, she sees information coming in from all sides, distracting people and giving them no time to think or develop ideas. 'The trend in modern China is chaos, with a constant search for balance,' she says.
Against this backdrop, Ma, who grew up in Beijing, also notes that people in China follow and understand international trends very well. 'Whatever you find in Paris, London and New York, you can now find in China, especially with all the major brands opening here over the past decade.' She describes Hong Kong as 'a city where you are able to get anything you want in fashion, an extremely trendy city'.
Ma says that it was her grandmother, formerly an actress in Shanghai, who shaped her early appreciation of style, elegance and design. One of her most treasured childhood memories was looking through her grandmother's photo albums, her wardrobe was a mix of international brands and Chinese tailor-made dresses.
'The pieces that amazed me most were my grandmother's old, tailor-made traditional Chinese gowns, the qipao,' says Ma. 'The craftsmanship was exquisite, and the fabric was very luxurious. It takes more than 300 steps to finish a traditional qipao, with even the silk buttons being handmade.' It was this early experience, Ma says, that made her aware of quality - and is her guiding principle today.
This respect for craftsmanship was honed when she worked in the studio of the late Alexander McQueen. He had learned the art of cutting and draping as a young apprentice on London's Savile Row, famed for its bespoke tailoring. Ma cites McQueen as a major inspiration and someone she deeply respected. It was he who inspired Ma to study for her master's in womenswear at Central Saint Martins.