Here is Keeven, a fashion designer from Shanghai.  His work has shown at fashion week there.  He is with the group Fashion Design Organization.  Sorry, still putting up pictures from China Fashion Week.  After spending so much time seeing shows, my work has become rather backed up and I haven’t had a chance to go out shooting.

Armor for a modern urban knight?  He designed it himself as he did all of his other garments.

Another China Fashion Week find that is probably weaves together quite a few threads, subcultures, and themes.  Despite her dimensions, she was there to watch the shows, not participate in them.

The press pass that had gained me entrance to 20 shows over the course of a week was in the name of the fashion editor of my magazine.   It was confiscated and I did not make it into the final awards ceremony.  These two guys did, though they did not have either a press pass or a ticket.  These two fashion students actually made it into every single show of China Fashion Week SS ‘10 without any documents allowing entry.  They would just sneak in – once or twice on my coattails.  For the final event, they walked past the guards into a side door, even though there were metal detectors before all of the official entrances.

Just look at the runways at China Fashion Week SS ‘10.  I encountered this young lady in the subway on the way to the Qi Gang show, where big cats were in evidence.  But this was not the only show immersing spectators in themes from the jungle and Beijingers these days seem never to get enough leopard scarves, flats, bags, neckties and jackets.  Is leopard “classic” now like blue and white stripes or gray herringbone?

Notice that this is one of the first times that I have broken my usual rule of steering clear of those with brand names visible.  Yes, I am a member of that snobbish and reactionary anti-logo crew.  They should be paying her to carry a bag that is an advertisement in itself.

Vivian Ying (应翠剑）is the designer for Cocoon, which was my favorite of the shows I’ve seen so far at China Fashion Week.  Here she is right before entering the Qi Gang show.  From lovely Hangzhou, she also designs several other labels.  Here she is wearing not one of her own designs; the sport coat is from Balmain, as can be seen from the shoulders.

See her whole SS10 collection at Yoka.com.

I ran into this stylist after the Entra show, on the second day of China Fashion Week.  Behind him are the buses that took press from the Beijing Hotel venue to D-Park, out at 798.  All media members were provided with a free, authentic, Big Mac dinner on the way back from 798 to the middle of town.  I’d never had a Big Mac before and I never thought my first one would come after watching hundreds of emaciated models.

Held at the Beijing Hotel and D-Park at 798, the second 2009 China Fashion Week celebrates the designs of brands based all around China, but with something of  a focus in Guangdong and Zhejiang.  I will have quite a more on this later, but for now here is Terry, a stylist at Tony Studio, after the “Mihuang” Qi Gang Cashmere High Class Fashion Show.

Well, he’s a bit above sixty, but he professes to love what the Party has done for him and he was the most interesting person I found on the square.  I only made it to square in the very last hours before they removed all of the displays that were there for the bash celebrating 60 years of progress and prosperity under the reds.  New comfort and wealth is probably what made all the tourists on the square happy, but the October One event itself seemed more of an old school dictatorship-style parade celebrating military prowess, nukes and all.

Anyway, jet lagged, I raced to the square not long after arriving from the States, hoping to find all sorts of bizarre provincials wearing dramatically overwrought ensembles proclaiming their new treasures.  I longed for LV print alligator-skin coats with chinchilla fur collars or people walking stylish poodles.  Failing the horde of brazen arrivistes, I thought there would at least be packs of dainty lads with bleached blond hair, ass-tight black jeans, Jackie O style sunglasses, leopard print windbreakers, and zebra print scarves and the equivalent females.  Previous forays into the provinces have yielded visual delicacies such as these.  The square was instead filled with a group that showed to me that rising living standards have brought less risk taking in fashion.  The provincials are not an exciting bunch compared even to Beijingers I encounter in the subway.  The homogeneity of the crowd was almost like a return to Mao suits, but that would have had quite a bit more charm.

The dress is from a Spanish designer but seems so Chinese.  She is a magazine editor.

A Marketing Director at Van Cleef’s & Arpels, Ms.  Aude Bousser has worked for fashion brands for quite a few years though she returns to her home in Paris nearly every month.  She thinks that opportunities are much more in the Asia market, especially China, both because of the growth and because women are more inclined to make decisions on purchases like jewelry by themselves and then spend their own money.  Further, she says that Chinese women with careers tend to be more independent minded than their sisters in the West.

After opening a new shop at Wangfujing, the next big task will be this fall in Hangzhou, where she believes Van Cleef’s & Arpels is less known but the people of the city love to spend on luxury goods.

Her dress is from Diane Von Furstenberg

I didn’t realize this when photographing her but lovely Jin Haixin is a well-known pop singer.  She is a Chinese of Korean ethnicity and has been popular since 1999.

The dress is Donna Karan the glasses vintage.

Compared to other more arrogant celebrities I have encountered, she was very sweet, not becoming irritated by my annoying questions (“where do you perform?” “do you have a band?”).  You can sample her tunes on baidu.

Paul Pan has worked for the website 263 for ten years and he lives in Weikung Hutong.

Beijing brit-rock band Super VC is a fan of Burberry and enthusiastically welcomes the new store.  Burberry Creative Director Christopher Bailey came to Beijing for a single day to attend the opening and I gave him a Stylites pocket square, which he found a bit surprising.  In the Jinbao Place Shopping Mall, also home to Gucci, Buttega Veneta, Vertu, and the Swank, mentioned in the post before, this new outlet on Jinbao Street is Burberry’s sixth and largest store in Beijing.  Someone evidently has a plan to make Jinbao street into Beijing’s answer to Madison Avenue or Via Spiaggia.  Jinbao street also has the Peninsula hotel, and its shopping mall, the Beijing Hong Kong Jockey Club Clubhouse, dealers for Maserati, Ferarri, and Bugatti, as well as the subtly designed Legendale hotel, which could have been the brain-child of Harrod’s owner Mohamed al-Fayed.

On both sides of the roped-off entry to the shop were standing some spectators from the neighboring hutong.  As it turns out, the lady in red crocs worked as a seamstress until retiring in her forties.  She doesn’t expect to ever enter the Burberry shop, despite its proximity to her home, but maybe she could get a helping with alterations?  I wonder what she thinks of the Legendale.

From Anqing in Anhui province, He Lulu (23) is now at the Communication University of China, studying to be a TV host.  Despite all of the Western cartoon characters she is wearing, her favorite of all time is Hello Kitty.  She does dress this way every day.  Apparently no one at her University thinks it odd.

Some will accusing me of photographing everything strange I see and neglecting pedestrians who exhibit true good taste.  Others will point out that there are whole tracts of Tokyo in which those who don’t mix hot pink with yellow and the Pink Panther with Sponge Bob are treated as lepers.  The goal of Stylites remains to catalogue, and ideally profile, the interesting characters stalking the streets of Beijing at this particular juncture in history.

It’s not the Star or David because the line is double.  Still, it is hard not to think they are implying that Jews are more creative.  I find it odd that there is a symbol for creativity and even odder that someone would get a tattoo of it.

Outside of the Beijing Center for the Arts in Qianmen’s Legation Quarter (read more at the IHT), I met Lu Wei (陆薇）, the “Responsible Editor” at Art Value, a new art magazine established in cooperation with the Art Research Analysis Center of Central Academy of Fine Art.  We had both just seen the opening of avant-garde artist Gu Dexin works that included a three story high transparent pillar filled with thousands of pig hearts, which, incidentally, had leaked small amounts of blood on the basement of the gallery.

So what is the value of Chinese art these days?  Brian Wallace of Red Gate Gallery tells NPR that values have dropped by over fifty percent, on average.  It could be a great time to stock up.  Chinese art might be going back to being for its own sake.

The timing of China Fashion Week was a subject of some debate among my contacts.  According to China Apparel Net, it will start，here in Beijing, on March 24.  China fashion week has been going for eleven years.

H&M will open one shop this Spring (at Joy City in Xidan) and one this fall.  Outside of Beijing, H&M will open three shops in China in 2009 for a total of five new shops this year.  Unlike Zara, H&M is staying out of India for the time being.

Mattel opened its House of Barbie Mattel in Shanghai and is looking to the China market to help it recover from a 21% plunge in sales as a result of the slowdown.

The China Post tells us the total population of the municipality of Beijing, including legal and illegal migrant workers, is 17 million, a figure cited by most others.  The Embassy of the PRC in the USA frightens us a bit more with 20 million.  Many of my acquaintances, aiming to drive the annoying foreigner from these teeming shores, claim 25 or even 30 million.  When talking to friends back home, I round up to a neat 100 million.  Any fewer would be a let down.  This is China.

And yet, I have almost never in recent memory walked down Nanluoguxiang without encountering at least three people I know.  In evenings, when I don’t really photograph, the number is even higher.  At times, it approaches 100 million.  In Sanlitun, it is also common for me to run into people I know, though there I often pretend I am someone different.  Granted, in the other million hectares of this miasma of concrete devouring the North China plain at light speed, it would be almost shocking to see a familiar face.

I literally always run into photographer Xiao Yang. Though I do like him, our meetings have not been intentional after the first one.  Xiao Yang was on his way back from photographing the famous British-born art collector and critic, Karen Smith, who resides and houses her myriad works of avant-garde modern Chinese art in a courtyard near Jingshan.

Rico and Erica have both read at least a couple works of Kafka, in translation, but Rico says she prefers Milan Kundera. These two Czechs came up because Rico said she studies finance but wishes she could focus on literature. The Kafka should still come in handy once she enters a cubicle.  Please note that I have a gnawing feeling that there is a debate somewhere on whether Kafka can be considered Czech. Or maybe this isn’t even debated; he was a Jew from Prague who wrote in German.

He shows how to wear those eye-grabbing streetwear pieces.  Also a lover of hip-hop music, this fellow must be one of those fans that actually understands the culture behind it, mainly because his pants aren’t too baggy or worn below his thighs.  He shops at Bustout, profiled below, the newest and largest streetwear shop in Beijing.