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Vice Blog

FASHION ISSUE EXTRA - A CHINESE MAGAZINE THAT IS GOOD

While perusing incomprehensible and mostly very cheesy magazines at a coffee shop in Beijing I came upon a copy of Vision. I thought it must've been foreign because it didn't look as cheesy as the local publications. Even though it had stories about stuff like space travel and future cars mixed in with amazing fashion spreads, which was really edgy in 2005 (when I found it), it did turn out to be Chinese, which made it all the more unusually sophisticated and graphically adventurous. Eating a 50-cent bowl of noodles in a noisy and grimy food stall while slowly feeling the heat that rises when you want more more more of something made me feel like I was living a scene out of Bladerunner. I occasionally filched copies of the magazine from women's clothing stores to take home and study, an obsession that eventually built up to meeting Vision's fashion editor Maple Jiang.

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Vice: How long has Vision been around?

Maple Jiang: Since 2002 – six years. It was founded by the artist Chen Yifei. He was a painter and his paintings were quite famous, like traditional Chinese women using musical instruments, oil paintings. They are very, very expensive, and he was also a filmmaker. He passed away in 2005.

Is this a private company?

It's very complicated, I haven't even figured it out.

Where did Chen Yifei's vision of Vision come from him? He must have seen Western magazines?

Yes, he was known abroad and he traveled a lot. I'm sure he saw I-D, and The Fader, Dazed and Confused, and Purple.

What were you doing before you worked for Vision?

I was studying in England, and then when I came back I worked for a local magazine, quite a crap magazine, but it was good for the experience. I was the fashion editor for that magazine for one year, but it wasn't really my style, it was more Japanese style – how to match clothes. And I was working as a stylist as well, organizing shoots.

Wouldn't you say it's been a pretty massive transformation recently in that this society has gone from zero fashion 30 years ago when being fashionable was anti-revolutionary and fashion was discouraged and seen as bourgeoisie affection?

That was a long time ago.

 Well, not that long ago, 35 years is not a long time.

I wasn't born then.

It's interesting, when I bring up the Cultural Revolution the response is often, "That was a long time ago." So when you were a teenager you were really into fashion?

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Probably TV, like celebrities, and also there was a Japanese magazine called Ray, about matching clothes. It's very popular, even now, that many office ladies and young people always buy, and it shows how to dress up and what kind of a nice office is in fashion now, so I had that. But then when I got to Uni in Beijing I was buying old magazines like Cosmopolitan and Bazaar and maybe some local magazines. Also they had a library where you could see foreign magazines.

Who's your main competition?

It's quite hard to say. As for advertising, old magazines like Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Bazaar, they're all competition. But the content – they aren't competition. There are a few newer magazines coming that are trying to do similar things, but you can still see there are a lot of differences. There's one called New Vision.

That's weird. Sounds like a rip-off. Are the Hong Kong magazines very different? Because from outsider's perspective it seems like there's a big contrast between what comes out of Hong Kong and what comes from the Mainland.

I think mainly the magazines you can see here in this market from Hong Kong are more information, because we to accept that the fashion information in Hong Kong is a lot more than on the mainland. You can see more brands, and people there are more aware of fashion. For me, Hong Kong magazines are really young – young girls and young boys look at Hong Kong magazines so they can see different styles, like new trends, new fashions. I don't really see many Hong Kong magazines here, in Beijing.

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When you were younger did you look towards Hong Kong, for this kind of information, more than you do now? People love to shop there and the way they dress seems shockingly different, definitely more fashion-conscious than Beijing.

For me part of the disappointment was the fashion in Hong Kong.

What do you mean?

Really trendy people. But you know Beijing is a big city and there are lots of outsiders in there, like many people from the countryside, they want to stay, and they work hard to make their lives, but you can't expect them to have really high fashion sense.

So then who is the audience for Vision?

Mainly the creative people who work in the arts fields, in advertising companies, other magazines, and also white collar workers, they like the magazine, the images. This group isn't a stable audience, they don't buy every copy. The audience has a special character. Vision is kind of timeless, after one year you can still look at. Also it's very heavy, I've heard of people that bought the magazine for two years and crashed their bookshelves, so they stopped buying it. It's not like you can put it in a bag and carry it around, it's more for the living room.

 Ever think about expanding your audience outside these people?

We're trying. Of course we want more people to look at the magazine but we're quite happy about what we are doing, and we're just trying to improve. I think our readers are quite stable as a group, and it's steadily getting wider. But we're not mass scale.

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The normal city young woman, what is she interested in? And does that have anything to do with what's in Vision?

Maybe not.

 What do you think they like?

Cosmopolitan. But the good thing is that there are many young people who are more interested in the arts nowadays. So our magazine is getting popular with them and that's a good sign, that's our potential market.

Vision really stands apart and seems so much more cosmopolitan and smart, and I can't quite figure out why there's such a huge gap between this one magazine and everything else here.

There is one reason. I don't know if it's an advantage, or a shortage… I mean, a disadvantage, we are not as commercial as other magazines so our graphic designers have enough freedom to do the layouts – other magazines try to put as many information they can into one page – but our graphic designers are allowed to make it as beautiful as they want.

 The headlines are written in this strange English that's not correct but very evocative.

Really? Thanks. I'm always struggling with the titles because I'm not a native speaker. We have an English proofreader and he's always pissed-off with our titles because according to him they don't make sense at all.

On a totally random tangent, why are magazines at newsstands in China wrapped in plastic?

Plastic? Really?

Yes.

Um, I guess they want to keep it clean and they don't want people to always look at it and not buy it.

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What I mean is, abroad, at newsstands, magazines aren't wrapped in plastic and you can look at them.

I guess that's just a difference between the cultures. But you can't really control people, they read it and they might destroy the copy.

If you're a foreigner and you look at Chinese fashion magazines, it's very noticeable how many white people there are in them.

It's about their faces. They look better.

Why do Caucasian faces look better than Chinese faces?

The structure is different, it's very different, and for Chinese people they think that looks beautiful because of the difference.

So difference equates beauty?

You can't really say that, buy, yeah, maybe with the models. It's kind of an exotic thing. Like for Western people they think Chinese girls look different and beautiful and special.

Why do so many people have a thing against Gong Li?

Gong Li?

Why does everybody hate her? They're always saying how ugly she is. There seems to be an obsession with putting her down.

Some people, maybe. They don't really hate her. Different cultures have different…well when you get that famous you are an easy target.

But what is it about her face that's so problematic?

It's really plain. I don't know, maybe for foreigners they think she's really nice and pretty and typical Chinese-looking beauty, something like that, but we see Asian faces all the time.

OK, if she represents what isn't desirable, who is?

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Zhou Xun, she's quite a small girl, who is in the film _Banquet. She's been on the cover of _Vogue_ and she's kind of a fashion icon. She looks different. She looks smart._

Do you have any comment on the extreme level of androgyny and the ultra-femininity of many younger men in cities here?

I don't think that's only in China, that's international. I mean, the gay culture is becoming popular, especially menswear, it's gay fashion, and that affects young people who want to be fashionable – they copy that.

It's somewhat unnerving. So much primping…

Maybe also because the women are becoming stronger.

You're in the land of knockoffs. How do you differentiate between the real thing and the fake?

You buy the real thing in the boutique.

Who are some young Chinese designers that you like?

There's a friend of mine, Xander Zhou--he actually studied in the Netherlands. His style is really international, kind of Scandinavian. His stuff is really good, and I think he's gong to be really big. We went to Sweden together last month and did a show there, brought his new collection, and everybody was asking about where to buy his clothes. So I think that's the direction of young designers in China. They're not focusing on the just the local elements, they're going international.

Is there anything intrinsically Chinese about these young designers' clothes?

Some of the designers still use Chinese elements and make it a modern look, which is good, but not many of them are good. We don't want to see Chinese designs, always very Chinese, just putting it on, that's too – just the surface. But now the young designers know how to remake it, reinterpret it, which is good. Because you can still have the style, the look that gives you the feeling of being Chinese, but you can't really say it's specifically Chinese.

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What is the role of fashion in China?

I don't think there is one.

That's a kind of dark thing for someone in the fashion business to say. Is fashion important?

Yes, it's becoming quite important, especially economically. You can notice it in the big cites, there are many more fashion brands, people talking about fashion. But for smaller towns and the countryside it isn't an issue at all.

There's something very unfashionable about Beijing, which is kind of refreshing.

Yeah, you can't say Beijing is very fashionable.

How do you distinguish yourself in a country of 1.3 billion people with the clothes that you wear?

Me, I'm just wearing whatever I want, I don't really follow fashion trends. I trust my sense, and I think I have a good eye and I know what I like.

But for younger people, how do you stand out?

To be honest, you really can't.

JOCKO WEYLAND