A new exhibition at M+ Museum pays tribute to the “Godmother of Fashion”, who defined one of the biggest post-Cultural Revolution shifts in mainland China.
After years of aspirational and pseudo-intellectual misuse, the word “luminary” has lost its lustre. Yet all that it stands for continues to live on through the lives of a handful of brave pioneers who provoke, inspire and lead.
One such figure, Song Huai Kuei – a woman who almost single-handedly ushered in a new era of fashion and perceptions of femininity to the mainland in the 1980s – is currently honoured with an ambitious exhibition at the M+ museum, Madame Song: Pioneering Art and Fashion in China. It features more than 320 objects – archival couture pieces, photographs, artworks and video materials – tracing more than three decades of Song’s ever-present cultural influence and, with it, the evolution of popular notions of fashion, art and culture in China.
“Madame Song is such an interesting lens to look at the transformation of visual culture of the ’80s and ’90s,” says associate curator of design and architecture at M+, Tanja Cunz. “We received a donation by the family
in 2013, containing roughly 6,000 items of archival photos, albums and drawings. And then also 125 garments mostly designed by Pierre Cardin.”
The life story of the pioneer was as extraordinary as Madame Song might suggest. In 1954, at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Song met the Bulgarian fibre artist Maryn Varbanov, who, at the time, was one of the first exchange students in the People’s Republic of China. Soon, they managed to obtain a marriage licence, which marked the first instance of a Chinese citizen marrying a foreigner in the newly established country. In 1958, they moved to Sofia, Bulgaria, where they worked as artists.
Having emigrated during the heat of the Cold War, it wasn’t easy for Song to go back to China for the next 16 years – she missed her culture immensely. “She was one of the 2.5 Asian women in Sofia,” the artist’s daughter, Boryana Varbanov, says playfully. That’s why, says Cunz, “when she was in Europe, she dressed in traditional Chinese clothing, expressing her cultural roots,” and hosted extravagant costume parties.
Despite – or perhaps because of – her desperation to return to China, this heiress to the Enlightenment embarked on her quest to modernise the way women dressed in her home country through her connection with the French couturier Pierre Cardin, whom she met through her husband in 1979. “Pierre Cardin came on the last day of my father’s exhibition in Paris,” says Varbanov, “and he immediately wrapped up and bought the whole exhibition.” The artist’s installations then served as a mise-en-scène for the designer’s fashion show at his newly opened boutique on the corner of 57th Street and Fifth Avenue in New York.
As Cardin had previously attempted to expand to China, but couldn’t present his pieces beyond a restricted catwalk show in Beijing in March 1979, imagine how intrigued he was by Song’s proposal to help him achieve his long-standing goal. And just like that, in 1981 Song was able to return to China, where she helped make Cardin’s first public show in the country happen, as well as finding and training 20 male and female models. “There were government officials present, of course,” says Cunz, “so they needed to have one foreign model, who could present the outfits that weren’t deemed dignified for Chinese women.”
The idea of using a female body to sell clothes was unheard of in China at the time. Yet armed with ideas she’d learned during her time in Europe, Song began scouting young women and teaching them how to pose and walk. The Fashionista section at Madame Song reflects this career-defining passion of hers most authentically through, in part, a series of images that trace the evolution of Chinese magazine covers through the decades.
By now Cardin’s official ambassador, Song was regularly staging fashion shows and training models. “In China, she presented herself as a modern, cosmopolitan woman, often wearing couture pieces,” says Dr Wu Mo, the De Ying associate curator of visual art at M+. “She articulated femininity – something that had been completely abandoned during the Cultural Revolution – by showcasing a different way of dressing,”
Cunz adds. Soon enough, government officials and the textile industry saw the potential fashion could bring and began introducing fashion degrees to train future designers and encourage them to create clothes that people would wear on the streets. “The government also launched national fashion trends,” says Cunz. “There was a whole renewal plan. Song’s influence here was more indirect.”
Of course, Cardin’s tianxia triumph by the way of Song coincided with the Chinese Communist Party’s interest in fostering light industries, “revitalising the economy, bringing foreign companies and creating joint ventures”, says Cunz. And, one such venture, which Song played a part in establishing was the first overseas outlet of France’s Maxim’s de Paris in Beijing, not merely a fine restaurant but a meeting place for international visitors and the city’s most influential figures. “Everybody wanted to go there,” Varbanov recalls. “Politicians, actors, dancers – and then, among all those people of course, there was Alain Delon, who’s practically a god to Chinese people, and the Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev.” By the mid-’80s Song hadbecome the hostess to Beijing’s elite, earning the title “Godmother of Fashion” that reflected, among other things, the frequency with which she judged modelling competitions.
The pieces from Song’s archives on show offer a mere glimpse into the luminary’s fascinating psyche. There’s a backless evening gown, for example, designed by Cardin sometime between 1980 and 1987, which was featured in Jean-Paul Pietrus’s 2010 short film Beijing Love. Also displayed in Fashionista is the iconoclastic “fully round dress” that “connects to what Cardin did in the 1960s during the space age”, says Cunz. “In the second room of the Who is Madame Song section, we see her favourite red-and-black blouse with abstract leaf pattern, which she always wore with a black pencil skirt and a waist belt – we have so many images of her wearing it.”
The Cultural Ambassador section is dedicated to the international fashion designers Song was acquainted with and key figures of contemporary Chinese fashion design. A piece by Gianfranco Ferré during his tenure at Christian Dior “mingles” with an ensemble from Saint Laurent’s famed Les Chinoises collection, as the gold-and-red Guo Pei dress from Legends of the Dragon holds court together with a magnificent gown from John Galliano’s days at Dior.
It’s worth noting that, alongside a “westernising” trend in the ’80s and ’90s, there was also an urge by Chinese people to rediscover their heritage, something not entirely popular with officialdom during the Cultural Revolution. So Song established Five Dynasties, a world-touring fashion show portraying the evolution of clothing from the Tang to the Qing dynasties, which included performance-art elements such as Shaolin Kung Fu, ballet and modern dance. “It wasn’t in a nationalistic way at all,” says Cunz. “It was based on reconnecting with what was around her.”
We often describe people who find themselves in the right place at the right time as stars. Although Song’s fashion activism coincided with a moment of drastic societal changes, the ripples from her influence still echo across China’s cultural landscape. All hail the Godmother.