Ming Ma (Q3391)
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Ming Ma is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Ming Ma |
Ming Ma is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
The starting point for Ming Ma’s spring lineup was a book of drawings by the prolific British Victorian botanist and explorer Marianne North. It wasn’t only North’s work documenting plants and flowers that had Ma’s creativity in full bloom this season, but her spirit of adventure. From Jamaica and Brazil to Syria and along the Nile, North traveled extensively. Her work also extended past the scientific, it included the locations she would often visit.North makes the most fitting of muses for Ma. The designer has cultivated an impressive garland of floral references, each season finding a new way to deliver a fresh new bouquet. But Ma is also a travel fanatic, always introducing his collections with a sense of wanderlust, whether that be about where he envisioned himself going before designing or where he sees his clothes blossoming into life.“I wanted it to be a little bit sexier and more personal,” the designer said at his showroom, “also simply more mature.” This came through via his choice of fabrics: soft cottons, linens, and voiles. “We’ve used a lot of manmade fabrics before, but it felt right to use really natural fibers now,” he explained. North’s oil paintings translated directly into a repeat floral print used throughout the collection, but most captivating and fun were cutesy bead clusters that replicated the flowers she studied. Ma really found his groove this time around. This sense of play was balanced with the pragmatism of a great double-sided bomber and the funkiness of a lace zip-up hoodie and silk bloomers worn under tailored shorts or pencil skirts.He also starched some of his lace pieces to give them structure—while not the most comfortable to touch, they looked fantastic, particularly a slip and tailored blazer in which every single technical detail was out in the open to explore. There’s a collective anxiety at Shanghai Fashion Week due to dwindling crowds at shows and reduced foot traffic at the showrooms, and so “mature” is a word that has come up repeatedly this week. Ma’s take on maturity was neither boring nor stuffy. His compass is pointing in the right direction.
17 October 2024
Ming Ma is a Shanghai Fashion Week OG. His label, founded in 2018, weathered the repeated storms of the pandemic and returned to the runway for the fall 2023 shows—when SHFW celebrated its 20th anniversary with its first full season back post-Covid. Since then, he’s gone a little quiet, stepping away from the runway in favor of showing his collections during showroom appointments.The change has served him well. His fall collection in particular is a proper amalgamation of his romantic, playful sensibilities and the commercial pragmatism of a seasoned designer.“This season is about mixing inspiration from art and cultures,” said Ma, pointing at printouts of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s lush paintings and Ray Petri’s styling work for the Buffalo movement in the ’80s. He is adept at collaging and interpolating references and techniques, and his collections are often a living mood board of artistic footnotes. “I wanted to slightly shift [away] from what we did before; from all the full looks we do for the shows and do something [that’s] more about the existing item and about twisting it,” the designer added.Ma developed beautiful florals, some printed and others intricately ornamented with sequins and embroidery, to cut into relaxed slips and sophisticated gowns, which he shaped around a subtle wasp silhouette focused on the hips. He expanded his tailoring offer with a few great coats, and draped a deliciously puffy mini circle skirt, styled over tights, and often under smart sweaters and vests. The combination of these elements offered a playful, clever wardrobe, but Ma’s true revelation this season came from his Buffalo styling nods, which introduced a touch of androgyny to his world that gave new context and texture to his familiar classics.Who would have thought that a swan-printed t-shirt maxi dress or bubble skirts would look as good on men as they do on his regular cast of models, or that Ma could cut as great a black suit as he does a prim sheath? This is the kind of exploration that Ma should continue to welcome into his practice. The runway isn’t going anywhere.
3 April 2024
Ming Ma is a regular on the Shanghai runways, but not for spring. “I’ve been really feeling the exhaustion after many seasons of doing shows,” he said at a showroom appointment. The strain had been weighing on him, so this time around he found himself in search of lightness.“I was spending time at home and resting, and as I was listening to the music of Frank Liszt, I found that it gave me a feeling of profound tranquility,” said Ma. The Hungarian composer’sYears of Pilgrimagestruck a chord, and so the designer decided to go on a pilgrimage of his own, visiting France, Italy, and Japan. “Traveling can give freedom to the soul, and it gives you lightness,” he said. The resulting lineup is built around white fabrics and an amalgamation of various textures Ma picked up on his travels.Papery white poplin skirts and shirred summer dresses spoke directly to his search for stillness, though particularly impactful were his experiments with volume and silhouette. A pink gown with rounded godets cut in organza was special in its weightlessness; ditto his pretty handkerchief skirts, some with boning at the waist for a play on structure.On the fabrics front, Ma developed a bouquet of curiosities that added some fullness to his collection. Two standouts included a mesh embroidered with light blue classical motifs and a floral devoré that had yellow flowers printed in place.
16 October 2023
Ming Ma is filled with a feeling of awakening. After three sad years of lockdown, Shanghai has reopened, and the designer was able to return to the runway. Even over Zoom one could sense his energy, so it’s fitting that he titled his collection Mad Dynamics. “Fashion is mad dynamics; we all stay up all night putting our enthusiasm and energy into it,” he mused.Ma embraces prettiness and that’s the first impression this lineup communicates, but there’s more to it than that. This season, he was interested in surprising contradictions, both in terms of presentation (his confectionery designs were shown in a concrete space) and in the sporty touches he added to festive dressing.As simple as the opening look is, it has a couture pedigree of sorts. Ma was looking at ’80s tailoring, the flourishes of Charles James (who inspired the capelet’s sleeves), and Cristóbal Balenciaga’s shapes and bows. He said he was drawn to the way James and Balenciaga “manipulated volumes” that puffed or collapsed, and he chose materials like a papery silk cotton that emphasized those polar ways of being.In Ma’s collection we see the collective fashion mind at play: note the trains and tweed cardigan jackets that have been so popular this season. More interesting still iss how Ma’s fascination with the golden era of couture lines up with that of other contemporary designers. When asked what he thinks is driving this nostalgia, Ma had this to say: “I think because the clothes [from that time] are really nicely constructed and built. Now things are getting more flat—Internet, blogging, Instagram—so when looking at [past fashions], you [see the] 3D aspect. I think people want to bring back some essence of fashion, because fashion itself is clothes-making, it’s construction and it’s tailoring; it’s really about techniques. In my point of view, I think it’s about the skills and [translating those] to have a modern twist [that relates to] what people are wearing now.”One of the main narratives of the fall season has been the return to basics—either in the sense of casually elegant and functional clothes, or to the very building blocks of the profession. There’s nothing “basic” here, though; Ma employs time-tested skills to further his take on modern romance.
30 March 2023
Ming Ma’s pretty spring collection was kickstarted by a documentary on the highly influential Ballets Russses, the troupe with which Vaslav Nijinsky danced and from which Paul Poiret developed a dramatic palette that broke with the conventions of the 1910s. Ma’s idea was to bring some of those visual references into his own world, and use them in a way that would offer women strength and self-confidence as well as the romance the brand is known for.It’s not nostalgia that drives this CSM-grad to look to the past—the collection featured many corsets and crinolines—but a desire to modernize and make relevant for today existing elements of women’s dress. “Today, when [there’s so much] sportswear, high street, and street wear, we are trying to get them something more niche,” said the designer.Ma’s focus on dance and historical references is aligned with global trends that emerged during the spring season, but done in his own way. Mini pouf dresses had bra details that were sexier than sweet; though there was a generous dose of sweetness throughout, expressed through the use of lace and flowers. In some cases, Ma transformed silhouettes through his fabric choices. A white skirt with godets was unexpectedly made of white denim; a blue denim ensemble was prettified with floral appliques cut from an embroidered tulle the designer created with a mill in Italy. Ma played with this material’s sheerness by draping yards of it over a white crinoline in another look.If there’s a misstep here, it was in an overabundance of silhouettes, the addition of an empire dress and a halter A-line felt out of tempo with an otherwise well-edited and charming lineup.
26 October 2022
Ming Ma’s mood board, which he shared over Zoom, ping-ponged among varied references—New Romantics! Baroque! Tartans! Poufs!—that aren’t all that evident in his spring collection. For the most part the designer used his tear sheets as a jumping off point. The specifics aren’t what’s important here, what is is that Ma was drawn towards the 1980s, a turbulent, and analog, decade in which the designer sees parallels to today. “People were feeling quite depressed about the government at that time, and I think that is related to the present. We have COVID happening and we have war happening… I think we have lost something and we are in a waiting period.”Lockdowns in Shanghai meant that Ma, and many others, lost the opportunity to show on the runway this season. That’s a temporary inconvenience; more significant for many young talents like Ma, who are drawn to the more glamorous and dress-up aspects of fashion, is how to temper their work not only to the market, where idealism is replaced by the bottom line, but to customers who increasingly want, or need, clothes for more casual, and sometimes constricted, lifestyles.It’s easy to see how the individualistic and escapist antics of the New Romantics would appeal to Ma, who in his collection notes wrote about combining “the concept of self-liberation with the idea of a multicultural collage.” As someone who loves drape and color, the designer also found himself drawn to the 18th century (seemingly through the ’80s work of Christian Lacroix). A pink pouf skirt trimmed with black bows and paired with a digital-printed sequin top was a party in itself, as was a pink bow top paired with a slithery skirt like something from a Boldini portrait. Subtler volumes showed up in dresses that lacked the nerve and joie de vivre of the showpieces. The tailoring, which carried a whiff of Westwood about it, was another story. Shrunken jackets paired with long straight skirts had an unexpected dowdiness that’s just right.No matter how much we want COVID to disappear, it’s hanging on, and affecting our social interactions. Like many designers, Ma is trying to figure out how to translate the sparkle of his bold occasion looks into more everyday clothes. “I don’t want to be devoured by the market or want to compromise [to it],” he said, “but I think you have to sort of adapt to what’s happening now.” Yes and no.
Mirroring the world, the industry as a whole is out of balance, but recalibration won’t be achieved by reacting to what’s in front of us. We need to change from the ground up if we don’t want to be “waking up with the house on fire”—unless it’s to Culture Club’s 1984 album of that name.
27 April 2022
Ming Ma often refers to an “elegant tension” in his work. Couture volumes and romantic florals are his signatures, but the results never look as precious as that: They’re cut with asymmetrical hems, splashed with neons, or styled with heavy boots. Chalk it up to Ma’s global education and references: He’s based in Shanghai, studied in London with Louise Wilson at Central Saint Martins, and finds much of his inspiration in the past.He noted Cristóbal Balenciaga as an influence for spring 2022 and pointed out that luxury fashion didn’t really exist in China during his time; the small industry was still cloistered in Europe. In fact, it’s only been in the last decade that Shanghai has become a hub for emerging designers like Ma, and his business took off in 2020. The pandemic inspired local pride in Chinese designers, and with travel restrictions precluding shopping trips to Europe, shoppers’ money went to Ma and his peers.As a result, his spring 2022 collection was brimming with confidence. He’s pushing his techniques and construction, draping chintzy florals into bustiers with sweeping trains and slashing away-from-the-body gowns into tiny minis. Sequins, beading, and other hand embellishments are a new experiment for his team, but many of the fabrics are quite old: The floral silks and brocades—including the opening look, a painterly woven in soft shades of blue—were all sourced from deadstock supplies of Italian mills.Ma chose a historic home as his venue, not a major Shanghai Fashion Week location. He’s happy staying a little under the radar rather than growing too fast too soon. For now, his collection is only available in China—albeit in upwards of 100 stores—and he’s still carving out his niche. In a market of streetwear and ultra-experimental young labels, his elegant, bold yet unfussy dresses are outliers—and they’re exactly the sort of thing people want to wear to their post-pandemic events and parties. In the near future, it’s easy to picture Ma’s cool cocktail pieces and statement gowns making their way to New York, Europe, and beyond.
19 October 2021