The China National Silk Museum in Hangzhou will hold an exhibition on January 23 entitled Splendid Decade: Fashion China 2011-2020, featuring hundreds of China’s contemporary fashion garment masterpieces, sponsored by the China Fashion Association, Fabrics China and organized by the China National Silk Museum.
The exhibition – held annually since 2011 – showcases representative Chinese fashion designs selected throughout the year. To celebrate its tenth anniversary, this year’s Splendid Decade: Fashion China 2011-2020 will present a collection consisting of the most iconic examples of haute couture and avant-garde ready-to-wear pieces drawn from over the last decade. Creations on display during the exhibition will be from one hundred of China’s top fashion designers including Wu Haiyan, Mark Cheung, Guo Pei, Lawrence Xu and Xiong Ying as well as innovative fabric products provided by 40 domestic textile enterprises.
Dr. Zhao Feng, Director of China National Silk Museum, believes fashion museums are a significant part of the whole fashion ecosystem. He noted, “A museum should be regarded as a hall for clothing culture as well as a classroom for fashion design education. Classic items of clothing, which indicate special characteristics of periods of time and technology, are ideal objects for museum collection.”
The displays will give visitors an instant insight into the creativity of the contemporary Chinese fashion industry. Expressions from traditional cultural resources to trending fashion concepts such as digitalization and sustainability can be found in the designs. According to Dr. Zhao, the National Silk Museum has accumulated a massive collection of almost 70,000 clothing and fashion objects from all over the world, which grants it the honor of being China’s largest textile and clothing themed museum, putting it deservedly among the heavyweights of the silk textiles and clothing industry.
Since 2011, implementing the idea of “collecting today for tomorrow,” the National Silk Museum has been putting great efforts into improving its collection by carefully screening outstanding designs and products from China’s renowned fashion events every year with the purpose of recording the nation’s development process in the field of textile and fashion.
Aside from the laborious work of selecting, collecting, organizing and researching, the museum organizes annual exhibitions, fashion forums and shows themed around prevailing fashion trends. The museum also brings famous apparel collections from overseas museums every year to introduce the diversity of aesthetic and cultural traditions. Latest examples include: Dior by Dior: 1947-1957, introduced from the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada in 2019, and Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion, introduced from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2020.
Furthermore, China National Silk Museum is committed to promoting Chinese clothing culture overseas by organizing annual international exhibitions for qipao/cheongsam designs since 2018, over100 designers from 24 countries/regions have been invited. The museum hopes to become a hall of inspiration for fashion designers, an academy for fashion lovers, and a fashion museum with increased international influence.
