The story of Liwen Liang’s brand began approximately 1,000 years ago. The Chinese designer’s creations are a dazzling mix of ceramic craftsmanship and material innovation, occupying a space at the forefront of fashion’s future—but in explaining the current state of his work, we’re already getting ahead of ourselves. To trace Liang’s story to its true origin, you must look back about a millennium, to a Chinese town by the banks of the Chang River, on the cusp of becoming the world’s first global city.
Liang’s primary vocation is ceramic craftsmanship, and the story of his craft begins during the Song Dynasty, in a town then known as Changnanzhen. A natural abundance of high-quality clay dust and Chinese stone meant that a pottery trade began to flourish in the city, with the ceramic wares it produced reaching as far as Europe and the Americas. So renowned was Changnanzhen’s ceramic prowess that the Emperor during the Jingde reign eventually renamed the town Jingdezhen after himself, cementing its place in culture and history.
The city had been known as Jingdezhen for hundreds of years by the time Liwen Liang was growing up there, and it had held the mantle of the porcelain capital of the world for even longer. The reason the city’s storied past is so central to Liang’s own narrative is that, quite unlike anywhere else, Jingdezhen’s history is an integral part of its present. The city’s ceramic culture is vibrant and thriving, and Liang grew up immersed in it. He hails from a family with three generations of ceramic experience. “All of my friends and family are in this industry,” Liang shares. “History plays a very, very important role in our lives.”
His education in ceramic craftsmanship was not formal, but it was all-encompassing. Liang grew up amongst the mud and scattered shards of his family’s ceramic studio, playing and experimenting with clay from as young as four years old. The 32-year-old designer is now based in London; his designs have been worn by celebrities, featured on magazine covers, and selected for Milan and London Fashion Weeks. As we talk over a video call, though, he speaks with warmth about his adolescence in Jingdezhen. “It’s a very chill life in my hometown,” he says. “We don’t have pressure. We have time.”
It could be due to the inherent fragility of porcelain, or perhaps the weight of its history, but one imagines a town devoted to ceramic craftsmanship as something remote and still—a relic covered in clay dust. But Liang’s words paint an unexpected picture of a dynamic community, pushing boundaries even in pursuit of a 1,000-year-old craft. “The living standard is very low. You don’t need to make money to maintain your life, so everyone is always experimenting,” he explains. The younger generation of Jingdezhen is especially interested in pushing the craft to new heights, with Liang’s friend group all experimenting with different forms of ceramics, some incorporating glass and metal into their work.
Even in this regard, Liang stands out. He is the first in his family to bridge the gap between ceramics and fashion. Motivated by his love of fashion and admiration of designers like Giorgio Armani and Thierry Mugler, he applied for a master’s degree in womenswear design at the London College of Fashion in 2019. It was then that he first began to develop his distinctive porcelain fabric.
Here, the designer’s narrative breaks from Jingdezhen’s to become something definitively his own, and it’s a story of scientific innovation as much as it is of heritage. Liang’s method involves firing millimetre-thin pieces of ceramic, which are then bonded with fabrics and sewn into dresses and skirts. He began with ceramic shards no wider than a sheet of paper, but soon found it impossible to keep the 0.1 millimetre-thick pieces intact through the high-temperature firing process. After increasing the ceramic’s thickness to 0.3 millimetres, Liang’s next obstacle was bonding them with fabric. He began by glueing the pieces one by one onto clothing, which was an infuriatingly finicky process. “Each piece took me around 1,000 hours to make,” he recalls. “I was thinking, oh my gosh, I could never do this. My eyes are going to go blind.”
Eventually, he landed on the process which he uses to this day, and for which he has applied for a national-level patent in China. While studying in London, Liang experimented with different ratios of glue and clay, and crucially, also decided to standardise the ceramic pieces. By turning them from irregular shapes into identical squares, every six centimetres in width, he was able to create entire sheets of his ceramic fabric at once. The final product is a deceptively light and flexible ceramic material, and Liang uses it to craft sculptural and striking pieces that he describes as “wearable art”. From start to finish, this entire experimentation and design process took three years.
When asked how he hopes his designs make an impact, Liang answers with a refreshing humility. “To be honest, I’m not that ambitious; I don’t want to try to change the fashion world,” he confesses. “I just want to introduce myself and say: here’s something new, if you like it, you can try it out.” Despite this modesty, Liang’s thirst for reinvention and innovation has not been sated. He continues to push the boundaries of even his own designs: as part of an incubation programme under the Richemont group, he recently developed a leather and porcelain textile which he plans to use to create ceramic bags and accessories. He also wants to expand into interior design, aiming to create porcelain drapes and folding screens for luxury hotels.
“Culture needs to be developed, and techniques need to be developed,” he says. “You can’t keep doing the same things with no change; you need innovation. It’s not only me that feels this way, but our whole generation also wants to make something new, and not just stick to traditional skills.” It’s a refreshing view on culture and heritage. Depictions of Eastern philosophy in the fashion world tend to skew mystical, painting it as a land of old, shrouded in mystery—but Liang’s take is altogether more practical. It posits that culture, even at its most fragile and endangered, is never above being tinkered with. Take it off the shelf. Smash it into a million pieces. Stitch it back together again, painstakingly-what you end up with will be greater than the sum of its parts.
Ahead, Liang tells us more about his unusual creative journey and what’s next for his brand.
GRAZIA (G): Your work has attracted celebrity clients, magazine covers, and a place at London and Milan Fashion Weeks—what does recognition from within the industry mean to you?
Liwen Liang (LL): I’m very happy to be featured on so many magazines. As you know, it’s very difficult to make money through fashion design, so this life is very tough. Especially living in London, which is a very expensive city. I’m doing this out of passion, so encouragement from people in the industry means a lot. I have had singers that I like wear my pieces; young designer brands which I like have texted me to say “good job”, or have reposted my work. This makes me very happy. Those are great moments, because they’re all about connection and getting recognition from the industry.
G: Your ceramic textile was developed during your master’s at the London College of Fashion—what was that process like?
LL: London is much more complicated than Jingdezhen. When I first tried making my ceramic textile in London, I found the clay proportion to be totally different. When I fired the porcelain, it just wouldn’t lay flat, even though the entire process was the same. I didn’t know why, and this was during Covid, so I had to video chat with my family. I said to them, if you don’t help me with this, I cannot graduate! They spent two weeks trying to teach me how to make the textile. What motivated me was the thought of my graduation show during London Fashion Week, and eventually, in 2023, I made and presented my first completely porcelain dress during the show.
G: Beyond the fabric itself, how did you define what a Liwen Liang piece looks like?
LL: When I was studying for my master’s degree, my tutor was Nabil El-Nayal, who was twice a finalist for the LVMH Prize, in 2015 and 2017. He asked me, apart from your fabric, what makes you stand out in terms of colour, style, or archetype? This drove me crazy, because in the beginning, I only did ceramic fabrics. I then started thinking about the kind of archetypes I wanted to focus on, and I decided it would be ceramic dresses. I now do things like ceramic bras and tops, but in the beginning, I wanted to be famous for dresses. [I also asked myself], are you going to be a print designer or are you going to be famous for colour? For example, at Alexander McQueen, it has red, or at Burberry, it has blue. So I thought, okay, for my brand, I want to explore Chinese tradition, so I will make more prints. Anything related to ceramic culture can become a print—my brand’s signature is not only traditional prints, we also have more contemporary ones using a glaze effect. So these were the two defining things for me: the ceramic dress archetype and prints.
G: Your graduation collection drew heavily on the world of the ceramic craftsman—the denim, the clay, the studio environment. Is that still present in your work?
LL: For my first collection, I actually really wanted to explore sexuality and femininity, but my tutor said, no, you’re a ceramic craftsman. You should focus on something that ceramic craftsmen wear. So you can see that influence in my graduation collection. [It incorporates] the denim that ceramic craftsmen always wear, broken pieces of ceramics, and also the muddy environment of the ceramic studio. I used a vinyl print to create a muddy, dirty kind of look. That was at the beginning, though, and I explore femininity more now in my work. In my next collection, you’ll see more lace, with softer fabrics.
G: The new collection sounds like a departure—what drew you towards femininity and anger as its twin preoccupations?
LL: This collection is about exploring femininity as well as anger. As I said, in London, it’s a very tough life. I didn’t always find it so tough, because the first few years I was living here, I was discovering the city, and everything felt so fun. Last winter, though, was horrible—it rained all day for at least two and a half months, without any sunny days. I was so depressed; I didn’t feel happy. So with this collection, I wanted to express my anger at how tough this life is, not just because of the weather, but also as a young independent designer in this industry. I also wanted to express my personal life—as you can see, I’m more of a feminine boy, so I wanted to explore my femininity, my story, and my moods.
G: How does the making of it reflect those themes?
LL: Lots of ceramics. Basically, every piece is a ceramic dress. This time I combined it with lace—it’s very interesting, because lace is a very soft material, and then I put a transparent plastic under the lace to give it a glossy effect. Everything is hand-stitched, because you cannot sew the material on a machine. You have to draw every hole, one centimetre by one centimetre, and then I use plastic and ceramic to give it volume and make it more sculptural. That was a very fun experience.
G: Each piece takes at least a month to complete. With 13 in the collection, how do you sustain that?
LL: It takes so long to make. It took me two days just to stitch the plastic and lace, then the ceramic firing took two weeks, and finally, stitching the ceramic and lace together took one week. It took at least a month to make one dress, and I have 13 pieces in the collection.
G: Imperfection seems central to your philosophy—where does that come from?
LL: I think imperfection is part of our philosophy [in China]. I really like the Oriental philosophy of imperfection, because imperfection gives people authenticity, and this authenticity gives people power. I’m drawn to real things that empower people, and that’s why I believe so strongly in imperfection. No one is perfect—we have to accept this and be brave. I would like my clients to be brave and accept imperfection.
G: China has embraced your work in a striking way. What does that reception tell you about where ceramics sits in the culture right now?
LL: I get a lot of support in China. [What I’m doing] is storytelling, and in China, ceramics are one of the most important and supported parts of our culture. My work is also a very new thing for them, and they have never heard of anything like it before. Celebrities would like to try my designs, I was featured in a documentary as well as magazines. I was even on a reality show last year. The government also paid for me to have my first fashion show in my hometown. I was incredibly grateful.
G: What’s next for the Liwen Liang brand?
LL: Once I secure a patent, I would like to start producing more, [especially] because I can hire people now. I would also like to do more evening wear and evening accessories. What I make is a very futuristic Oriental product, and I want to use the uniqueness of the material to make evening wear and occasion wear that really stands out. I want to design for clients who are seeking something really special for an occasion, be it for an event or a gallery launch.
For next season, I will also be developing a lot more products, not just clothes. I want to expand into interior design—I can create products like porcelain drapes for hotels, or porcelain versions of traditional Chinese folding screens. I’ve already started speaking with a folding screen company, so I have a plan in place.
This story first appeared on GRAZIA Singapore.
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