'Amazon Coat' Hits Jackpot in U.S.

Arielle Noa Charnas/Instagram

It never entered Chiu's mind that his Orolay puffer jacket became a huge hit, celebrated as "Amazon Coat" in the U.S. And held up as a budding rival to premium brand Canada Goose.

Using duck down sourced from China’s Hebei and Anhui provinces, the polyester coats are priced between $80 and $139. By contrast, Canada Goose jackets start from about $575 in the United States. 


He estimates his firm made $5 million in sales last month and expects to bring in $30-$40 million this year. U.S. sales - almost all of which are sold through Amazon.com Inc - account for 70 percent of total revenue.

Orolay’s success is, however, not just a tale of competitive pricing and a design that found favor with U.S. consumers. Read More at Yahoo! and People.
 

"The Wandering Earth" Hit Chinese Movie Theater

Last year, Chinese cinemas took in Rmb5.8 billion ($913 million) in ticket sales during the first seven days of the Chinese New Year holiday – the most ever in a single week.

Comedies are traditionally the biggest crowd-pleasers during the holiday, but sci-fi could secure a greater share of ticket sales this time round. That’s because this Chinese New Year week sees two sci-fi blockbusters hitting the big screen. Admittedly, one is a sci-fi comedy – filmmaker Ning Hao’s Crazy Aliens, starring actor Huang Bo. The other is The Wandering Earth, which many in the foreign press have hailed as the first proper sci-fi film made in China.
Both movies are adapted from stories by Liu Cixin, the first author from Asia to win best novel at the Hugo sci-fi and fantasy literary awards.

Information Times felt the need to clarify the claims of a ’first’, however. “The Wandering Earth is definitely not the first sci-fi movie China has ever made, but it is the first sci-fi film that’s garnered so much attention in China.”

Read more >>

Happy Chinese New Year!

Hi friends! It's been a long time not update my tea house. Many things happened and have tried something new. And felt lost somewhere...And one day when I walked around our local bookstore and grabbed a book and turned to one page, on which there is a quote from Virginia Woolf, saying: “If you are losing your leisure, look out! -- It may be you are losing your soul.” That reminds me to come back and continue my journey,my passion about writing and sharing...Here I am, hello 😀! Happy Chinese New Year! Wish you have a peaceful, meaningful, and healthy 2019! Cheers!

Exhibition on China and Fashion Attract 0.7 Millions

“中国：镜花水月"Damon Winter/The New York Times

A dress by Guo Pei at the “China: Through the Looking Glass” exhibit.

The talk of Wall Street over the last week may have been Shanghai’s plunging stock market, but many blocks farther uptown, where commuter traffic gives way to verdant sidewalks, a different set of numbers related to China was making news. As it entered its final week, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s spring Costume Institute show, “China: Through the Looking Glass,” was attaining blockbuster status.

As of last Friday morning, 735,000 people had attended the show, with a week to go before its close on Sept. 7, including a final Friday and Saturday with viewing hours extended until midnight. That has already made it the most-visited Costume Institute show in the museum’s history, displacing “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” which pulled in 661,509 attendees, as well as elevating it to No. 7 — and climbing — on the museum’s top-10 most popular list, on a par with other 700,000-plus-visitor shows such as the “Mona Lisa” (1963), “Origins of Impressionism” (1995) and “Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art” (2010).

Andrew Bolton, curator at the Costume Institute and the man behind the show, said there have been more positive responses left in the visitor’s comment box than ever before. (“Usually people use it as an opportunity to vent displeasure,” he said. “Often at the lighting, or the signage.”)

By any objective measure, this will be the most successful fashion show the Met has ever had. The question is: Why?

“Honestly, it totally surprised me,” Mr. Bolton said. “I was prepared for it to be polarizing. We were predicting around 500,000 visitors. I never expected this level of response. ”

“No one expected it would surpass McQueen,” said Maxwell K. Hearn, the Douglas Dillon chairman of the department of Asian art, and Mr. Bolton’s collaborator on the exhibition, which is in the Asian art galleries on the second floor, some Egyptian galleries on the first floor and the Anna Wintour Costume Center on ground level.

A visitor photographs a Dior dress by John Galliano at the Met exhibition.
/Damon Winter/The New York Times

A visitor photographs a Dior dress by John Galliano at the Met exhibition.

I didn’t expect it, either. Not because I didn’t like the show (it’s visually engrossing in its mix of luxury, whimsy and point) but because it doesn’t have the single iconic hook that can transform a purportedly high culture meditation into an extended pop culture moment.

After all, it isn’t, as Mr. Bolton said, immediately obvious from the name what the show is about. (Answer: the way a received fantasy version of China engages the imaginations of Western designers.) And the subject itself was ripe for criticism from those who thought the approach played to a now-discredited stereotype of the East. You can’t attribute it to the sheer size of the exhibition, the largest ever, or it’s length, because size does not equate to allure.

There wasn’t the sort of human gossip element that helped drive interest in the McQueen show, held a year after the designer’s suicide and days after Kate Middleton married Prince William in a dress by Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen.

There was, to be fair, lots of striking use of mixed media, which made it seem both very contemporary as well as historic. And it included film — Wong Kar-wai, who wrote and directed “In the Mood for Love,” was the exhibit’s art director, and clips from movies like “The Last Emperor” and “The World of Suzie Wong” abound — always a popular medium.

But Mr. Wong is an independent director as opposed to a household name, and when Baz Luhrmann, a much more recognizable Hollywood figure, was the creative consultant on an earlier Costume Institute show, 2012’s “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations,” it wasn’t nearly the same hot ticket.

When I first saw the show in May, I was struck by the facile nature of the fashion when juxtaposed against the antiquities. No matter the clothes’ beauty — I remember the runway impact of Tom Ford’s pagoda collection for Yves Saint Laurent and being amazed by the broken blue and white china shards of porcelain on an Alexander McQueen bodice — they pale when compared with the source of the inspiration, in part because the latter has a creative integrity the former only borrows. Often too literally. Please go to The New York Times read more about this story.

Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale

I just happened to read the book this week. I am impressed by Yang's power of telling a story using her graphic talent. 

When Belle Yang was forced to take refuge in her parents’ home after an abusive boyfriend began stalking her, her father entertained her with stories of old China. The history she’d ignored while growing up became a source of comfort and inspiration, and narrowed the gap separating her—an independent, Chinese-American woman—from her Old World Chinese parents.

In Forget Sorrow, Yang makes her debut into the graphic form with the story of her father’s family, reunited under the House of Yang in Manchuria during the Second World War and struggling—both together and individually—to weather poverty, famine, and, later, Communist oppression. The parallels between Belle Yang’s journey of self-discovery and the lives and choices of her grandfather, his brothers, and their father (the Patriarch) speak powerfully of the conflicts between generations—and of possibilities for reconciliation.

Forget Sorrow demonstrates the power of storytelling and remembrance, as Belle—in telling this story—finds the strength to honor both her father and herself.