How Chinese fashion films are integral to this US blogger’s annual festival

In 2016, the festival held a satellite event in Shanghai, where it screened at prestigious venues such as the West Bund Art Space, Shanghai Himalayas Museum and Power Station of Art.

This year, ASVOFF’s Chinese fashion film category was judged by Tasha Liu, founder of Labelhood, a platform for emerging fashion designers in China, and Lucia Liu, a stylist and creative director.

They gave the best film award to It is Not Spring Until All Flowers Blossom, directed by Curry Sicong Tian and featuring costumes and creative direction by fashion designer Ya Yi, full name Yayi Chen.

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The film commemorates a garment strike by predominantly Chinese women working in New York’s Chinatown in 1982.

The multidisciplinary project sits somewhere between a fashion showcase and film. It presents Ya Yi’s first fashion collection, brimming with knit jacquard fabrics, translucent lace, embroidered flower accessories and fringed garments, but is also an exercise in storytelling and dance. In total, more than 50 Asian and American creatives took part.

“The starting point was very personal,” says Ya Yi, who was born in Spain and grew up in Spain and China. “It’s inspired by the people I worked with every day in the industry, such as Chinese immigrants – just like me.”

Beijing-trained Tian was the first person she reached out to “because of her incredible eye, use of colours and her dramatic view on how to put a story together”.

The film pays homage to the Asian immigrant women working in the garment-making industry in the West.

“I have so much love and empathy for these women who are working so unseen and uncredited and yet they form so much of the fabric of this industry,” Ya Yi says.

Tian was attracted to the project by Ya Yi’s vision. “I was so struck by, and interested in, her unique and profound starting point, which I found so inspiring,” she says. “I’ve never seen such a sharp viewpoint before and I fell in love with her dedication. Ya Yi is the master.”

According to jury member Tasha Liu, who took on the role for a second year, Chinese fashion films signal that the “narrative of local Chinese design is strengthening” and that directors are “in line” with international production levels. Impressed with the winning film, she thinks Ya Yi is an artist with multiple strong suits.

“The film reflects her individualism, her growth and ideological transformation, from being born in Spain, a childhood in Shanghai, studying and working in New York, to focusing on affirmative action for Asian women immigrants,” she says.

The provocative piece also won the best styling award at 2023’s Fashion Film Festival Milano.

Elsewhere in ASVOFF’s China category, visionary young director Yining Zhou returned with a brave short film called In Perfect Skin, in which she aims to break the public taboo surrounding skin conditions and push for more open discussion of the topic.

“Body marks are physical museums that can be linked to a person’s sorrows and struggles,” Zhou says.

Pernet says the fashion films emerging from China in this year’s ASVOFF were characterised by “their richness” and “lack of adherence to any single trend”.

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They range from “deeply narrative to poetic expression”. While some take a more futuristic approach, the common thread is their “originality and refusal to be bound by a single concept”.

Almost half of the Chinese films on show were digital works. London-based Shan Hua’s film I Can Hear You, in an Unfamiliar Way was one.

“I feel that digital fashion film brings a new dimension to fashion film,” says Hua, whose work explores the symbiotic relationship between natural forms and humans.

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A graduate of the Royal College of Art, Hua was recently shortlisted for 2023’s Vogue China Fashion Fund in the Virtual Frontier category.

In ASVOFF’s official competition, highlights included American model and activist Bethann Hardison’s documentary Invisible Beauty, which details her fight for diversity in modelling and which premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival; and Junk, which documents the devastating impact of fashion on the planet.

Day three featured a creative chat with singer, Balenciaga muse and jury president Jay-Jay Johanson.

Pernet is elusive when asked about her upcoming China plans, but says she is already looking ahead to next year’s event, for which entries are now open online.