Have you ever thought of wearing a dress made like a porcelain vase?
Liwen Liang, the designer from Jingdezhen, China, came up with this. He turns ceramics into thin sheets that he then sews like a second skin.
by Sara Sozzani Maino
Extremely thin ceramic sheets 0.3 millimetres thick fused with textiles: the invention of a weave of shattered shards that, almost like enamelled sequins, crumble light into a sparkling dust that envelops the body and irradiates it, defining solids and voids, volumes and décor.
Liwen Liang embodies a new generation of designers for whom fashion is not just an aesthetic exercise, but an act of cultural and productive responsibility. His work stems from years of research into lost crafts and craft traditions that time and industrialisation have progressively pushed to the margins. Each collection of the brand, founded in 2020, takes shape through a slow process in which the material is respected, studied and transformed without forcing and the manual gesture is an integral part of the story.
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'Be brave, be fragile'. The synthesis of his creativity lies in this oscillating balance between two extremes, temporal and physical: ancestral roots and hi-tech experimentation, soft and hard, Jingdezhen, city of birth, and London, city of choice. For Liwen Liang, ceramics is a material charged with meaning, intimately linked to personal history. His family has been working in this field in China since the 1950s and the designer has transformed traditional knowledge into contemporary practice: he has studied the technique of thin-shell porcelain, a delicate and resistant element, imperfect and durable, capable of encapsulating memory, time and human gesture, in a very personal language. Here craftsmanship is not a heritage of nostalgia, but a way of questioning the present and imagining new production possibilities.
After much experimentation, developing manual skill with poetic sensitivity, he devised a technique of firing clay and glue mixtures in very thin sheets, as if they were paper, then composing them on fabrics, grinding them to make them very soft, flexible and wearable. The ceramic is thus reinterpreted and integrated within the garment. Its surface, modelled by hand, keeps the trace of manual making and its variations, including imperfection. Inserted as a structural or decorative element, it becomes a second skin.
In this dialogue between fashion and applied arts, Liwen Liang crosses disciplinary boundaries, restoring visibility to a cultural heritage in danger of disappearing. It is a gesture of continuity and responsibility, in which the recovery of her grandfather's craft - who worked in a kiln at the National Porcelain Factory - translates into a broader reflection on the role of fashion as a guardian of memory and identity.
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