Most brands nowadays launch special products or capsule collections to celebrate Chinese New Year (falling on 1st February 2022) and win in this way the loyalty of the Asian markets.
Oriental inspirations have always been trendy in fashion: the Orient was, for example, a popular theme in the '70s in New York, as proved by an issue of Life (December 10th, 1971). On the cover of the magazine a model donned a jacket decorated with red lacquered Chinese character-shaped scatter pins (meaning happiness, love and luck) by Willie Woo, "the enfant terrible of the costume jewelry world".
Inside the magazine a fashion reportage focused on all the latest collections inspired by the Orient: Halston created an elegant black "Dragon Lady" dress matched with Elsa Peretti's "Bone" cuff for Tiffany's and reinvented the Mao suit in a sensual key (matching it with a Peretti belt), the result was an Americanisation of this garment.
Giorgio di Sant'Angelo was inspired by the splendour of the Orient and created instead rich designs patterned after ancient costumes, some of them in cotton upholstery chintz.
The Chinese zodiac gives each year an animal sign and 2022 is the Year of the Tiger, so most collections celebrating Chinese New Year at the moment feature images of a tiger.
Chinese born but New York-based designer Vivienne Tam for example created, in celebration of the Year of the Tiger an exclusive Pop Pop Tiger (普普藝虎) collection for the Shop at The M+, one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world. The collection includes a range of garments and objects, from T-shirts, scarves and totes to face masks, postcards and prints.
The M+ Shop is also exclusively launching Tam's Tiger Together (老虎家族) collection, featuring garments such as T-shirts, Cheongsam Tops and dresses with a checkerboard of laughing tigers in pop colours and playful expressions, an idea directly connected with Vivienne Tam's early collections and with Andy Warhol's Pop Art portraits, that also hints at the current craze for NFTs portraying the same character, often an animal, with different traits and visual attributes (Bored Ape Yacht Club anybody?).
Those who prefer art to fashion can enjoy spotting tigers in paintings, sculptures and installations in museums all over the world. An example of a very unusual tiger is the mixed-media installation "1st Class" (2011) by pioneering Chinese contemporary artist Xu Bing, that was part of the exhibition "The Allure of Matter" last year at LACMA.
From a distance, the installation looks like a tiger skin rug, but if you get nearer you will discover that the "rug" is actually made with painstakingly arranged cigarettes that form the stripes of a tiger.
Xu Bing is well-known for his language based projects like his experiments with the Chinese written script that led him to create nonsensical Chinese characters and his transformation of English into legible Chinese characters.
Made with 500,000 "1st Class" brand cigarettes, Xu Bing's "1st Class" is part of his "Tobacco Project" (2000-2011), a research on tobacco, its consumption and global circulation. Using tobacco as both material and subject, the artist explored the history and production of the cigarette global trade and marketing, reminding us that tobacco was one of the first products from the United States to enter the Chinese market. The works that are part of this project can be seen as a way to comment on the US-China connection and explore the interwoven histories of the global economy, commodities, and Chinese art history.
While "1st Class" is obviously not your usual image of a tiger wishing happiness and good luck, it remains fascinating and inspiring for the way its creator used this material, arranging the cigarettes to form tiger stripes.
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