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Malone Zhou

Malone Zhou

London, United Kingdom
UNIVERSITY/COLLEGE Royal College of Art
Title of Work The Harmony of Order and Chaos
SPECIALISMS Womenswear

Contact Tutor
flora.mclean@rca.ac.uk

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My collection explored how order and chaos can coexist to form a new sense of harmony. Rooted in my research into Chinese architecture, spatial hierarchy and cultural memory, it reflects on the relationship between public and private space, interiority and exteriority, protection and restriction. My hometown, Nanjing, became a central metaphor. Its city walls appear monumental, controlled and defensive, yet they also hold histories of protection, continuity and collective life. As a Chinese designer educated within a Western fashion environment, I stand between individual expression and collective balance. Through colour, I bring the vitality of Chinese local culture into my work: the warmth of everyday life, the humour of ordinary people, the optimism of colour, and the emotional richness of communities. I want to communicate another understanding of Chinese identity and happiness. I work with uniforms, latex, pleating, stitching and knitwear. The uniform symbolises discipline, institution and order; through pleating, folding, stitching and reconstruction, I disrupted its authority and transformed it into something personal and alive. Ultimately, this collection is a study of structured vitality. It proposes that harmony is not the absence of conflict but the ability to hold contradiction and to imagine a self-defined language of modernity.

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