Profile | How Chinese fashion designer Ming Ma has become one to know with his universal ‘pampered princess-like’ womenswear
- Ming Ma established his eponymous label in 2018, debuting at Shanghai Fashion Week the same year via the event’s platform for emerging designers
- Clean, deceptively simple-looking dresses are his signature, and a classic white dress has become a bestseller on Chinese e-commerce platform Tmall
Chinese fashion designer Ming Ma lives within walking distance of his crisp-white but homely Shanghai studio. His parents relocated from Wuhan, the city in Hubei province in which he was born, to the area to be closer to him. Sometimes he brings his small fluffy pet Pomeranian, Muaji – named after the Japanese rice cake, mochi – to work.
Outside the window, Shanghai’s looming Exhibition Centre – one of the city’s landmark buildings, constructed in the mid-1950s – looks within touching distance.
“My world is this one-kilometre square,” he laughs.
Books surround us, with titles such as Utopia Forever: Visions of Architecture and Urbanism; Sacai A to Z; Kenzo Takada; Edward Hopper. “I have loads at home too. I love collecting books,” he says.
Ma graduated from London’s Central Saint Martins art school with a bachelor’s and a master’s degree before taking a different route to many of his contemporaries and working at a fashion company in Beijing for two years, where he familiarised himself with production, cash flow and other tenets of a successful fashion brand.
He established his eponymous label in 2018 and the same year showed its first collection at Shanghai Fashion Week via the event’s platform for emerging designers, Labelhood.
