Synopsis Liu Wen Is a Well-known Fashion Model From China. She Is

The Liu Wen Express

Mao Rushmore Beneath a statue of the chairman at Orangish Island Park in Changsha. Céline jacket, $three,800, and pants $1,250. Available at Kirna Zabête. Call (212) 941-9656.

Credit... Photographs by Angelo Pennetta. Fashion editor: Ethel Park.

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Mao Rushmore Beneath a statue of the chairman at Orange Island Park in Changsha. Céline jacket, $3,800, and pants $1,250. Available at Kirna Zabête. Call (212) 941-9656.
Credit... Photographs past Angelo Pennetta. Manner editor: Ethel Park.

March 15, 2012

Slipping into a pair of blue Marc Jacobs pants in the back of a rented van in Yongzhou, China, the model Liu Wen was feeling an unusual degree of jitters. Changing apparel on the go is standard practise for models shooting on location, and she liked the look: "It'southward tomboy fashion," she said. "I feel information technology's my mode." And under virtually circumstances — long travel, bad atmospheric condition, unexpected wardrobe glitches — China's first bona fide supermodel has a reputation in the manufacture for being gracious and professional person. Only equally the van pulled up to her quondam middle school, she peered worriedly out the curtained windows at a waiting crowd: hundreds of frantic teenagers in white compatible jackets, spitting images of her contempo quondam self. "Information technology's getting crazy here," she said. The students were chanting, "Liu Wen, Liu Wen" and were armed with cellphone cameras and notepads for autographs, eager for the return of their school's most famous alum. "I'm not that big a celebrity," she said. "I'm merely an ordinary person."

At 24, Liu is non and then far removed, in years, from her time at Yongzhou No.iii Heart School. She grew up in the southern province of Hunan, most famous every bit the birthplace of Mao Zedong and as a powerhouse of domestic pork product. Dorsum then in Yongzhou, population 5.vii million, there were "no mode stores, not even manner magazines," she said. "Our sense of the exterior globe came mainly from South Korean lather operas." About the only widely recognized Western brands in boondocks were Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's. Her modest 5-story school has long open up-air corridors leading to cramped classrooms lined with one-time-fashioned blackboards. On the walls hang portraits of Chairman Mao, Vladimir Lenin, William Shakespeare, Hu Jintao and other inspirational figures. In wintertime, to conserve electricity, students and teachers habiliment coats inside to proceed warm.

Information technology was, in other words, inappreciably blighted that a girl from China's pig land would go on to become, as Liu has, the first Asian model to be the global face of Estée Lauder, the first Chinese model to walk the Victoria'south Secret runway and one of the most booked Asian runway models in the world. She has learned to article of clothing stilettos ("I never wore loftier heels in my hometown") and taught herself English. She moved to Beijing and so to New York City. Perhaps the simply thing that remains the same is that she is single. "I have never had a swain," she told me. "In my schoolhouse days, everyone thought I'm too tall for a Chinese daughter. And now, I travel and then much. Perchance in 2012." Information technology was her first time home in more than a year, and she was reflective about how her perspective had changed. "Twenty-4 is still young in New York, simply in Hunan most of my friends are married."

For the most part, Liu takes listen-boggling change in stride. Maybe this quality, more than anything else, defines young Chinese people today. But somehow contemplating it all, compressed into a single instant, felt overwhelming. Nonetheless when she stepped into the shrieking crowd, shaking easily and answering questions, the anxiety wore off. "I feel like here is abode," she said. "Information technology's been a long time, but it still feels very warm."

In a trivial room upstairs, Liu had luncheon with several of her old teachers, surrounded by laminated posters of embankment scenes and palm copse — exotic places few of her peers have seen. With the heating off, anybody huddled around a circular tabular array in sweaters and night jackets, save for the principal, Mr. Liu, who wore a gray arrange with a purple tie for the occasion. On the table was a plastic dish total of sunflower seeds. The teachers uncorked ii bottles of red wine, a treat, and offered rounds of toasts, standing upward and clinking spectacles in the style of a Chinese banquet. Liu, who does not drinkable alcohol, raised her loving cup of green tea and offered a personal motto: "Be a skilful student and enjoy your life. You never know the futurity."

Certainly Liu'southward success rides largely on her looks —

"I frequently utilise the give-and-take 'precipitous' to describe her," a casting director for Victoria's Secret, John Pfeiffer, told me. "She's not a soft, delicate beauty. But she has that very indefinable 'It' cistron, full of presence." That she defies the stereotype of the spoiled, immature mannequin has besides helped her. ("After our kickoff meeting, she sent a handwritten thank yous carte; it was charming," Aerin Lauder remembers.)

Yet her rising is due in equal measure out to the extraordinary moment in China's history from which she emerged. When Liu was born, in 1988, the daughter of a construction worker, many of the brands she has modeled for — Dior, Chanel, Jean Paul Gaultier — were unknown in the country. Beijing was and so a sea of bicycles, and thick coal dust in the air darkened both shirt collars and the heaven. China's per capita annual income was just $704

(final year it was $five,184), and only a sliver of the population could afford such luxuries equally skin creams and handbags.

With roaring economical growth every year of her childhood, Beijing was transformed by the time Liu moved at that place in 2006, equally an 18-twelvemonth-old aspiring model. No longer a wasteland of sleepy state-owned section stores, the capital was throwing upwardly stadiums, shopping malls and car dealerships. At the same time, the urban center had become a magnet for People's republic of china's immature dreamers — artists, writers, designers, punk bands, models.

It was into this energetic new world that Liu stepped ane Nov morning after a 20-hour train ride from Yongzhou. She had come up lonely, clutching two suitcases full of warm wearing apparel and snack foods her mother had packed. That fall, she had won a modeling contest in Hunan; her victory gave her the idea that modeling might be a career, but in no way assured success. She insisted that she's "non pretty, pretty, pretty by Chinese standards — big optics and pocket-size nose and oral cavity." She had come on a leap of faith.

In her beginning flat, which she dissever with ii other aspiring models, she began to pile up fashion magazines, at least 2,000 by her own estimate. Many, like Vogue China, had simply recently printed their kickoff issue, catering to a new class of urban Chinese consumers whose spending on cosmetics solitary has leapt from $24 million in 1982 to $168 billion in 2009.

In 2007, Liu was discovered at a Beijing fitting past Joseph Carle, then a creative managing director at Marie Claire International looking for models to whom both Western and Chinese women could relate.

Soon she was appearing in those magazines she'd been hoarding, and past 2008 she'd walked for Burberry in Milan. The adjacent year she moved to New York, knowing about no English. "I could merely smile and say, 'yes' and 'no,' " she recalled. But she learned apace with the help of Broadway shows, "Gossip Girl" and by comparing Chinese and English language versions of the Harry Potter books. And she institute a new expect in vintage stores, a concept little known in Mainland china. Over Skype her mother asked her: "Why would yous buy that former stuff, when you can afford new?"

Back in Hunan province, Liu posed at the ancient Yuelu University in Changsha, under a misty gray sky. Taking an optimistic view of the drizzle, she repeated an onetime Chinese maxim: "Pelting brings riches." At that moment, a group of Chinese tourists wandered through the impromptu set, trailing a woman with a microphone clipped to her collar: "Ladies and gentlemen, this fashion." Had she not become a model, she had planned to enter a local vocational schoolhouse to become simply such a tour guide. Now the crowd paid piddling attention to the tall slender woman wrapped for warmth in a blue parka. But ane young girl stopped and stared. Turning to a friend, she whispered, "She is so beautiful." Liu warmed to the familiar lilt of Hunan dialect.

In the van afterward, barreling between the Changsha and Yongzhou, she curled up beyond two seats and caught up on sleep. Outside, the light had faded; the view through the window soon inverse from city — new hotels and high-rises — to rolling fields where farmers toil with spades in pocket-sized plots all the same untouched by modern farm equipment. It felt a little like traveling back in time, although both worlds, the aboriginal and the hyper-mod, exist in Cathay today. And Liu has learned the art of slipping between them.

At almost midnight, the van pulled upwardly to a residuum finish near a Sinopec gas station. There were several big trucks laden with structure materials or oinking pigs, their drivers sleeping in the cabs. Liu and members of the coiffure wandered into the 24-hour convenience store and strolled down its brightly lit aisles. She picked up a bag of chocolates and a red sugary concoction labeled "Wang Zai Milk Drink." A bit nostalgic, she said with a sigh, "Information technology's my favorite from my teenage years." And so, though one-half asleep, she had the practiced grace to offer to interpret between Standard mandarin and English language, between the drowsy Sinopec store clerk and the black-clad New York makeup artist. "Yes, we have chips," Liu said. "Shrimp season or cheese season?"

ESSENTIALS • Hunan Province

SIGHTS
Yuelu University Founded in 976, the Yuelu Academy of Classical Learning, in Changsha, is one of the oldest schools in Prc. In 1903, it was formally converted to a public university. (In 1926, it was renamed Hunan University.) The grounds include a temple defended to Confucius — revered as a patron of higher learning in aboriginal Mainland china (and lately being reinterpreted by the Chinese Communist Party every bit a patron of hierarchy and authoritarian government). Stroll through its peaceful, contemplative gardens or hike up the next Mount Yuelu.

Statue of Mao Zedong It's not just ironic Chinese teenagers just besides provincial governments who are reclaiming the paradigm of the Chairman (after several decades out of fashion) on everything from T-shirts to key chains to 105-foot stone statues. And Hunan province, the birthplace of Mao, has what might be the best slice of Maomorabilia in the country: a chiseled giant Mao caput in Changsha'south Juzhou Park, erected in 2009 and depicting the young leader looking decidedly more svelte than the iconic Mao on the 100 RMB note. A shuttle coach runs from the park's gate to the statue.

Temple of Liu A memorial to the eighth-century poet, travel author and official Liu Zongyuan, the temple was erected in Yongzhou in 814. Liu'southward celebrated works include Eight Records of Excursions in Yongzhou, depicting his jaunts to the mountains and bamboo forests near the aboriginal city. The Temple of Liu is on Liuzi Street, on which several quaint old homes have been preserved. Information technology'southward a squeamish stroll from the temple to nearby Xiaoshui River.

HOTELS
Wyndham Grand Plaza Royale Furongguo Changsha Five-star hotel in the majuscule of Hunan province. 106 Furong Heart Road, 2nd section; 011-86-731-886-88888. Doubles from about $185.

Yongzhou Fanceden Four-star hotel in Liu Wen'due south hometown. 399 Lingling Middle Route, Lengshuitan Surface area; 011-86-746-868-8888. CHRISTINA LARSON