Models wear Lan Yu’s haute couture wedding outfits in different hues at a show in China Fashion Week. [Xinhua]
"I like rain. Someone says that love comes from raindrops." It is a line that wedding dress designer Lan Yu remembers from a Korean film called Over the Rainbow.
Inspired by the film, Lan presented a series of haute couture wedding outfits in different colors at a show for China Fashion Week on March 25 at the Beijing Hotel.
With flesh pink, baby blue, lilac and pale orange, the haute couture outfits subverted the tradition of pure white wedding gown.
The last dress, however, revealed Lan's love of rainbows.
Small white sequins, beads and flower-shaped decorations were laid all over the outfit like waves, and sequins in red, green, purple and blue were mounted from the shoulder to the hemline like the scales of a mermaid, glowing and reflecting like a rainbow.
With every piece priced at more than 120,000 yuan, Lan was concerned that the high prices would keep customers away.
So, to enable more people to marry their true love in a beautiful dress, Lan established two brands.
One, Les Fees de Lan, provides dresses priced between 5,000 and 20,000 yuan.
At the show, the brand showed its spirit.
Gauze is used in the dresses to add some romance and lightness. The traditional long hemline is dropped and replaced with a skirt above the knee.
At the show, models wore baseball hats backward under their veils, matched with white flat sports shoes.
Her second brand at the show, Lanyu Bride, produces wedding dresses priced from 20,000 to 80,000 yuan.
Here, classic white sleeveless satin dresses are covered with transparent long-sleeved gauze. With a combination of different materials and multiple layers, the dresses are for mature women.
Lan, from East China's Shandong Province, follows her instinct when it comes to design, and she believes in holding on to her own views.
At 16, she was selling designs for 130 yuan each, but she couldn't tolerate her work being destroyed by the modifications done by the buyers. So she set up an independent studio to take total control.
Even now, she insists on not following the market blindly but sticking to the grace and romance that she wants to present with her favorite elements, such as gauze, lace, sequins and bows.
She believes that a wedding is the most beautiful moment for a woman, and that the wedding dress is an important witness and carrier of a precious memory.
She is therefore scrupulous with every needle and piece of thread to provide wedding dresses perfect in every way.
She sometimes does some of the needlework herself.
"I never keep long fingernails and my fingers are far from slender with all the calluses."
Lan is constantly trying to cater to a larger market. So, in a project with Chinese dating website Baihe.com, her creations will be sold in around 30 physical stores named True Love Palace — selling wedding supplies, including dresses — within the next three years.