First lady's designer Ma Ke keeps elegance simple

Chinese fashion doyenne Ma Ke's show is staged at a factory-turned-creative space in Beijing earlier this month.[Photo provided to China Daily]

Ma Ke's rise to fame after dressing up first lady Peng Liyuan isn't coming in the way of her pursuing an inner purpose.

For people like me, who dislike primping up for a fashion show but sometimes have to go owing to professional reasons, a recent event was a welcome change. The organizers insisted on a dress code, though, but it read: "Please dress in a casual and comfortable way - no tight skirts or high-heels." The fashion show was held at a factory-turned-creative space behind Beijing's National Art Museum on a Mid-Autumn Festival evening, and I wore my jeans and sandals. As soon as I arrived, I knew why high-heels were barred. We climbed up a set of steep steel steps that led us to the roof of a building, where we were served fruit in handmade bowls, traditional desserts wrapped in leaves and homemade rice liquor.

It was Chinese fashion doyenne Ma Ke's show.

Then we walked to the roof of a neighboring building, where guests sat on grass cushions on the floor to watch the show. That is why the advisory against tight skirts was issued.

There was no fancy lighting either, with a big full moon hanging in the dark sky serving as the perfect backdrop. A woman was seated by an old wooden machine, spinning cotton, while another wove clothes at a distance.

An ensemble of some 30 people aged between 6 and 70, including several from different continents, was gathered for the show. They all dressed in basic single-color handmade clothes and moved slowly from one end of the rooftop to another.

Unlike usual fashion shows that blast recorded music on speakers, this instead had one folk singer from the Katatipul tribe, members of which live in southeastern Taiwan.

The city's neon lights were visible from where I was seated, but in a way I was lost in the quiet evening that Ma had created.

Although known in China's fashion industry for the past two decades, Ma became a household name overnight after President Xi Jinping's wife, Peng Liyuan, wore clothes designed by Ma during Xi's first state visit to Russia in March 2013.

After media reports suggested that Ma, 43, may have designed Peng's clothes, people started to look for Ma online. Websites showed that the designer had an association with Exception, a Guangzhou-based brand that she and her former husband created.

A few days later, Ma publicly acknowledged that she was indeed behind the first lady's look, but also clarified that she had left Exception in 2006 and had since taken a different direction.

In 1988, Ma left her hometown, Changchun in northeastern Jilin province, to study design at the Suzhou Silk Institute in eastern Jiangsu province.

After graduation in 1992, Ma joined a fashion company in Guangzhou in southern China's Guangdong province. After three years, she felt it was "a disaster for a designer to work in a company that only pursued profit".

And then, she met designer Mao Jihong and married him. The couple founded Exception in 1996. It is one of China's first independent fashion labels. Mao took care of marketing and branding while Ma focused on designing.