Junwei Lin: Belong Nowhere

The first time I met Junwei was at Lady M in mid-town New York. She just moved to the city from London for studying at Parsons School of Design. I was pursuing my graduate degree there. My thesis was driving me crazy. We complained about how expensive New York is, even we just moved from other cities with high living costs.

Not long after this meeting, she told me she's going to drop out. There were exciting opportunities in China. It's so important for a fashion designer. After going back to China, she started a menswear brand Junwei Lin. Her design soon started to show up in first-tier fashion magazines as well as in Paris fashion weeks. Even some big names in the Chinese pop industry wear her clothes.

One day I was thinking of her and went to check her website. There was one line caught my attention: belongs to nowhere. It speaks to me that there is no real hometown for me anymore - Changsha (the city I was born), Shanghai, and New York - I was eager to learn her thoughts on including this line in her branding.

I was lucky. Not long after that, Junwei came to New York for vacation. And we recorded this chat in Central Park.

It was such a pleasure chatting with Junwei. She has this natural calmness in her, maybe because at such a young age she's been living in a few countries and made many big decisions for herself. On top of her experience, now she's leading her own business, and I see a mature character in her. She has transformed life experience, where changes happen all the time, culturally and socially, into her motivation of design.

Each year people in Asia flocks to the West for work and study. And we seemed to be so ready without any clue that how much challenges we are going to face in terms of identities - who are we, and who do we want to be?

"Be positive and be open", "get your English perfect", or "try getting along with the locals", these general suggestions don't work all the time. What we need is being able to establish ourselves in the new environment, and I hope, this is something we can learn as we go.

Some of us have shown it. Let's start with Junwei's story.

- About Junwei -

JUNWEI LIN is an independent designer whose vision is characterized by a ’Ragged Romanticism.’ Age 15, Junwei left her native China to live and study abroad in Australia, UK, and the US, graduating from London College of Fashion into an MA at Parsons NY. Having lived between East and West, Junwei’s work is sensitive to human emotions and social phenomena. Through the deconstruction and rethinking of traditional menswear underlined by her romantic ideals, in addition to her willingness to adopt a womenswear approach, Junwei hopes to craft a more nuanced definition of menswear.