CHEN ADDS GRACE TO CHINESE FASHION

Being fashionable is not about how many couture designers a society has but about how its people dress, China's star couturier tells Zhang Ruinan in New York

Twenty years ago Grace Chen became the first student from the Chinese mainland to study fashion design in New York's Fashion Institute of Technology.

"But starting from 2005, about 10 years after my graduation, more and more Chinese students have come to study fashion design in the US," said the Beijing-born couturier who established her couture brand under her name in Shanghai in 2009. "They've slowly gone back to China to establish their own brands, so now they are getting attention."