A Tribute to Karl Lagerfeld: The White Shirt Project

‘If you ask me what I’d most like to have invented in fashion, I’d say the white shirt. For me the white shirt is the basis of everything. Everything else comes after.’
–Karl Lagerfeld

Hundreds of fans and friends from around the world gathered to celebrate the legacy of Karl Lagerfeld at a private exhibition held at his mansion in Paris on September 25, 2019. The White Shirt Project featured 47 designs for white shirts by a global roster of artists, actors, supermodels and designers. The star-studded affair welcomed celebrity guests including Anna Wintour (Vogue), Takahashi Murakami, Gigi Hadid and Kaia Gerber (the daughter of legendary supermodel Cindy Crawford), to name only a few.

‘Breathe’, a design by our own Xu Jing, a modern calligraphy artist, was featured in the event. Xu Jing drew her inspiration from Karl Lagerfeld’s remark, ‘I design like I breathe. It just happens.’

The combination of an ancient Chinese art form and Western design produced a unique fusion that transcends cultural and geographical boundaries. As designing was to Lagerfeld, creating works of calligraphy is as natural and essential as breathing to Xu Jing. The combination of calligraphy and a white shirt marked a return to the basics of artistic creation, and Xu Jing’s design brought a broader appreciation of China’s vast cultural and artistic heritage to the West.

Xu Jing’s life is an ode to the art of calligraphy, a life-long devotion to thousands of years of artistic wisdom that preceded modern China. Ms Xu holds a bachelor’s degree in graphic design from Nanjing University’s School of Design and a master’s degree in calligraphy from the Nanjing School of Fine Arts. Her calligraphic work has appeared as the titles of many Chinese films, such as Zhang Yimou’s Happy Times (1999) and Hero (2000), Peter Chan’s Swordsmen (2011) and Wong Kar Wai’s Grandmaster (2011).

In the upcoming exhibition Ink Asia 2019, No 55 Artspace will showcase her works from the Ink-and-Wine series, including Journey and Attitude.