Belgium-based Taiwanese fashion designer Shi Jen Huang (黃璽珍), whose winter collection was lauded by a leading Belgian fashion institute last month, said her ultimate goal is to promote her designs internationally as a “made in Taiwan” brand.
Huang’s new collection, titled God will speed you, was posted on Aug. 9 on the blog of Belgium’s Flanders Fashion Institute (FFI), which helps fashion designers and companies improve their marketing and management skills with government funds.
As the first Taiwanese graduate of fashion design in Belgium, Huang said in a recent interview that all the hard work she put in at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent (KASK) was worth it after being recognized by the institute.
Photo: CNA
The KASK 2007 graduate said the school’s fashion design program, which she described as “rigorous to the point of almost being harsh,” accepts between 20 and 30 new students a year, but only six receive a diploma after a strict selection process by teachers there.
Huang, who launched the brand Shi Jen last year, was also one of the few non-local designers recommended by the institute.
As a Christian, Huang said she hopes her designs can help distressed people appreciate faith in a proper way.
“Her storytelling comes alive through haute couture techniques combined with street wear, suitable for a modern day lifestyle ... Her vision comes alive through references to Christian iconography but also through soft materials such as wool that protect their wearer,” the FFI blog said of the designer’s works.
However, Huang’s biggest hope is to see her home country embrace her designs as her brand grows, she said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift