Directly associated with Devolution‘s interpretation of shanghai, ‘the bund’ is a waterfront area in the city center. in the 80’s tv dramas and news, the area was portrayed as the metropolis of green gang warlords, spies, revolutionists, and magnates. in addition, it was reffered to as an experimental field for innovation, reformation, and capitalism. it seems to be the birthplace of various trends and new vocabulary, as if the world always enters china at this end of the yangtze river.
The other focal element of the project was ‘shanghai knitting factory’. during the 90s, the regional circulation of goods was not as developed as it is now that online shopping is available. thus, trade fairs of various scales selling all sorts of products were still very popular in second and third-tier cities. ‘shanghai knitting factory’ was one of the most glorious titles and for a very long time, it was a synonym for style and quality.
These two ideas together carve a personal perception of shanghai – shanghai is the bund filled with people wearing chic knitwear by shanghai knitting factory. in the blink of an eye, commodity markets from all over the world entered, and the phrase ‘hotel trade fair’ withered gradually. the first thing that comes to mind when bringing up the bund is no longer the sweaters of the ‘shanghai knitting factory’, but the skyscrapers on the other side – the oriental pearl tower in 1994, the jin mao tower in 1999, the world financial center in 2008, and the shanghai tower in 2016.
In the past two decades, people have been unceasingly discussing how the new skyscrapers broke records, and all of these changes happened unceasingly at a place that was called ‘sludge road’ just a while ago. people from all over the world come to the bund and gaze upon the sky to see the future of this city. the knitwear series was created in this hazy imagination of shanghai. these 8 sweaters were hand-woven with wool of the same length of the 8 skyscrapers in pudong. the complete height of each building is not even visible when looking up, but turns out that wool of such length can barely be woven into a complete sweater.
Project info:
Name: the bund
Design studio: DEVOLUTION
Art director: yang lutong
Editor: kaki cai
Film editor: chenyang wang
Knitwear maker: xueshuang
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