When I first began thinking about what a Chinese handbag brand could look like, I found myself confronting a question that extended far beyond handbags.
There are certain visual cues that have become extremely efficient at communicating “Chinese” to an audience. A dragon can establish the association almost immediately, as can a lantern, a piece of calligraphy, a particular use of red, a cloud motif, or a pattern that has become broadly recognizable as traditional.
None of these things are inherently superficial. In many cases, the opposite is true. They belong to artistic and material traditions with histories far more complicated than the shorthand they sometimes become in contemporary design.
Chinese calligraphy is a useful example because its familiarity can obscure the depth of what it represents. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes calligraphy as the visual art form that was traditionally valued above all others in China, supported by centuries of development in script, technique, aesthetics, criticism, and individual artistic practice (Delbanco, 2008). A written character can therefore carry an enormous amount of cultural and artistic history, even though it can also be used today as little more than an atmospheric graphic.
My discomfort has never been with recognizability itself. It begins when recognizability becomes the entire design strategy.
If I design an otherwise conventional handbag and then place a dragon on it because I want the bag to read as Chinese, the dragon is being asked to perform almost all of the cultural work. If I place calligraphy across a surface without any meaningful relationship between the words, the object, and the person using it, the writing may communicate cultural association very efficiently without having influenced the design in any deeper way.
The same can happen with colour, ornament, pattern, or almost any other visual reference.
I may have communicated where the inspiration came from, but that does not necessarily mean I understood what I was referencing.
That is the distinction I am trying to describe when I use the word costume.
I do not mean that historical dress, ornament, or recognizably traditional design is somehow less sophisticated than contemporary design. I am using the word to describe a design process in which cultural identity is placed onto the exterior of an otherwise unrelated object so that the audience can immediately recognize the role the object is supposed to be playing.
I do not want XU to begin with a conventional handbag and then dress it in Chinese references.
I want the reference to participate in deciding what the handbag becomes.
That difference changes the order of the entire design process.
With the Ruyi, I did not begin by searching for a Chinese motif that could be applied to a handbag. I began with the 如意 itself and tried to understand the historical object before deciding which parts of it, if any, should continue into something contemporary.
The ruyi offered many possible directions. Its name carried the sentiment commonly translated as “as you wish.” Its function and social role changed over time. Surviving examples were made in a wide range of materials, while its distinctive head developed into the cloudlike form that became one of its most recognizable characteristics. The Palace Museum also documents the migration of ruyi related forms into furniture, porcelain, clothing, decorative paper, and architectural elements, showing that the visual language associated with the object had already travelled between categories long before I encountered it as a designer (Palace Museum, n.d.).
That history gave me a very different starting point from simply placing an image of a ruyi on a handbag.
I could begin by asking what the historical object was doing formally. I could study the relationship between the head and stem, the movement of the curve, the point at which that shape became recognizable, and the ways related cloud forms appeared around it. I could consider the meaning of the name and ask whether that idea still had relevance in a contemporary life. I could look at the materials historically used to make ruyi and allow that research to influence the material world surrounding the handbag.
Only after understanding those things could I begin deciding what deserved to survive the translation.
The curve eventually became the architecture of the flap. The cloud language entered the carved leather rather than being printed across a finished surface. The idea contained in 如意 became part of the reason I chose the object in the first place, although its meaning had to enter a completely different life from the ceremonial and social contexts in which historical ruyi once existed.
Other characteristics disappeared entirely.
That part of the process matters just as much.
Understanding a historical object does not obligate me to reproduce every visible characteristic associated with it. A contemporary handbag has a different function, scale, material relationship, body relationship, and social context from a historical sceptre. If I reproduced the source so literally that the resulting object became awkward, impractical, or visually unresolved as a handbag, I would not consider that outcome more respectful simply because it looked more historical.
Translation requires judgment because the designer has to distinguish between what is structural, symbolic, contextual, decorative, or so specific to the original object that moving it elsewhere would separate it from the very thing that made it meaningful.
This is where the difference between inspiration and costume becomes more complicated than simply deciding whether a reference is obvious.
An obvious reference can be deeply considered.
A subtle reference can be completely superficial.
The question is whether the reference belongs to the object for a reason.
That principle became clearer to me as I learned more about the ways Chinese artists and craftspeople themselves engaged with older design languages.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art's research on Chinese bronzes from the twelfth through nineteenth centuries documents how later makers returned to ancient bronze forms and transformed them for new periods and functions. Shapes and decorative vocabularies associated with archaic ritual vessels could reappear in incense burners, flower vases, objects for the scholar's studio, and other forms that belonged to very different ways of life. Rather than treating all of these later objects as inferior copies, the Met emphasizes the ways many became fundamentally new creations with their own functional and aesthetic identities (Lu, 2025).
I find that history useful because it suggests that serious engagement with the past has never required the past to remain physically unchanged.
A form can move into another material. A decorative vocabulary can be simplified or rearranged. An object's function can change completely. A recognizable reference can become part of something unmistakably contemporary when the maker understands enough of the source to know what is being transformed.
This is also why I have become increasingly cautious about the idea that cultural continuity has to be immediately legible.
Sometimes I think we make heritage too easy to recognize.
A relatively small collection of visual symbols is often asked to represent an enormous and internally varied cultural history. Once those symbols become familiar enough, they can work almost like labels. The viewer understands what cultural category an object is supposed to belong to before having to understand anything about the particular history behind it.
That efficiency is useful in some contexts, but it is not what I want to build XU around.
I would rather someone encounter a handbag and become curious about why the flap has a particular curve. I would rather they notice the carving and later discover the visual language that informed it. I would rather the relationship with Chinese history become richer as someone learns more about the object instead of being completely exhausted within the first second of seeing it.
The handbag still has to work if the viewer never recognizes the historical reference.
That is essential to me because if the Ruyi only succeeds when someone already knows what a historical ruyi looks like, then I have designed something closer to an illustration of the reference than a contemporary handbag.
The object still needs balance, proportion, function, material coherence, and an identity of its own.
The history should deepen the design rather than rescue it.
This is part of why the phrase “Chinese inspired” has begun to feel incomplete to me, even though it is not necessarily inaccurate.
Inspiration can describe an enormous range of relationships. A designer can be inspired by the colour of an artifact without knowing anything else about it. A motif can be copied from an image because it is visually compelling. Something from another period can be detached from the function, material, or context that originally gave it meaning and still truthfully be described as inspiration.
What I am trying to build with XU asks for more than recognition.
I want research to happen before I decide what the reference will become.
I want to know what an object was, how it was used, what materials shaped it, what its proportions were doing, how its meaning changed across time, and how later generations responded to it. I want to understand whether the most interesting thing about a source is actually its most obvious visual feature, because sometimes the answer may have very little to do with appearance.
The part worth carrying forward may be a construction principle, a mechanism, a relationship between materials, a way of containing or balancing something, or a philosophy attached to the object.
When that happens, the historical reference may become almost invisible on the surface while still determining the architecture underneath.
That possibility is much more interesting to me than requiring every XU object to announce its cultural origin immediately.
It also connects directly to the larger design language I want XU to develop.
The Ruyi curve should not appear on every future handbag simply because it eventually becomes recognizable as XU. That curve belongs to this particular design because of the historical object that produced it. Another source may have a completely different essence and therefore require a completely different visual answer.
What should remain consistent is the method of understanding before translating.
This is where “What If Chinese Objects Had Never Stopped Evolving?” takes the idea further. That essay asks what can happen when historical design languages continue into contemporary objects. This one asks the question that has to come first: have I understood the source deeply enough to know what I am actually carrying forward?
The distinction matters because the goal is not subtlety for its own sake.
I do not want XU to create another arbitrary hierarchy in which obvious Chinese references are considered unsophisticated and obscure references are automatically treated as more intelligent.
A dragon is not inherently cliché.
Calligraphy is not inherently decorative.
Red is not inherently obvious.
A cloud motif is not automatically superficial simply because people recognize it.
If one day a dragon, a character, a textile pattern, or another highly recognizable form becomes genuinely relevant to a design because the research leads there, then I would rather understand it deeply enough to use it purposefully than avoid it simply because I am afraid of being literal.
The question is not how obvious the reference is. What matters is whether the reference belongs because it has affected the idea, structure, meaning, material, or experience of the object in a way that would be diminished if it were removed.
That is a much harder standard than simply asking whether something looks Chinese enough.
It also makes me think differently about my own relationship with identity.
For much of my life, culture often felt as though it needed to become legible to other people before it could be understood. If something was going to be recognized as Chinese, there was a temptation to make the signs unmistakable enough that nobody could miss the message.
I have become less interested in performing identity that way.
I do not think everything connected to culture needs to contain every recognizable marker of where it came from in order to belong to that history. Sometimes the depth of the relationship exists precisely because the connection is structural rather than performative.
That does not mean hiding where something came from.
It means trusting that cultural specificity can exist without constantly announcing itself.
I think an object can do that just as a person can.
The Ruyi does not need an additional collection of generic Chinese symbols to prove that its design began with Chinese history. Adding dragons, lanterns, characters, or other references without a particular reason would not make the relationship more authentic simply because it made the cultural origin easier to recognize. In this case, those additions could actually distract from the much more specific conversation the handbag is already having with one historical object.
That does not create a permanent prohibition against any of those forms.
It creates a responsibility to know why they are there.
This is ultimately the difference between inspiration and costume for me.
Costume, in the sense I am using the word here, begins with the appearance of cultural belonging and works backward. The object needs to communicate a category, so recognizable signs are gathered until the identity becomes legible.
The kind of inspiration I want for XU begins in the opposite direction. It starts by understanding why a form, material, object, or idea belonged to its original context before deciding what part of that relationship might still be meaningful somewhere else.
The result may be immediately recognizable, or the connection may reveal itself only after someone becomes curious.
Either outcome can work.
What matters is that the reference helped determine what the object became.
XU may never be the fastest way to communicate “Chinese luxury” from across a room, and I am increasingly comfortable with that.
I would rather the connection reveal itself through the logic of a form, the movement of a curve, the behaviour of a mechanism, the reason a material was chosen, or the history someone discovers after asking why something looks the way it does.
If the design has been understood deeply enough, it should not need to wear its history like a costume.
The history will already be inside it.