Designer rebel with applause

A bag Zhou Yi designed for the Breaking the Ice collection, which will be unveiled at the end of this year.

Having lived in Rome since the age of 10 and studied in London and Paris with degrees in political science and economics, Zhou, in her 30s, described herself as an artist with a "chaotic cultural background" so that she doesn't and cannot "go with the system" of any one place.

"I am not one of them, so I am kind of the reverse of the Chinese poem," which translates as you cannot see the real face of a mountain because you are inside it.

But the background turns out to be an uninterrupted supply of inspiration for Zhou's multimedia artwork.

The prolific artist, film director, and art director for domestic video portal Tudou.com, has been hailed as a modern-day Chinese combination of Hitchcock, Yoko Ono and Cindy Sherman by Vogue China.

Her works have been exhibited at Shanghai Biennale, Venice Biennale, and the Cannes Film Festival. Hong Kong curator and art critic Chang Tsong-zung has described her work as "lunar-aura gilded fantasy".

She can create fresh scope for imagination by bringing adolescent innocence and vain glory, cosmic dreams and virtual reality, heroic epochs and soap sentiments together in her work, as Chang put it.

Zhou considers fashion design barely different from her usual artworks, except that she's drawing on a girl's body rather than on canvas. Going beyond her Italian and Chinese background, she looked for inspiration from an "iceberg related" place. She unsurprisingly found it in Iceland.

At her studio, sweaters, dresses and pants featuring intentionally unfinished 3-D polar bears, birds and dolphins are exhibited.

"The project represents a whole new experience for me, and I want to take advantage of it to show the Chinese brain," she says.

Paolo Gerani, CEO and artistic director of the brand, believes that the collaboration would be proof that "while artistic inspiration may in general be nationally neutral, the industrial base in Italy in the textile sector is open to all languages and can bring to life - in premium form - all types of fashion visions".

"Zhou is a modern woman with boundless energy and creative imagination. That's the concept at the core of this project," Gerani says. "We came up with the idea of working backwards, in the sense that we would not be the ones to manufacture our products in China. She instead would be the one to become a designer here in Italy, benefiting from our exquisitely Italian staff, materials and machinery."

According to a fashion index white paper released at the beginning of this year by Trends Group, a media conglomerate that owns 17 fashion publications in China, luxury consumers in the country have gradually changed their focus.

After snapping up so many bags and clothes with globally recognizable big logos, they are turning their eyes toward fashion items designed by someone who can connect with them, or more directly, shares the same culture. These are becoming the next most desirable things wanted by what's potentially the world's largest market.

The paper, a study of the "nouveau riche in 20 big cities in China", found that at least one-third of these people have bought both internationally famous luxury goods and not-so-well-known Chinese designers works. And nearly half of the frequent luxury shoppers said they have bought or intend to buy items by Chinese designers.