Rising year for 'dragon robe' designer (4)

Models present creations by Laurence Xu at the Paris Haute Couture Fashion Week. Photo provided to China Daily

Xu, 41, was born and raised in Zaozhuang, East China's Shandongprovince, not a fashionable area in China but the home province of Confucius and rich in traditional Chinese culture.

Xu, the second child in his family, had two interests when he was young: accompanying his mother to see the local opera and altering his father, sister and brother's clothing.

"My boyhood dream was to be a local opera performer because I thought the costumes were amazingly pretty and the gestures full of imagination. The actor waves a whip to symbolize riding a horse and demonstrates embarrassment by covering his face with his long sleeve," he says.

As for his passion for clothes, he recalls once cutting the collar off his father's shirt but before he could make a new one, he was discovered by his father and got a good smacking.

In summer, he "mixed and matched" many clothes and pretended to perform on his bed－he considered it a stage－and was laughed at by other boys.

He also tailored a qipao, a traditional Chinese cheongsam for his sister. She rode a bicycle while wearing it, and he sat on the back to show her off across the small town. But he was very embarrassed when the hemline got tangled in the bicycle wheel.

In 1997, he studied design at the Central Academy of Art and Design in Beijing, going on to further study in Paris in 1999.

After returning to China, he started to design costumes for theater and film, getting to know many actresses such as Fan Bingbing, Zhang Jingchu and Zhou Yun, for whom he started to make red-carpet gowns, gaining wide acclaim.

Xu now has a studio in Beijing and specializes in haute couture and wedding gowns.