PROLOGUE
River water
CLEANFLOW was born in Wuhan, a river city in China. The Yangtze runs long and unhurried, open and even-tempered, shifting quietly as it goes. It holds yesterday and today at once, carrying tradition and the modern along together, and it has bred an aesthetic inclined toward the long term, the practical, the tolerant and the balanced — as well as the honest, forthright, quietly punk refusal of Wuhan people to drift with the crowd.
That vitality, drawn from the river, runs through what CLEANFLOW values: not a surface current that changes by the moment, but a Chinese brand that settles — in stillness and in motion — into something with real force behind it.
CHAPTER ONE
A beginning: Eastern minimalism
My childhood ran almost the whole length of the 1990s, and the minimalism of those years marked me deeply. It is no exaggeration to say that restraint and rebellion have been the through-line of my taste ever since; that surreal, avant-garde quality held me completely.
I also understood early that I am someone who lives in an inner world. The deepest resonance I can remember came from my favourite text in middle school — Watching Snow from the Pavilion in the Heart of the Lake, by Zhang Dai of the Ming dynasty:
In the twelfth month of the fifth year of Chongzhen, I was living by West Lake. Heavy snow had fallen for three days, and on the lake every sound of people and birds had ceased. That evening, after the watch drum, I took a small boat, wrapped in a fur coat with a brazier beside me, and went alone to the pavilion at the heart of the lake to watch the snow. Rime hung thick in the air; sky and cloud and hill and water were, above and below, a single white. Of shadows on the lake there remained only one stroke of the long causeway, one dot of the pavilion, one mustard seed of my boat — and in the boat, two or three grains that were people.
At the pavilion, two men sat facing each other on a spread felt mat while a boy heated wine over a stove until it boiled. Seeing me, they cried out with delight: “How could there be another such person on this lake!” They pulled me over to drink with them. I forced down three large cups and took my leave. I asked their names: they were men of Jinling, staying here as guests. As I stepped back into the boat, the boatman muttered: “Do not say the gentleman is mad — there are others madder still.”
That absolute emptiness — “every sound of people and birds ceased”, “above and below, a single white” — set against the fineness of “one stroke, one dot, one mustard seed, two or three grains”, formed in my mind a picture of extraordinary beauty. It answered the East Lake I actually knew, and together they made a hidden place that hovered between the spiritual and the real. It became the highest thing I could imagine beauty to be.
Beyond that, I was moved by the obsession of those old scholars — a lone boat, snow, a rare sight worth going out for — and by the fullness they found inside extreme solitude. That beauty is just as remarkable, and it is a romance that belongs to no one but yourself.
CHAPTER TWO
China needs slow fashion
In 2015, a year after graduating, I planned to open a womenswear shop on Taobao. At the time the platform was split three ways between Japanese, Korean and Western styles: fast turnover, rough quality. Women’s clothing then leaned either toward the traditionally ladylike — conservative and unremarkable — or toward whatever was trending, with an emphasis on conventional femininity. The aesthetic options were narrow, and the market lacked pieces that took fabric seriously: simple in cut, moderate in style, and still designed.
Because I am obsessive about fabric and set on natural materials, I spent years digging for clothes I liked among export surplus. I believed a generation of new Chinese brands would emerge: independent in taste, well made, with a position of their own — not fast fashion, but long-term brands that could hold their footing through the waves and stay themselves.
CHAPTER THREE
A woman is not shaped by others
Beyond style and quality, I noticed the question underneath: why women dress as they do. Emphasising conventional femininity is a real market demand, but it is not universal, and it does not run the length of a woman’s life. Many women feel distant and unfamiliar to themselves in such clothes, and come away less confident. The clothing keeps reminding them to meet a fixed standard of beauty and to satisfy other people’s expectations, which only deepens the resentment of that passive position, and the self-diminishment that comes with it.
To my mind, clothing always comes back to the person. Women — and any gender — are already whole, dimensional, many-sided. Womenswear design needs to recalibrate where it starts from: to attend to women themselves, and to offer strength rather than constraint. Each of us should have the freedom to shape ourselves, and to choose for ourselves in the ordinary act of getting dressed.
With that conviction I founded CLEANFLOW, taken from the Chinese name 清洗流. I hoped the brand could carry that newborn edge upstream against the swell, find its own worth, and see its core grow clearer through every trial.
CHAPTER FOUR
Reconstruction
As a fabric obsessive, the first material that came to mind when planning products was mulberry silk. For Chinese people, “good cloth” almost always calls up silk first: a luxury rooted in the bloodline, and an Eastern cultural sign that has travelled the world.
In early 2016 I set out for Hangzhou to trace silk to its source, visiting the silk museum and the museum of folk craft. In the fabric market I came across gambiered silk from Guangdong — hand-dyed by an old method. Its mineral sheen, unlike ordinary silk, and its particular hand, supple yet with a spine to it, left a strong impression. An old cloth steeped in time, and modern at the core.
The trip was also a study in culture. I felt keenly that Hangzhou, once the Southern Song capital, still carries the imprint of Song aesthetics — which, to me, is not only the high point of Chinese aesthetics but the fullest expression of Eastern minimalism. There, the experience of beauty is folded into ordinary life; people and nature speak together; the fine, quick beauty of the East is everywhere you look, down to the elegance of the names above shop doors. In the art bookshop of the China Academy of Art beside West Lake, I lingered for hours, and was moved by how many young contemporary artists were taking traditional forms apart. That spring and summer I released the gambiered silk ready-to-wear series, reworking the cloth with a simple, modern hand, and designed pared-back Eastern accessories with an abstract quality, drawing on folding fans, rock formations and the waterfalls of classical painting.
West Lake, Hangzhou — three hundred and eighty-four years earlier, Zhang Dai had written Watching Snow from the Pavilion in the Heart of the Lake in this very place, a text I have never stopped dreaming about. I could only marvel at the rhyme fate had hidden there: standing in that moment, I seemed to cross time and answer the secret place of my girlhood — dream answering reality, where I came from pulling at where I was going.
I knew then that I had to bring out, with my own hands, the Eastern landscape I had kept inside me, and share it.
EPILOGUE
A nursery rhyme
After becoming a mother I often sang my child the Western nursery rhyme “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”. Set to a melody that ripples like a stream, its words — apparently simple, and far deeper than they look — kept striking me:
Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.
As I understand it: life is a river, so sing as you go with it; life is a passing dream, so live this moment fully.
In an age of widespread anxiety I cannot help asking how my child should spend this one life — and how I, already at middle age, should spend mine. After long thought, my answer is only this: hold the oars, listen to your own heart, move gently forward with the water in front of you, and let yourself feel all of it. That, I think, is what feminism reaches down to, and the last romance available to a life.
Written by CLEANFLOW founder Chen Wenxi, from the brand story document. Translated from the Chinese.