This article originally appeared in 'Hypebeast Magazine Issue 33: The Systems Issue.'
Dingyun Zhang’s Shanghai design studio welcomes onlookers with a brutalist granite terrace made lush by freshly planted greenery. The studio overlooks an industrial part of town offset by a canal, offering a subtle juxtaposition between the city’s manmade infrastructures and nature’s might. Inside, fashion workrooms, textile development labs, and brainstorm tanks invite eclectic creatives for collaboration, while a diverse range of music echoes through its chambers. This is where Zhang — the Mongolian-Chinese designer known for his avant-garde puffers, credited for envisioning many of YEEZY’s era-defining sneakers, and watched intently by industry experts forecasting him as fashion’s promising next act — gets his work done.
Zhang’s résumé is robust: he received an MA from Central Saint Martins in 2020 after presenting a powerful thesis collection composed of futuristic, supersized outerwear that was inspired by China’s harsh winter conditions and snow sports. At the tail end of last year, he dropped his first full line under his eponymous label for Fall 2023, in which he toned down his gargantuan silhouettes to meet the consumer. Zhang’s brand has amassed a loyal following, thanks to industry co-signers (Steven Smith, Jerry Lorenzo, Tremaine Emory), famous fans (Kim Kardashian, A$AP Ferg, Gigi Hadid), and several viral creations that likely appeared on your Instagram’s Explore Page (a waterproof gilet resembling a mushroom; a punctured puffer imitating a sea creature).
After stints in London and Los Angeles, Zhang moved back to Shanghai in 2021 and spent the next two and half years designing a dream studio for his namesake label. Now that he’s cut the red tape at the atelier-cum-laboratory, the hybrid working space acts like an advanced computing system that runs his creative code, which, as he describes it, involves ideation, discussion, research, experimentation, creation, and repetition—all on a multidisciplinary plane. “We’re making furniture at the same time that we’re designing our next collection,” he explains of his ambidextrous practice. “It’s a crazy moment.”
The connective tissue that binds the 28-year-old visionary’s feats is succinctly described in his Instagram bio: “childhood relics.” Born in New Mongol and raised in Beijing, Zhang grew up collecting action figures. “I wanted every pack, whether it was the latest G.I. Joe figurines or the playthings that came with McDonald’s Happy Meals,” he says. His boyish love for collectibles could be classified as the canon event that sculpted one slice of his present-day artistic identity: an architect of “wearable toys.”
Zhang’s Helmet Bag, the inaugural item from his Fall 2024 collection, references the headwear that often protected his childhood toys. The polyester accessory almost resembles a cartoon villain, thanks to its detachable velcro eye panel. But it’s also exceptionally functional, operating as both a tote bag and a backpack with snap fastenings, drawstring adjustments, zippered pockets, and incognito hardware. This is, in Zhang’s words, a “childhood artifact reinvented for an adult world.”
The designer’s Fall 2023 Marni collaboration, as well as his sculptural outerwear capsule with Moncler Genius the year prior, propelled his boyhood-led design concepts into the mainstream fashion sphere. The polka-dotted mohair jumpers found in Zhang’s Marni team-up proposed a similar “superhuman” persona to his solo work, with oversized drop-sleeves and down padding that bolstered their ultra-puffy finishes. When Justin Bieber buried himself in one of the collection’s zany red coats at the NHL All-Star Game in February, its con- spicuous guise appeared sprightly animated among the other attendees sporting jerseys and hoodies. In Zhang’s fashion universe, that’s the point: “My childhood memories are embedded in my creative process, and they continue to contribute to my larger design conversation.”
Among those memories, Zhang recalls that his love of basketball was always a “very big deal.” While walking through Beijing’s streets on the way to school, he would pass by massive campaign posters for the 2008 US Men’s Olympic Basketball team (better known as the “Redeem Team”). He developed a strong interest in shoe models like Tracy McGrady’s adidas T-Mac 5, noting that its wood paneling now reminds him of a Tesla’s interior detailing. Though he couldn’t get a pair of his own, he satisfied his curiosity by sketching personalized sports cards that spotlighted various players’ signature sneakers. “I wanted to design for this ‘sports hero’ archetype,” he says. “I started there.”
When Zhang starts something, he often takes a non-linear path to the finish line. For his Shanghai headquarters, he drew up a blueprint that included a basketball court, which required four rounds of sketches and three-dimensional renderings before Paris-based design imprint FR AR Studio could start building. “We found roughly 20 different colorways and finishes for the court’s red stones before settling on one with a more organic top touch,” Zhang explains. “Attention to detail is very important.” It’s this tender attentiveness to fulfilling childhood fantasies that perpetually defines Zhang’s creative apparatus, and it’s the reason that the community surrounding his brand’s universe continues to grow more cult-like.
His childhood obsession with basketball shoes foreshadowed Zhang’s future success as a designer, as well. In his second year at Central Saint Martins, his tutor granted him a career-shifting introduction to Ye, then known as Kanye West. Zhang flew to Calabasas in 2016 to meet with the YEEZT founder, who hired him that same day. While at the brand, he worked on designs like the fast-selling YEEZY 700 series. Later, Ye produced a custom YEEZY Foam RNNR for Zhang’s graduate MA collection.
Zhang appreciated the diverse perspectives that moved through YEEZY’s doors. “Ye surrounded himself with creators from different backgrounds and disciplines, from music to architecture to fashion,” he says. He vividly remembers the brand’s brainstorming sessions: “Footwear designers, lighting designers, and stage designers would come with different mood boards simultaneously, constantly ping-ponging ideas while pursuing a common goal. You would see Steven Smith, James Turrell, or Pusha T in one corner, and a group of shoe designers in another.”
Today, in Shanghai, Zhang runs a similarly eclectic brainstorming model, with weekly meetings revolving around three pillars: discussion, mood boarding, and evaluation. “We invite architects, photographers, and people from different disciplines to join in on the discussion, so we can get an all-around perspective,” he explains. His team comprises eight members, and he maintains close relationships with his pattern makers, cutters, sourcers, and designers, each of whom plays a role in crafting every garment in the brand’s workroom under Zhang’s watchful eye. “Because I’m a small brand, I believe the details are quite important,” he reiterates.
Zhang credits his meticulousness to another schoolboy hobby: tracing Japanese animations from behind his English and math textbooks in class. He recalls approaching the task with sharp precision, which he finds himself enlisting today when specifying measurements as small as one millimeter in his design sketches. This tedious task, however, comes after what Zhang considers “the most joyful part of the design process”: collage-making. “For footwear, apparel, and accessories, I always begin with an abstract, unreal collage made from different media, either on Photoshop or by cutting mixed materials and piecing them together,” he says. Zhang adds that artist Robert Rauschenberg’s famous collages inspired the ritual and “showed me how to express my ideas.”
This careful approach was responsible for Zhang’s entire Fall 2024 offering, which, on top of its action-figure inspirations, lends a sartorial lens to Sanxingdui, the lost Chinese civilization grouped among the greatest Bronze Age cities. “I’m really into these kinds of mysterious discoveries, whether they are of our ancestors or of aliens,” he says. For Fall 2024, the designer’s otherworldly collages became ground zero for a slew of reimagined adventure tools, like ice fishing tents, survival rubber suits, and life vests with martian-like proportions fit for a sci-fi movie’s intergalactic combatant. Here, Zhang’s output rebelled against this planet’s fashion standards to instead outfit “an ancient civilization, discontinued and mystified from antiquity” with a signature, juvenile playfulness that’s executed masterfully.
The method to Zhang’s success and mad genius artistry lies in the consistency with which he nurtures his inner child. On a fundamental level, his brand is a nuanced creative platform for the dreams and desires of his former self, a concept that, for many, feels impossible in the face of adulthood’s harsher, practical realities. “We create between the fringes of youth culture,” Zhang says. “Our audience likely finds solace in the beauty within those margins.”
Does he foresee a change in that perspective? “Eventually, but we don’t make any compromises right now.”
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