Sometimes it’s hard to be a man. One woman who understands this is Danxia Liu—cofounder of second-season London menswear brand Danshan. Why? Because when she was a little girl her family raised her as a little boy.
This afternoon’s Danshan presentation was held in a London Chinese community center—a safe space, as Liu observed. The Danshan models young and old gathered around a table cracking peanuts and drinking tea, or sat in a circle on the floor as if in group. The clothes were loose, light, and wide, and invariably lined with satin, silk, or sheepskin because, Liu explained, the designers want their customer to feel softness.
Before she came to London to study fine art, swerved to womenswear, and metcofounder Shanpeng Wong, Liu was raised in Guangzhou, China. Here, extraordinarily, she spent much of her early life masquerading as a male. She explained: “The reality is it started off as almost an accident, a joke. Because when I was born my grandmother told my dad to divorce my mother because she’d wanted a grandson. My dad loved me very much, the whole family too. But that incident raised a lot of drama in the house . . . I’ve always been quite boyish. But my dad would cut my hair short and wherever we went, people would say, ‘ah your son is so cute’ and he would never deny that [she was a girl]. He just went along with anybody that thought I was a boy. It did give me a different perspective.” This state of gender inconclusively continued until Liu was around 12 years old.
Growing up deprived of dresses and being told that crying is for weaklings gave Liu, she says, a unique insight into root causes of masculine emotional constipation. Which is why she, alongside Wong, decided to focus on equipping men with apparel in which to express themselves. She said: “Men should just . . . be human.” Wong added: “Total emotional honesty is something men should be allowed to have.” Partially inspired by the compulsively candid Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader, this Danshan collection is an interesting exercise in disassembling the gender-certainties in menswear—and its cofounder’s story is surely unique.