Dong Liang Beijing

Dong Liang (栋梁) was founded in November 2009 by Nan Lang and Tasha Liu in a sub-twenty-square-meter shop tucked inside Beijing's Wudaoying Hutong, just off Lama Temple in Dongcheng. From the outset its proposition was specific and counter-cultural for the moment: stock only mainland-Chinese independent designers, in a retail landscape where the dominant assumption was that Chinese fashion shoppers wanted European labels and that domestic designers had no commercial future. The store became, in effect, the first dedicated multi-brand incubator for the post-2008 generation of Chinese designers — Uma Wang, Xander Zhou, Sankuanz, Babyghost, Comme Moi, Deepmoss, Shushu/Tong, Caroline Hu, Staffonly, Pronounce — and over fifteen years it has carried roughly eighty designers on a rotating basis. The Beijing flagship eventually moved to Sanlitun Taikoo Li North, where Dong Liang invested in a 500-square-meter space designed by Pritzker-track architect Zhang Yonghe. The store sits in the same retail corridor as Acne Studios, Balenciaga and the international luxury houses, which has always been the point: to put Chinese independent design on a shelf next to the global brands rather than in a hutong side gallery. The Sanlitun store programs ongoing exhibitions, designer talks and seasonal showcases, and runs in parallel with Dong Liang's Guozijian art-space store and its operations through Labelhood at Shanghai Fashion Week. Dong Liang's role in the Chinese fashion conversation is structural rather than just commercial. Co-founder Tasha Liu went on to launch Labelhood in 2016 as the runway-and-incubator arm, and the Dong Liang stores remain the retail front of the same project: the place where the designers Labelhood develops actually meet customers. For overseas observers, Dong Liang has functioned as the canonical entry point into the mainland-Chinese designer scene; for domestic shoppers, it is the buyer's stamp that legitimizes a new Chinese label.