Profile: Mengdi Cui – Only Natural Design Competitions

Mengdi Cui

Central Saint Martins

Mengdi Cui is a Chinese fashion designer whose work explores the relationship between restraint, ritual, and inner transformation. Rooted in Buddhist philosophy and Chinese cultural memory, her practice seeks to create garments that feel calm, precise, and emotionally enduring. Rather than treating clothing as decoration, she approaches it as a quiet structure for the body, a way to hold discipline, desire, vulnerability, and release. Her pre-collection develops this language through the use of natural materials, including denim, cotton, linen, silk, and leather. Each fabric is chosen not only for its texture, but for the emotional and physical state it can express. Denim and cotton bring a sense of everyday clarity, grounding the collection in the intimacy of real life and the private body. Linen introduces breath, dryness, and restraint, suggesting simplicity, heat, and spiritual discipline. Silk carries fluidity and ritual softness, echoing the movement of Buddhist robes, draped cloth, and ceremonial dressing. Leather, by contrast, gives the collection strength, tension, and sculptural control, allowing the garments to hold shape around the body like armour or relic. Together, these materials create a dialogue between softness and structure, protection and exposure, discipline and sensuality. The collection reflects Mengdi’s ongoing interest in garments that are minimal yet charged with depth: clothes for a woman who has been refined by experience, who moves through the world with calmness, power, and an uncompromising sense of self.

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Blandness

Category: Apparel

Competitions: Fashion Competition 2026

Blandness is not the absence of intensity, but a quieter, sharper form of seduction. In this project, I transformed one of the most overlooked materials in daily life — leek skin — into a fragile yet commanding garment. Over 1,000 pieces of leek skin were collected, naturally dried, pressed, layered, and stitched by hand, turning something perishable, domestic, and almost invisible into a surface of quiet power. Inspired by François Jullien’s writing on blandness, as well as Daoist and Zen ideas of emptiness, change, and inner richness, the work challenges the Western desire for immediate visual impact. Instead of creating beauty through decoration, I searched for tension inside restraint: translucency, repetition, impermanence, and the sensual vulnerability of organic matter. The leek skin becomes almost like human skin — thin, veined, wounded, luminous — carrying traces of time, decay, and transformation. The silhouette is influenced by Chinese calligraphy, especially the character 之, allowing the body to move through a soft but deliberate line. The garment wraps, shields, and exposes at the same time, creating a figure that feels monastic yet erotic, ancient yet futuristic. Its pale surface appears calm from a distance, but up close it reveals countless irregular textures, stains, fibres, and scars. For me, Blandness is a meditation on how power can exist without noise. It is about the richness hidden beneath simplicity, the eroticism of restraint, and the moment when nature, body, and garment begin to dissolve into one another. What seems quiet is not weak; it is precise, alive, and dangerously intimate.