This month, our NM crew flew a collective 120,000 miles, touching down in Shanghai for a four-day photo shoot that took us to cities and villages across eastern China. Our Shanghai-based producer and team scouted locations and joined models Xiao Meng and Bonnie Chen as de facto translators—a good thing, as neither photographer Alistair Taylor-Young, senior art director Lori Stadig, nor the rest of the nine-person creative team spoke a word in any of the 30 local Mandarin dialects. We can now say ni hao (neehow), hello; xie-xie (shiye shiye), thank you; and piao liang (pi-ao leeang), pretty!
NM China
Home and headquarters for a major portion of our shoot was Amanfayun, the almost indescribably beautiful Aman Resort spread, village-like, over nearly 35 acres of the Hangzhou Valley. Each day, we watched saffron-clad Buddhist monks trod the winding Fayun Pathway to one of seven nearby temples. (The most important, Lingyin Si, date from A.D. 326.) Breakfast was native longjing tea (Hangzhou is known as the Tea Capital of China) with steamed soy milk, beef noodle soup, barbecued pork dumplings, and, by special request, French-press coffee. Each night our pillows held a different gift—prayer beads, a miniature carved wood teapot, a paper parasol, a bit of silk.
In Lóngmén Zhèn village, the setting for our blue story, we swooned over adorable babies and watched old men smoke and talk over a teahouse game of authentic Chinese checkers. Most of the working-age residents, we learned, were on the clock at a badminton factory a few kilometers away.
Scouting in the 2,200-year-old city of Hangzhou (a major destination for Chinese tourists, thanks to mountain-ringed West Lake and the gardens that earned it a UNESCO World Heritage Site designation), we stumbled upon a traditional pharmacy teeming with dried herbs, roots, and all manner of healing concoctions. We ultimately settled on scenic travel billboards as our photo backdrop, shooting as locals zipped by on ancient bicycles retrofitted with electric motors. Dinner was BaBaoYa, or “treasured duck,” in which duck is stuffed, marinated, then sealed tight for cooking with layers of lotus leaf, parchment, and mud. Only the natives were brave enough to sample the deep-fried chicken feet.
The bullet train to Shanghai (first-class!) was as modern as the city, with electronic seats that recline to beds and LED speedometer displays. A day of rain transformed our plans into a chilly night shoot in the neon-lit Nanjing Road, where we rented a room in a side-street hotel so the model would have a warm place to change.
See the entire fashion spread in the March issue of The Book.
