Time travel + period setting comeback + fashion design + workplace rivalry + business battles + bonds across time + military industry secrets + romantic entanglements + technological innovation + the tide of a new era
Lin Xia, a 21st-century fashion designer, unexpectedly transmigrates during her runway finale into the body of a textile mill worker in 1982. Clutching an altered vocational school application form for the textile mill, she finds herself trapped in front of a roaring spinning machine. She notices how stiff the collars on the era’s polyester-cotton shirts are and how dated their color palettes look. The thousand designs hidden in her memory become her only golden finger.
One stormy night, she runs into Gu Cheng, a young soldier carrying a fashion magazine. Using her knowledge of modern tailoring, she helps him improve the factory’s work clothes, but soon gets caught in the factory’s rigid hierarchy: the section chief targets her, she faces discrimination over her education, and even her designs are stolen by Li Yao, the deputy factory director’s daughter. Despite being criticized for not focusing on her work, she applies to a correspondence college’s evening program in fashion design. She teaches the women workers to alter clothes with thimbles and improve polyester-cotton fabric with tie-dye. At the factory anniversary gala, she astonishes everyone with a “homespun fashion show.”
As reforms sweep through the township enterprises, she seizes the opportunity to form a design team, only to face obstruction from state-owned factories when she takes on export orders. Then she learns Gu Cheng’s true identity: he is a technical specialist secretly testing fabrics for the military industry. The peony-patterned fabric on his wrist is an exact match for the design in her 21st-century brand’s “Rebirth Collection.” Two souls constrained by their times weave starlight on sewing machines as they break through their limitations, while unraveling the mystery of time hidden behind the application form, a puzzle left by her future self…
When depicting the picture of the times, the details are vivid and the atmosphere is rich, instantly pulling readers into the story and immersing them into experiencing the past years, with a strong sense of immersion.