Back to 1985: I Become a Fashion Queen in the Mountains

The moment she opened her eyes, Su Man had gone from backstage at Paris Fashion Week to a poor, dusty mountain village in 1985.

Her situation: married for three years, with a two-year-old daughter. Her husband, Lu Xiao, was a technical-school graduate with a secure factory job in town. As for her, she had been a modestly famous fashion designer in 21st-century Country C, only to die suddenly just as she was making it. Now she was Su Man, a countrywoman with nothing to her name.

Looking at the hopelessly unfashionable blue cotton shirt she wore and feeling the few coins in her pocket, Su Man wanted to cry. But her keen eye for fashion and skill with scissors from her previous life were her only way to turn things around!

No fabric? She would remake old clothes! No market? She would set up a stall at the fair! Starting with a waist-cinching, slimming blouse for a village girl, she went on to make “Hong Kong-style” headbands and hair accessories from scraps that became all the rage in town. With her nimble hands and ahead-of-her-time vision, Su Man’s little stall became the trendsetter for miles around.

Her husband, Lu Xiao, was quiet and reserved, but he brought her warm water when she stayed up late drawing designs and stood up for her when hooligans harassed her. Their daughter, Niuniu, was her little model, winning everyone over in the children’s clothes her mother made.

The stall became a workshop, and the workshop became a clothing factory. Su Man’s “Man” brand spread from the mountain village to the provincial capital and eventually took the whole country by storm. She bought homes and land, moved the whole family to the capital, and watched her daughter become a top student. Their life flourished.

But when Lu Xiao’s stern face, so different from those of the local men, drew the attention of influential people in the capital, Su Man realized that her “ordinary” factory-worker husband was hiding an earth-shattering secret...

Watch as this reborn designer uses her deft hands to cut a path to success, rising from a village seamstress to a fashion queen. Together with her mysterious husband, she writes a new story in the 1980s.