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Jiawa Liu is standing in the middle of an ikat rug, toying with a tripod. She steps forward and, now with her back to the camera mounted atop the apparatus she has just wrestled into submission, performs a series of twists at the waist to face the camera.
Pivoting on the spot, her cotton candy hair swings back and forth. The remainder of her movements are subtle, the differences to the naked eye near imperceptible. Before you even realise what it is that she’s doing, she has finished exactly what she set out to accomplish.
“How many pairs of jeans do you think are in this one pair?”, she turns to ask the room of her haute Frankenstein denim. Ten? Two? At least three?
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Credit: Lee Oliveira
Liu, who has operated under the moniker Beige Renegade for going on six years now, wears almost as many hats herself. As recently as the start of the year, Liu worked as a lawyer, a contracts advisor on end to end procurement processes for major works of construction. Or words to that effect. That she can segue as easily from discussing that role into describing the perfect flat and its manifold advantages is all the more impressive.
Credit: Lee Oliveira
“It’s absolutely perfect, because I’m a flat shoe person. I will definitely – occasionally – wear heels. I own so many heels, but they’re just for the look. I’ve gotta say, there’s this thing going around that your legs ‘don’t look good unless you’re wearing high heels’. So not true. You just have to get used to what that silhouette is, with the flat shoe. I think the SUPERSONIC is perfect: they’re pointed, they’ve got everything going. Some people tell me, ‘lace up or the ankles straps, they shorten their legs’ – this is so not true. I just feel like people need to try and not limit themselves. For me it’s like another variation to the flat and I think it’s beautifully flattering.”
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Credit: Lee Oliveira
Liu is just as animated as she ducks and weaves a conversational web that takes us from flats to France to the concept of freedom, all the while managing to avoid the kind of non-sequitur pitfalls that would befall those less well verse in such ostensibly disparate topics. However for Liu it turns out that the three are inextricably linked. It was in Paris, after all, that she came to the realisation that she could make Beige Renegade her full-time pursuit, offering her the kind of freedom and flexibility that can only be achieved with complete creative and career autonomy.
Credit: Lee Oliveira
“I started [Beige Renegade] when I came back to Australia after I lived in Japan,” says Liu. “I was working as a government lawyer in Canberra [and] there was nothing to do. I decided to live my life on the Internet.” Over the intervening years, the blog itself became something of a salve for the woes “nine to five office jobs” that, while intellectually stimulating, failed to live up to the creative fulfillment of Liu’s creative “side hustle”; that such a project has become a sustainable career path for Liu seems to come as much as a surprise to her as it would, say, her grandparents. It was only in January this year that Liu decided to make the leap under circumstances best described as ‘fairytale’.
“It just took that thing to realise that it’s not all about money. I think I had this epiphany when I was travelling in Europe. Of course, how cliché. I lost my phone in Paris, which is also another cliché thing which occurs in Paris, right? I’d gone there because I was just going for Pitti Uomo and Haute Couture and then fashion week was coming up like two weeks later. And I’m like, ‘It doesn’t make sense, why would I leave Europe now? I should just stay and go to fashion week.'”
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Credit: Lee Oliveira
And so she did. Liu credits the experience of completely stepping out of her comfort zone with giving her the clear head needed for a drastic realignment of priorities. It was only then, once she had thrown caution to the wind, that she came to realise the gravitas of her generation’s defining dictum: “‘You only live once’.
“You only get this one time. It’s gone after this, right? So how can you spend your whole life doing something you don’t like? It just sounds so crazy now to me. It just sounds so insane now. I feel like, how did people get convinced that they should spend their one life doing things they don’t like?”
Credit: Lee Oliveira
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Equipped with a new frame of mind, Liu – Chinese born, and once Perth based – now finds herself between Paris and Sydney, with tentative plans to revisit China somewhere in between. It’s only apt that when asked to describe what she’d consider to be her one true love that she should pause, only momentarily, before answering “Freedom”.
Credit: Lee Oliveira
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“I just wasn’t always allowing it to manifest [before]. You know, style is about freedom. Shoes are about freedom. You know having shoes out there all the different kind of shoes that you can pick that suits your style, that’s freedom. Choice is freedom. Freedom is luxury, luxury is freedom. They are one and the same thing, and I’m all about that.”
Tile and cover image: Lee Oliveira
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