With her long curly hair, Anita Mui had the look of the girl next door when she made her breakthrough in the mainstream Hong Kong pop scene. For her appearance at the Tokyo Music Festival in 1983, her music company Capital Artists Limited invited renowned local fashion designer Eddie Lau to create an image with a rich oriental flavour. Her simple yet liberating looks came from a white cotton quilted jacket, black leather pants and a large red scarf. With her uniquely deep and magnetic voice and her consummate singing, Anita won glory for Hong Kong by clinching prizes at the festival. A lifelong friendship between the singer and the designer was born.
Eddie Lau designed a huge variety of different images for Anita Mui – for album covers, concerts and her appearances at award ceremonies and publicity events. A successful image involves much more than simply dressing the singer in trendy clothes. It combines their personality and the theme and feeling of the song into an integrated whole that projects a unique concept, leaving the audience with a lasting impression of the song and consolidating the singer’s appeal. Visitors who are familiar with the Hong Kong pop scene of the 1980s will still remember some of the images associated with Anita: the besuited masculinity of As Years Go By; the unconventional, but stylish Bad Girl; the Arabian goddess of Evil Girl; and the femme fatale of Fiery Red Lips. Feverish anticipation greeted the prospect of each new style, which quickly became the talk of the town when it finally appeared. From the ‘Anita Mui in Concert’ in 1985, Eddie injected all of his passion into creating images that reflected Anita’s status as the undoubted queen of the stage and that took all the different perspectives into consideration – the theme of the concert, the rundown of the songs, the interplay between the stage, the lighting and the sound effects, as well as Anita’s choreography. Every stage costume and every image he created for Anita was a classic in its own right, thanks in particular to his exceptional three-dimensional cutting skills that were embodied in his creations.
Off stage, he devoted all of his attention to getting her ready, so that, as she rose up into the auditorium, all eyes were focused on her entrance. On stage, his designs allowed her to captivate everyone with her unrestrained performance. If Hubert de Givenchy and Audrey Hepburn were perfect partners in the West, then Eddie and Anita are their Eastern counterparts, forming a relationship between a designer and a superstar that was based on mutual respect and love. From the time they met, Anita and Eddie worked closely together for a full 20 years, developing a mutual understanding that encompassed every aspect of their relationship. When Anita held her very last concert in 2003, Eddie designed an exquisite red and gold Chinese wedding gown and a simple but resplendent Western-style white wedding gown for Anita as an expression of her final wish – to be married to the stage. Hand in hand with ‘the ever-changing Anita Mui’, the legendary diva of Cantopop, Eddie Lau pioneered the concept of image design for local singers.
