About Ren Chi | Fashion Designer Ren Pei

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REN CHI

We exist in the space between forgetting and remembering, where garments become vessels for the parts of ourselves we thought were lost. Each piece is both sanctuary and rebellion—a quiet revolution against the idea that we must choose between who we were and who we're becoming.

Our atelier is a laboratory of transformation, where ancient techniques meet contemporary urgency. Through weeks-long natural dyeing processes, through the meditative placement of each hand-selected feather, through fire and rust and time itself, we create more than clothing. We create talismans. We create second skins for souls in transition.

This is fashion as alchemy—transmuting pain into beauty, memory into armor, vulnerability into strength. We dress the body that holds all of your stories, honoring both the scars and the dreams yet to unfold.

Atelier Process
Natural Dyeing
Tea & Rust Ceremony

Ren Pei

Founder of Ren Chi, studio and tailorhouse based in Fengtai, Beijing, China. Where tradition meets transformation in every thread.

"I create for the person who understands that getting dressed is a daily act of becoming. Someone who sees clothing not as costume but as conversation—with themselves, with their past, with the person they're growing into. Each piece whispers: you are allowed to change, you are allowed to grieve what you've outgrown, you are allowed to emerge as someone new."

the unraveling →

Ren Pei
Founder Portrait
In the Atelier

Names as Destiny

rèn chí

任驰

I was born Ren Chi—a name that meant to run freely, to gallop without restraint. But a sickly child's body betrayed this promise. While other children ran, I wilted. While they played, I fought for breath.

huó fó

活佛

A living Buddha, keeper of ancient wisdom, read my spirit like an open book. Among the five elements that govern all life—metal, wood, water, fire, earth—I was missing earth. Tu, the foundation. Without it, I was unmoored, my immune system as fragile as paper in rain.

jīn

金

mù

木

shuǐ

水

huǒ

火

tǔ

土

the dance incomplete

péi

培

So they buried Chi and gave me Pei—earth embedded in the character itself, tu as the radical that would anchor me to life. My body healed. My lungs learned to breathe. But something else was lost in that transformation. The artist-child who saw colors that had no names, who drew worlds into existence with wild abandon—that child disappeared with the name.

shī qù

失去

For decades, I carried this grief. Art became a ghost I couldn't touch. Creation felt like betrayal of the practical life that had saved me. I walked through the world healthy but hollow, grateful yet grieving, always wondering about the roads untaken by the child who could no longer run free.

But time teaches us that nothing is ever truly lost—only transformed. Every ending births a beginning. Every burial makes space for new growth. Now I understand: I needed both names to become whole. Pei gave me the foundation to survive. Chi gives me the courage to run toward who I'm meant to become.

the child and the adult are both real

This brand is my integration song. Every piece holds space for all the selves we've been and all the selves we're becoming. We are walking archives of transformation—each scar a story, each choice a thread in the endless weaving of who we are.

When you wear Ren Chi, you wear the understanding that identity is not fixed but fluid. You honor both the practical and the dreamer, the survivor and the visionary, the grounded and the running-free. You dress not just for today, but for all the versions of yourself that brought you here.

yuán mǎn

圆满

Wholeness isn't the absence of breaking.
It's the courage to gather all the pieces
and call them beautiful.