Chinese actor Li Chen attends a launch party for Alexander Wang's collaboration with H&M in Shanghai. Photo provided to China Daily

Chinese customers started lining up outside 16 H&M stores in nine cities at midnight on Nov 5; once the stores opened the next morning, everything was sold out in three hours.

Wang Lu, 27, arrived at the Xidan location in Beijing around 5 am. Once inside, she grabbed a black waterproof coat－the model Chinese pop star Li Yuchun wore at the launch party in Shanghai－and a gym bag.

"Basically I have bought the designer's collection for H&M every time. The project is interesting. What's more, I'm a big fan of Wang," she says.

Wang has many fans in China, partly because his parents are from Taiwan. He speaks Mandarin at home, but after growing up in San Francisco and working in New York, he has an international outlook.

"I cannot say I do this in a very Chinese way, do that in an American way. I have a balance of breathing Chinese culture and American culture," he says. "We all live today in the world where everybody communicates on the Internet, everyone gets access to information at the same time and at the same speed. There is less and less a definite line that separates us."

Wang, 30, adds that he was not from a fashion family but just naturally found passion in this field at a very young age.

"It is like something clicks in your head and you feel completed committed to do it," he says, noting that he started working in high school and didn't really have a mentor.

"I just learned step by step. I've definitely made many mistakes, but those mistakes have brought me to where I am now."

Wang says one workday is never like the next. He travels between New York and Paris a lot, on some days meeting in the office all day and on other days running between events and campaigns one after another.

"That is also why I love my job. I often tell my team that you have to wait for anything, prepare for anything and always be open to any kind of meeting. I don't want to restrict myself to fashion. Influences－inspirations come from everywhere and from different people of different backgrounds."

He says his greatest reward as a fashion designer is the element of surprise, especially when he sees unexpected people wearing his work who don't seem conscious of the brand.

"They just like the shoes or the bag," he says. "That's really exciting."

Related: Wang for H&M stirs fashion madness in Shanghai