Exeter alumnus named one of Forbes Top 100 Most Influential Chinese, 2024
Exeter alumnus Dali Ma (2005, Physics and Philosophy) grew up in the 1980s in a small town in China, where ‘it felt like the end of the world, a forgotten corner where people and things seemed to stagnate from an early age’. Yet his career has been anything but stagnant. Ma is a fashion photographer with features in magazines as influential as Vogue, Bazaar, ELLE, L’Officiel, Maxim, and others. He has also founded two companies: Truly Yours, a digital marketing agency, and Purmulti, a women’s clothing brand, leading to his being named one of Forbes’ Top 100 Most Influential Chinese, 2024.
In their introduction to Ma, Forbes emphasises how he ‘continually extends the radius of his vision and the boundaries of his life’. He was the first from his town, Anshan, in the Liaoning province in north-east China, to attend an international top university directly after high school. Offered a full scholarship by Oxford, Ma moved to England. He read Physics and Philosophy, combining two subjects sometimes seen as fundamentally opposed, however, as Forbes emphasises of Ma’s diversity of interests, ‘the expected fragmentation does not appear’. Both subjects seek to answer the biggest questions humanity has about ourselves and the world around us, and each acts as a different lens through which to view the possibilities. Ma says: ‘there should be no boundaries in disciplines, and even more so, no boundaries in life’.
Similarly, photography is a way in which to frame the world slightly differently. In a recent blog post on his website, Ma explores Temecula, a Californian town, with his camera. Many of the shots are filmed through glass. One, looking through a window to see Ma sitting outside, distorts the viewer’s position; another, in black and white through the windows of a classic car, recalls the world of the past. In one more, Ma sips wine in a vineyard, the curved glass tipping the landscape behind it to a forty-five-degree angle. Each photograph is a new frame and a new angle on the world. Having first picked up a camera at his part-time job at an Oxford camera shop, and in a seeming diversion from his degree, Ma’s success in the world of fashion photography seems a similar distortion, yet also in keeping with his continual pushing of disciplinary and professional boundaries.
Alongside his photography, Ma is the founder of Truly Yours Inc, a digital marketing agency that works with ‘both startup companies and industry giants’. Some prolific partners and clients include the University of Oxford, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and even IKEA, departing from Ma’s fashion industry background. Truly Yours emphasises the importance of AI, pushing the boundaries of traditional digital marketing to work on a much larger and faster scale. ‘AI is something we cannot avoid,’ Ma says, it’s ‘like the internet twenty years ago; if you don’t embrace it, you will be left behind’. Truly Yours isn’t the only startup Ma has founded: he also created Purmulti, a women’s fashion brand. It debuted in the 2024 Beijing Fashion Week, and, with a Chinese collection as well as collections of blazers, dresses, coats, and evening wear, it too merges boundaries of nationality and even gender, selling women’s suits that push against traditionally gendered clothing.
Despite all these achievements, Ma regularly turns to his university years in Oxford. He writes that ‘Exeter has taught me to think big, think different, and think the unthinkable’. He also learned ‘the spirit of innovation, entrepreneurship, and—more importantly—the fearlessness which has been influencing [him] to this day’. Ma highlights his time at Oxford as the stepping stone along the way to his remarkable career, and Exeter College congratulates him on his success.
Dali Ma Photography: DALI MA
TrulyYours Inc: Digital Marketing Agency – Truly Yours Inc.
Purmulti: PURMULTI:Women Clothing – Continue the Brand’s High-Definition DNA – Purmulti
