Feng Chen Wang (Q3125)
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Feng Chen Wang is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Feng Chen Wang |
Feng Chen Wang is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
Next year, Feng Chen Wang will celebrate her label’s 10th anniversary. That milestone, plus her habit of drawing inspiration from techniques of the past, pushed the designer to focus on what she thinks the future should look like.“I do tend to really look at timeless things, and also threading things through time,” she offered backstage before her show. “I’m always looking for a new way to pull together all the things I love—ancient artifacts, my sculpture, my clothes.”One way she did that was to unveil a new capsule line called féng—a word that encompasses the Chinese words for “meet” and “sew.” An homage to high craftsmanship, these entirely handmade pieces played up visible stitching, appliqué, embroidery and inside-out constructions.Wang described her work for spring as “weaving together the texture of the years, in an easy way.”That might mean picking up on the cracks or patina of ceramics and rendering them in textile, or taking pajama-light silk and using a 2,000 year-old ancestral technique to tug tiny threads so they pucker just so, before being dyed denim blue. There seemed to be a new maturity—or perhaps a newfound confidence—in laddered openwork polo knits and suiting with raw edges. Aqua denim was hand-dyed to mimic the ribbing on plants.Speaking of nature, Wang worked bamboo into clever mesh tops or cute little leather-free handbags, also under the féng label. A collector of ancient things and crafts, she wrapped up amphorae like handbags, and sent them out tucked under models’ arms not as something precious, but with the ease of a football. Once again, the designer rocked out on futuristic footwear: like moon boots from a sci-fi fantasy, towering shells slipped over UGG Tasman shoes that were finished with imperfections recalling the crackled finish of fired porcelain.Wang often says she wants to create a new kind of bridge between East and West, past and future. With this collection, she seemed to make strides in speaking to a broader audience.
21 June 2024
Feng Chen Wang lives and works in London, but in her hometown of Fujian, there’s a tea tradition for every season. For fall, that was her starting point, but it’s as much about interpersonal connection as it is about any specific custom like the one known as Hundred Family Tea. (Yes, she does make her own.)Turning tea culture—with all its implicit ties to nature, heritage, and process—into a contemporary, nongendered design proposition sounds like a tall order. It could have gone completely gimmicky. But with just a few exceptions, the designer kept her inspiration in the background, though it’s worth knowing that a dipped hoodie and loose trouser ensemble was made with tea-based dyes.In her notes, the designer explained that her base has “matured and developed, much like a perfectly steeped Wuyi Rock tea.” That’s a poetic way of saying that while she’s well aware that these times call for restraint, a white shirt doesn’t have to be boring and denims need not be basic (instead, they come ribbed with delicate pleating). Also, earthy roasted and brewed shades are universally flattering. Several pieces of outerwear looked like keepers, among them a couple of tailored, sepia-tinged leather jackets, a burgundy bomber lined with caramel shearling, and a sweeping bronze puffer.Accessories were where the designer really let her bubbly personality shine through: A clamshell-style handbag reprised a ceramic teapot, for example. So did the limited-edition two-in-one Chuck 70 sneaker collaboration with Converse, which was released on the designer’s website simultaneously with the show. They come with a futuristic 3D-molded sole, an add-on informed by another traditional teapot. In a season defined by stompers, those might just catch on.
19 January 2024
In the sun-baked court of Paris’s Lycée Montaigne, Feng Chen Wang showed her (mostly) featherlight spring collection as the heat radiated through the windless space. Maybe it was the high temperature, but the airy, silky tops printed with dried floral motifs pieces looked the most desirable. Wang said backstage that they were a nod to her beloved late grandmother. Wang’s birthplace of Fujian, China, where her grandmother also lived, is mountainous and cleaved by rivers. The added heartfelt memory made the botanical schemes even more appealing.Wang is highly adept at taking influences from her home country and globalizing them. This time, she did so with a Gen-Z verve and a sort-of, kind-of ’90s filter. There was one segment of relaxed separates in a blurred hue print—this, too, was an abstract homage to Wang’s past. Call it her very own Technicolor dream.Sometimes the lineup became a little jumbled—a beaded bra top (this was a co-ed show) and a tulle outer layer pant, worn over straight-cut trousers, felt less realized. But any doubt was ameliorated by the finale, when Wang sent out a teaser from her upcoming Nike collaboration. A spliced-and-diced neon green and black dress, it not only looked befitting of her oeuvre, it also added a jolt of sport—a welcome kick, especially in the lull of the afternoon heat.
26 June 2023
Feng Chen Wang knows more than most about connecting east with west, old with new. Having grown up in a rural village in the southern Fujian province of China, she is now based between Shanghai and London, and sees herself as an ambassador for Chinese craftsmanship. “I am the best bridge-builder,” the designer said, speaking at a preview before her presentation at the Hôtel d’Evreux, a diamond’s throw from Paris’s luxury mecca of Place Vendôme. “It’s about connecting culture and community, and generations as well.”For fall she drew upon the Chinese tradition of the “Hundred Families Robe,” a patchworked mantle made up of 100 pieces of fabric collected from friends and family and said to bring luck to a newborn. In Feng’s version, she spliced up deadstock fabrics from her studio with Chinese silk fabrics she had collected to form a bomber jacket in various shades of khaki and a floor-length, double-breasted coat whose train unbuttoned to convert into a cropped style. Similar ingenuity was on show with her modern take on the Chinese knot, inspired by memories of her grandmother’s knotted hairstyle and knot-fastened garments, enlarged here for the streetwear generation to comprise cartoonish proportions on padded scarves. The motif was used to equally deft effect on reversible puffer jackets, as well as shearling and nylon coats with detachable panels.The collection also served as an official debut for Wang’s makeup collaboration with Estée Lauder, which launches in April after two years in the making. Wang chose to zero in on an eyeshadow palette of nude and beige tones with pops of plum. “Purple is a very important color in China, meaning loyal family,” she explained, “and it connects back to the phoenix, which is a symbol for the brand.” Phoenix imagery popped up elsewhere on laser-printed indigo denim studded jackets and jeans, the pattern inspired by the traditional ink drawings that Wang used to practice as a child, and in the swooping foam rims that clipped on to Nike Air Max 97s.The latter in particular summed up Wang’s knack for rejuvenating archetypes—no wonder Nike has already tapped her as a collaborator. And if her choice of show venue was surprising, its silk-lined walls and formal salons far removed from the raw, urban spaces enlivened with throbbing music she’s shown at before, that was all part of the plan. “People have been asking me all day, Feng, why did you choose here? It’s not you!” she laughed.
“But actually I wanted to have a bigger contrast—not following what people expect. I want to say, hey, the space is traditional, but people can be modern.”
18 January 2023
After so many digital meetings, it was great to see Feng Chen Wang and her clothes IRL in the Palais de Tokyo. Now she has got back to Europe, she will spend her immediate future reacquainting herself with her Shoreditch studio. This collection was conceived while still in China, and although the clothes themselves were uplifting and attractive, the sentiment behind them was more ambiguous. Over the raucous electronica playing in the space, she said: “The collection is inspired by thoughts of people who are emerging. These are people full of conflicts. Maybe these people are happy or sad, maybe they feel lonely. It is about conflict.”An oversized black suit, finely tailored, was patterned with a constellation of rings and other pieces of hardware. A pale blue suit, wearable multiple ways through the removal or rearrangement of layers, was cut in subtly contrasting sections of wool and silk. The model in it wore a wide chain collar which—like denim shirts and dresses and a chain veiled baseball cap—emitted the brittle sparkle of Swarovski, who had partnered with Wang on the collection. Some looks, such as a white suit with signature phoenix cut-outs in the sleeves, came less abundantly Swarovski-fied. Sparkle-free too were phoenix relief knitwear for both genders whose decoration was delineated by the play of opaque against solid. Four cool looking outwear pieces produced with Canada Goose, most featuring Italian-style removable liner layers, looked ruggedly pragmatic and came decorated with work by the artist Xu Zhen. There were also some same-collab tactical boots with removable gaiter sections, a group of customized Nikes, and new variations on Wang’s conversation piece bamboo bags.
28 June 2022
Feng Chen Wang is having a moment. Earlier this month, she debuted her designs for the Chinese Olympic flag bearers at this year’s opening ceremony in Beijing, lending her offbeat eye to a series of puffer jackets decorated with inky blue line drawings of frosty mountainous landscapes, alongside slick white jackets and trousers inspired by traditional Chinese tailoring. And yesterday she debuted her latest collection in London while working with her team remotely from Shanghai, where she’s been stuck for the duration of the pandemic. “I’m really excited, but it’s been challenging,” said Wang. “It’s a new way of working.”Things may be going swimmingly for Wang right now, but this season she was drawn to notions of imperfection. Her signature chopped-and-screwed shapes—this time arriving in the form of hybridized trench coats with puffer details, asymmetric denim jackets spliced with golden padded sleeves, and some intriguing shirting featuring layers of contrasting blue and white panels—dovetailed nicely with this search for the beauty found in flaws. But for Wang, it ran a little deeper, too. She noted that when we can accept the imperfections of what we own, those things hold greater longevity. Wang showed the clothes in a gallery space she curated remotely—featuring an array of paintings and textile pieces of contrasting textures—that was carefully set up to highlight the seasonlessness of her designs. “Do we need everything new every season, and to then throw it away after six months and buy something new?” Wang said.To take this theme over the finish line, she also looked to a handful of references from the history of her homeland. One was the delicate lines and floral details of bodiless lacquerware, a craft tradition that originates from her native Fujian province. Emerald green lacquer was referenced in gorgeous dark green marbled prints across jackets and shirts that had a suitably mind-bending aura for a collection that was intended to defy expectations.Finally, there was the continuation of Wang placing her new mascot of sorts, the mythologicalfenghuang, or Chinese phoenix, at the center of her vision, this time as a new logo. “The phoenix in Eastern culture is genderless, and sometimes switches between female and male, which felt like a good symbol for us,” said Wang, also noting its parallels with her own name.
Wang’s cohesive, desirable offering this season—with just the right amount of warp and deconstruction to please those who prefer the more avant-garde end of her spectrum—proved that her success over the past year has been firmly well deserved.
23 February 2022
Feng Chen Wang has been experiencing a series of lucid nightmares. They are populated by wild, fantastical beasts. In addition to the phoenix to which she is so closely drawn there are also, she said down a Zoom, dragons and monkeys and others: hybrid animals haunting a forest in her subconscious. Every day she has been waking up with those nightmares near-perfectly remembered, episodes in a series she cannot choose not to watch. The ongoing theme of those episodes? “You want to get there, but you can never get there. Everything you do does not matter.”In that chat she said she reckoned it was the anxiety of recent months and not being able to return to her team in London that might have been the source of her unconscious disturbance. Just to be on the safe side, she consulted a Feng Shui consultant who advised her to wear an amulet engraved with a phoenix. And of course she took all that material and placed it in this collection.Shown in Shanghai on a watery runway edged in fire—two mutually exclusive elements in close proximity—the collection included her first formal “womenswear” (although we have seen some here and there before).Although Wang was reluctant to gender-identify the garments for the sake of fashion’s categorical imperative there were phoenix-print sheer dresses and cycling pants, some cool-looking asymmetric skirting, plus some knotted leather tops that seemed pretty specific. Beyond this, though, both gender elements merged and mingled through her distinct and creatively irreverent approach to tailoring and sportswear. Indistinct swirls on knitwear reflected that dreamstate forest, while her phoenix flew across footwear, denim, and a metal bra. The only true nightmare here was for the Ugg-collaboration footwear on that liquid floor—otherwise Wang harnessed her dreamstate demons to drive this runway reality a fresh step closer to where she wants to be.
14 October 2021
The mythological being that those outside Asia often term a Chinese phoenix bears about as much similarity to the Western phoenix as Chinese food does with much Chinese food eaten in the West. The Western phoenix, whose origins are Greek (although some attest Egyptian), is basically a beautiful symbol of natural renewal, later conflated with Christianity. There are awesome oversized cosmic bird protagonists in almost every ancient culture. In China, however, this protagonist is not a phoenix but a fêng huang, a.k.a. 凤凰.This sudden 凤凰 familiarity came courtesy of a call with Feng Chen Wang, still working remotely from her London team in her China studio. “The fêng huang is different because it is both male and female, which is very interesting to me. And it is quite personal too because it sounds a little like my name in pronunciation. It’s a merging animal, both genders, and that’s quite cool.”Although she emerged through Lulu Kennedy’s now degendered Fashion East menswear platform, Wang too has always leaned unisex, increasingly presenting more female worn looks in her collections and increasingly exploring less binary interplays of gender characterization in her work. This collection both handsomely and beautifully—and via many other possible adjectival tokens—continued in that direction. Highlights included cutaway knits in a puckered and slashed weave shaped to create unusual windows upon the mostly male bodies that they contained and finely draped tailoring with severe cinching to aggrandize the façade of the mostly female bodies that they, in turn, were cladding. Running through the collection were pieces patterned with brush-painting-inspired prints, sometimes worked ingeniously into irregular pleating. Each of these garments was, by the nature of the manufacture of the fabric, complexly individual, like a hand-painted barcode.In our chat Wang said that she wanted to stress that much of the collection was fashioned from deadstock and that she is working to develop her articulations to be more materially positive in their ecological impact. That 凤凰, which appeared on some shirts and roll-necks, had also inspired her to examine more determinedly the worn geography of gender that her thinking is working to alter. What’s great is that a designer from Fujian, trained via the Royal College of Art, can achieve the multicultural altitude from which to survey her field of interest with such fresh perspective.
13 April 2021
Two days ago Feng Chen Wang was in Beijing to launch her second physical pop-up in as many months. Today she was back in Shanghai, the site of the first, which is still open to customers and doing well. COVID-19-wise, being in China, where Wang has been for most of the year, sounds pretty dreamy right now. As she said: “In most ways, it’s back to normal. We can walk around. Everything is fine. We don’t need to wear masks. But that’s inside China, and we cannot go to other countries because you always need to quarantine.”Wang, a Royal College of Art and MAN (Fashion East) alum mainly based in London, has been using her time in China’s hard-won bubble of relative tranquillity to learn more about the fashion desires in her home market. She said: “They are looking for something special and different. Before, a lot of young customers were enjoying luxury brands—the brands whose products are the same all wherever you go in the world—and buying logos, big logos. But now, they are looking maybe for something more real, unique, and authentic.”This suits Wang just fine. Her eye is rooted in asymmetry, deconstruction, and throwback shapes, and her process is rooted in traditional techniques and colors from her Fujian home province. This was inevitably a Zoom review, so Wang pushed a resist-dyed shirt up close to her laptop to demonstrate the idiosyncrasy in the process that ensures every garment is different. Similarly her acid-washed, white-dyed denim pieces—they looked snowcapped—offered an infinite variety of formation. The insertion of subtly tradition-riffing calligraphic motifs and hands-held prints, said the designer, was a nod to the increased importance of “human connectivity.” The fact that log-in issues meant she couldn’t connect to this Zoom until well after it was due to start underscored that. Wang is a smart and sincere designer who seems set to prosper mightily. That each season there are more and more women’s looks in these men’s look books is no accident; expect a full womenswear collection soon.
17 December 2020
The pattern of irregular patches of blue that strafed against competing shades of gray in various outfits in this show—rib knits, jacquard jackets, oversize work shirts and track pants, a popper-peppered puffa—was, Feng Chen Wang said, inspired by a sunrise over the Wuyi mountains. As ever, Wang worked here to incorporate elements of her home culture and experience into the collection. Some of these elements were personal, such as the moto-inflected knits, riding jackets, gloves and goggles. “It’s a layer of memory, a memory from my hometown of my father; he was always riding. It’s also about a sense of speed and being brave and facing a challenge.” Wang was talking about the challenge of growing her own brand, something she is certainly rising to: Her impressive collaboration with Converse had a fresh iteration today, and she is amongst the finalists for what is an extremely strong International Woolmark Prize this year.Another culturally specific influence on the collection could be divined in the Wang-shouldered opening suit, a long caramel trench, and a vibrant scarlet knit: All were dyed using herb and vegetable extracts regularly employed in Chinese medicine. Very appealing were the ’90s style track tops elongated with long skirts to convert into swooshy trenches—an example in taupe and olive was particularly fine—as were the acid-washed and overdyed denim pieces (all of which were recycled). For women we saw a strong piece of leather suiting and a fair few throwback bodycon knits. Since her MAN days Wang’s work seems to have coalesced into a back and forth between her big-shouldered suiting and some interestingly re-conceptualized sportswear, but the womenswear and the interesting integration of Chinese culture here suggested that she has other directions in which to develop.
6 January 2020
Though Feng Chen Wang is still a relatively new name in fashion, the London-based, Chinese-born designer has made an early impression on the scene. A graduate of the Royal College of Art, she was nominated for the LVMH Prize in 2016 a couple of years after setting up shop. Her twisted puffer coats in poppy colors will be recognizable to avid watchers of men’s street style, spotted on the backs of discerning menswear connoisseurs.In the past couple of seasons, Wang has been mining her Chinese heritage for inspiration. Her research led her to the Fujian Province where she was born, to the centuries-old crafts the region is known for. She drew on traditional basket weaving techniques to bring sculptural dimensions to sweatshirts and denim jackets. Taken to its ultimate conclusion though, with bamboo structures that were layered over the body, and the idea proved overly conceptual in execution.Wang’s experiments with ancient textiles practices, on the other hand, were more compelling. The designer employed what is known aslanyinhuabudyeing, a method she came across at the annual Qingming Festival in her hometown. Made using a combination of soybeans, limestone chalk, and locally formulated indigo dye, the white and indigo fabrics are worn by people during celebrations as a way of paying homage to their ancestors. The streaky, one-of-a-kind textiles worked particularly well on a workwear-style jacket and offered a minimalist answer to fashion’s ongoing obsession with tie-dye. Where the Made in China tag has been frowned upon in the past, Wang is bringing the country’s lesser known artisanal textile legacy to the fore.
11 June 2019
Feng Chen Wang moved her runway to London this season after showing in New York of late. With that relocation arrived a slightly upgraded meter of clarity for this designer; her Fall collection, which was inspired by her mother and her two siblings, had a steady enough appeal. It wasn’t 100 percent good, and she still doesn’t have an immediately recognizable aesthetic signature, but there were bright spots nonetheless.These came mainly via painterly lotus and space-dyed motifs. The lotus served to symbolize the designer’s mother (having three children in China when Wang was born was illegal, and her mother sometimes had to hide her pregnancies by dipping low into a local river in Fujian, her home province). The flower looked pretty when screened onto a corduroy shirt and cotton sweatpants. Lotus petals were also imagined as sculpted jackets, the most interesting of which was an armor-like icy pink parka. A watercolor scheme synced with this vibe, too, surfacing as washed-out tie-dyes in a series of separates later on.Where Wang faltered, as many do, was in conceptualization—and she overdid it at times. Coats that physically connected between two of the models (one would assume they were linked to represent sibling-hood) were silly and out of line with the cleanliness elsewhere; likewise with hooded puffer scarves (or were they capes?). Sporty and serene—this is where she succeeded today.
7 January 2019
Designer Feng Chen Wang was preoccupied by halves this season, specifically the idea of “the other half” that might complete a person—not necessarily romantically, she notes, as one could find solace in one’s career or other leisurely pursuits. It was more her desire to further “explore human connections and emotions,” which invoked several visual cues.First, those halves: Wang hacked up several garments and spliced them back together. The most successful of these were the two fluttering white trenchcoats—each painted with a soft gradation of watercolor—and the white Converse Chucks with marbled baby blue or pink backs. There were also Frankenstein denim jackets and spare legs tacked onto jeans from her ongoing collaboration with Levi’s. Another half—the Feng Chen Wang woman (though the line is technically unisex) made her grand entrance in an iridescent anorak turned thigh-skimming dress.Wang’s use of color was nice—a range of pinks and blues, drawn gently across the body to suggest the full spectrum of human emotion. Elsewhere, she used stuffed gloves on oversize bags and belts to refer once more to human connections. It drew to mind, however, Martin Margiela’s famous gloved tops and skirts; Margiela of the John Galliano persuasion appeared, as well, in some of the holographic rain gear. It was tough to shake a vague sense of déjà vu (a little Comme in the reconstructed coats, a touch of Rick Owens in the cut-outs and hefty backpacks).There were no evident copies here, but Wang clearly responds to trends while sticking to certain conceptual design codes. It was a solid offering, but by ticking all those neat little boxes, things started to feel a little same-same. It would be nice to see Wang step out of her comfort zone and find a new way to explore these conceits.
10 July 2018
Feng Chen Wang’s runway, with its smattering of cartoonishly giant, plush household items—a telephone, refrigerator, and toilet, like something out of a Claes Oldenburg installation—set the stage for her decidedly conceptual and comfortable vision of menswear. For a second time, the Chinese designer touched down during New York men’s Fashion Week to show her impossible, artful conceits.Where last season she emphasized her Chinese roots, this season she spoke to the notion of homecoming. Her home these days is split between Shanghai, London, and New York, so the provenance in question was her birthplace of Fujian, in southern China. “I wanted to play with the idea of going home,” she said in a pre-show walk-through, “and of always having your memories with you wherever you are in the world.” If some of the enormous padded coats and trenches resembled furnishings, that was the point, as were the tangles of circuitous seams and meandering tape. The number 239—her street address as a child—was appliquéd throughout and fashioned into 3-D bags.One extreme look, a colossal pile of men’s shirting, as if picked up from the dry cleaner and tossed in a heap, was in fact her version of the boyfriend shirt, repeatedly borrowed and never returned. Other looks were draped in an exaggerated way or had other garments folded into them, a reference to hand-me-downs. They were accessorized with key-shaped jewelry and The Way Home sneaks, a collaboration with Air Jordan 1. Wang used color to similarly novel effect, with warm gold and peach hues evoking the sunset at the end of a day’s journey.Comparisons to other creators of the avant persuasion, among them Rei Kawakubo and Walter Van Beirendonck, are inevitable. Like those artists, Wang appears happily preoccupied with concept over sex appeal. Her seduction lies more in the delineation of an idea, the rendering of an abstraction. It’s a nice point of departure in a week too often dominated by trend-driven messaging.
6 February 2018
Feng Chen Wang made it clear from the outset what her men’s show was all about. The wordsMade in Chinawere emblazoned front and center on the first look and recurred throughout, at times more obliquely in the corner of a shirt or sometimes as enormous 3-D fanny packs tied around the waist, spelling out the lettersM,I, andC.This was, quite obviously, not your traditional Chinese aesthetic. And that was precisely the point. Feng Chen Wang wanted to show another side of Chinese design, a contemporary vision marked by a high degree of innovation, such as shirts composed of cascading petals and long, puffy gloves that seemed to serve no utilitarian purpose. This is the sort of technical wizardry she became known for in her home country and that she continued to shape at the Royal College of Art in London, where she earned her MA in menswear. An LVMH Prize nomination soon followed, firmly ensconcing her on the rising-star map.Which isn’t to say the collection was completely devoid of traditional Chinese references. The palette ranged from soft browns and navy, an homage to the country’s rural landscape, to modern pink and a crisp red, an obvious political nod. Red is also the color of the Chinese New Year, she pointed out. All of which Western audiences had better start getting used to.
13 July 2017