Fashion
Feng Chen Wang Is Looking For Her Other Half
Story by Shyam Patel / Photography by Andrew Boyle
11 July 2018
"I guess this is my way of processing life," Feng Chen Wang says regarding the design process backstage at her spring 2019 show. "I'm always trying to answer personal questions." At present, Wang is attempting to figure out who or what her other half is. While the Chinese designer has yet to find the answer, she's managed to make the query physically manifest in her most recent collection.
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Using garments as stand-ins for people in her elaborate commentary on fulfillment (or lack thereof), Wang fuses, alters, and inverts shirts, jackets, coats, and trousers to signify that neither clothes nor people have a singular identity. Two pieces in particular — a coat made of five different button-down shirts pieced together and a poncho crafted from two inverted trench coats joined at hem — epitomize Wang's stance that multifariousness is inherent and inevitable.
Multi-shirt coat.
Trench coat poncho.
Wang backstage at her spring 2019 show.
While fully realizing multiple garments to make a new piece out of them may seem tedious, Wang isn't interested in the easy way out of the search for her other half.
Photography: Andrew Boyle / Runway Images Courtesy Gerardo Somoza