In the last few posts, we looked at the importance of precisely cut designs and details in fashion and sculptural inspirations. Let's continue the thread by briefly focusing on the latest collection by Feng Chen Wang that reunites some of these aspects.
After designing the outfit – comprising a down puffer jacket in glacial white and sky blue, symbolizing the mountains and rivers of China interconnected with the rivers and mountains of the world – for the flag-bearers at the Winter Olympics in Beijing, Feng Chen Wang showcased her latest collection during London Fashion Week.
For the new collection the designer opted for deconstructed looks and disassembled menswear to later reassemble it in ingenious ways. This practice allowed her to create multiple layered new geometries and introduce a series of hybrid designs combining a jacket with a shirt, a checked trench coat with a puffer jacket, shattering the normality of a denim jacket to integrate in it padded sleeves (Feng Chen Wang's hybrids look at times like the casual versions of Mason Jung's elegant camouflage tailoring experiments).
Other inspirations integrated in the collection were borrowed from art and from her background as well: for her latest collection Wang, who is preparing to return to London after spending time in her native China since the pandemic struck, moved indeed from a craft from her hometown in Fujian province – bodiless lacquerware.
Considered as one of China's three folk art treasures, together with Jingdezhen's porcelain and Beijing's cloisonne, and produced in Fuzhou, the capital of coastal Fujian province, the bodiless lacquerware technique (invented, according to the legend, by Shen Shao'an) consists in creating objects with clay, plaster and wooden bodies. Grass or silk cloth and raw lacquer are then applied layer by layer for drying, then the original body is smashed or removed, leaving the shaped lacquered cloth, to which is then added a gray background, polished, repainted lacquer and abraded, various decorative patterns are then also applied.
One bodiless lacquerware technique reproduces a marbled effect made with thin layers of bright colours including blue, green and brown, that end up emerging from the lacquer mix at random, creating a natural looking, marble-like pattern. The rich emerald green and black marbled effects in Wang's jackets and shirts were derived from this technique.
There were other references to her background, including the desirable cross-body bamboo bags (already available on the designer's site and already a hit with the fashion crowd) and the designs with the mythological fenghuang, or Chinese phoenix, a reference to her name and a symbol of grace.
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