How China's rising fashion designer Cheney Chan is captivating global audiences
Rising fashion designer Cheney Chan gives us his take on dreaming big. Photo: Handout Icons and Influencers 'You see these feathers?' asks Chinese couture designer Cheney Chan, pointing to a breathtaking work – not a bird, but a dress, covered in finely cut fibres that appear so feather-like that Chan has to clarify they aren't real. They represent something more remarkable, these feathery wisps fashioned from layers upon layers of silk, painstakingly peeled apart like bananas, according to Chan, to achieve that airy and ethereal effect. This is a marriage of contemporary art and traditional craft, where Mother Nature meets human innovation and the genius of a young designer meets age-old wisdom backed by thousands of years of civilisation. Cheney Chan's visions are fast making him one of China's most promising fashion designers. Photo: Handout
It's telling that Chan chose to use one of ancient China's greatest inventions – a precious, delicate material made from the metamorphosis of silkworms – to create his own, marking the designer's impressive evolution over the years and fully realising his transformative vision of fashion. Just as silk, woven into luxurious fabrics and traded along its namesake Silk Road, became the hottest new commodity on the block as early as two millennia ago, Chan is now one of mainland China's most promising young exports – a home-grown talent making revolutionary breakthroughs in the East and West. Cheney Chan's designs take inspiration from nature. Photo: Handout The designer is, after all, a cultural ambassador of sorts for his home country. His may be a relatively new name to audiences in the West – Chan made his unofficial debut during Paris Haute Couture Fashion Week in June – but TikTok users may be surprised to learn that on Douyin, China's version of the short-form video app, he is already a well-known fashion influencer and commentator, with more than five million followers on the platform. And counting. Cheney Chan: half-dreamer, half-designer. Photo: Handout
'When I talk with my followers, we just talk about how to make you more fashionable,' says Chan when we catch up at his recent trunk show with the Hong Kong Fashion Designers Association. 'It's easy to deal with ready-to-wear, how to cover your body, shape your body, something like that. But when I do couture work, I just be myself. I don't need to talk with anyone else.'
As much a dreamer as he is a designer, Chan has larger-than-life ideas that often take shape subconsciously as he grounds himself in the design process – grasping with the grandiosity of his fantasies, so to speak, without losing his grip on reality. 'For me, it's [been] a long journey to do this,' says Chan, 32, who earned his stripes as a ready-to-wear designer for almost a decade before launching his couture-exclusive Cheney Chan Private label in 2021. 'In the past, I didn't do it well. When I designed a dress about, for example, porcelain, I only drew some patterns like qinghua qi [blue and white Chinese porcelain]. But it was not enough. It wasn't contemporary enough.' One of Cheney Chan's biggest inspirations is porcelain. Photo: @cheneychanofficial/Instagram
Feeling uninspired, Chan returned to the foundation of fashion and art in general – experimentation – to reach into the depths of his imagination and create something so profoundly vivid it could only be deemed an extension of the visionary's world view. Following that train of thought led Chan to develop the principle of fengya qi , which translates roughly as 'elegant porcelain' – a term the designer coined to describe not only his porcelain-like creations, but also his overall rebranding.
'Now when I think about porcelain, I make it myself,' he says of his trial-and-error approach. 'I found something very funny – I'm not good at making porcelain, and it will fall down. It gave me many beautiful silhouettes.'
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Asia Times
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RTHK
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